Getting Ready For Christmas

Got to get enough stock in

Christmas is rapidly approaching, and a beautiful Skye At Night book makes for the ideal present.

At Skye At Night HQ everything is gearing up to ensure there’s sufficient stock in place. I’ve got three Christmas fairs booked at Tarskavaig, An Crubh and Armadale Castle which should help things along a bit as well.

Thankfully the nightmare of the misprinted copies is well behind me. My printing company did the decent thing and reprinted the whole lot, and sent out new copies to over 150 people who were affected.

Rather than throwing away the misprinted books, I thought it might be a good idea to sell them at a discount as they were, effectively, printed at no cost to me. After all, there were only four pages printed in the wrong order, and all the content is otherwise intact and glossy as it should be.

I put them on sale at £15 apiece and they’ve been selling very nicely indeed. This is great as it just adds more to the donation to the Skye Mountain Rescue Team, at about £10 per copy.

I’ve just ordered another print run, the fourth! Triggering a new print run is always a big event, not least because it has to be 100% paid for up front. As I’m donating all profits to SMRT, there’s no “float” of funds available from book sales so I pay for the print run out of my own pocket. This should arrive at the end of November just in time for an expected increase in demand in the run up to Christmas.

I’ve also opened up sales on Amazon. I’ve taken my time to do this because they take a hefty referral fee of about £6.50 per book, which is just money that SMRT won’t get. I don’t really want to contribute to Jeff Bezos’s next yacht.

However, there’s volume to consider, so if I sell 100 books on Amazon versus 50 from my own website, the overall donation to SMRT will be the same. So if you want to buy from Amazon, crack on, but more of your money will go to SMRT if you buy direct from this website - thanks!