PayPal and Me

Heather, my website mistress, exclaimed “PayPal is the best thing since sliced bread.  I love it!”  She said this early in the morning as we set up a PayPal account to link to my website to sell Suitcase, through my new business, Pomegranate Productions which is listed along with authorcloud, Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, Sony Reader and Ibook.

         

By early afternoon Heather’s love of PayPal hadn’t wavered but her patience had.  Trying to make sense of the ordering business meant finding the right ordering button (check out cart, buy now, order now) and writing a definitive direction for each link.  Pomegranate Productions my company, will sell and ship only (in the U.S. only, personally signed or not) the book version of Suitcase.  The publisher, authorcloud will sell ebooks and ship books to anyplace in the world.  While the other afore mentioned will (at this point) sell only ebooks.

How to arrange all this information on a graphically pleasing, and comprehensible website page had both me and Heather hunch-backed, blurry eyed and brain dead by early afternoon.  TMI, and too many different directions, instructions, obstacles and dead ends.  We could not link to ibooks because neither of us own ipads.  Ironic.   I told my friends Suitcase was available through the afore mentioned, and my friends with ipads relayed they had purchased Suitcase.  When I went on line to see how this worked I could not access iBooks, because I do not own an iBook which you must own to have an iBook account in order to purchase Suitcase though iBooks.

I still write thank you cards by hand and mail them through the postal service.  I have a vast library of books because I only buy books. All of my three published books were first written in sloppy cursive on errant pieces of paper and in spiral notebooks.  So, this ebook, ibook stuff has me buggered.

After Heather had gone home to feed the chickens and I went on a long walk, with my short dog, I returned to my office, opened an email from Shelly Hitz, a self-publishing coach, which included this factoid:

“Amazon sold 22 million Kindles in the first half of 2010 with Kindle book sales outpaced hardcover books sales.  And the numbers continue to increase for ebook sales.”

It’s a fact of my literary life in need of an upgrade.  And I still haven’t got a handle on PayPal.