Cadence & Slang’s service.
I spent my previous post discussing Cadence & Slang’s sales. Now I’d like to discuss service. I spend much of my book’s first chapter discussing good customer service, although some folks have done it better. I try to practice the best service possible for a one-man operation for many reasons:
- I practice what I preach. It would be extremely weird to write about good service, and then not follow through on good service.
- As a self-publisher, I can. The more middlemen are involved, the less I can service my customers. Cutting out middlemen also allows me to make more money.
- Running a Kickstarter campaign taught me the value of nurturing and building a good, if slapdash and only semi-connected, community. I care far more about the people I met through Kickstarter than the funding it gave me.
- But, most importantly, it is simply the right thing to do. The publishing industry has lost sight of the connections it makes with its customers. Authors don’t know who reads them, and readers rarely have a way of directly contacting authors.
So what all does that entail?
Handling problems. Books can arrive damaged or late. One fun example: I sold around 400 books in the first week of December, and sent them all out via Media Mail on the morning of the 6th. While I did know that Media Mail doesn’t provide a guaranteed delivery date, I didn’t know that the delivery times - formerly a few days in most cases - became over six weeks during the holidays, because Chicago post offices, infamous for not delivering anything on time, ever, if at all, simply weren’t delivering any Media Mail. And not telling anybody about it until after the fact.
So between December 15 and 20, I received around two dozen emails from frustrated customers, and overnighted copies to every single one of them, at the cost of around $25 each. I kept the customers’ names on a chalkboard, tracked each package, and crossed each name off when it was listed as delivered. Then customers would receive the second copy, sometime in the middle of January, and I would tell them to give it to a friend. Why inconvenience them to send it back?
That is but one example. If a large bookstore had the same problem, it’s highly unlikely that they would have been able to respond so quickly, and personally, to each customer. It’s also unlikely that the customer would have been able to keep both copies. Or that the bookstore would have cut a profit. If I were the CEO of a publicly traded company, I’d probably be ousted over this. But again, it’s the right thing to do.
Correcting errors. I maintain an errata page, which is largely created by my customers, who email me with corrections or clarifications. I reply back to every single email towards this end, and often it provokes a lot of research and good conversations.
Making friends. I’ve made at least a dozen solid professional contacts through service calls. I didn’t expect this to happen, but I do think it was far less likely to happen through traditional models. And at the very least, it humanizes my customers. Contacting them on Twitter gives them a face, a name; even the reductive biographical information helps put it in context, and instructs me on who may be reading.
So that’s it on service, I think. I don’t care that this differentiates me more from traditional publishers, or further exacerbates the rift between new media and old, or represents some kind of punk ethos. I am doing it because books are communication, the beginning of a vital conversation, and it is just completely bankrupt to me to consider writing something and not follow through on it in this way. It’s messy for sure, and requires a lot more work than with traditional models, but my god, it’s just so much more gratifying.
