Right.. more or less back on an even keel…

2,000 books to sell, and knowing absolutely nothing about the book world. What would you do?

Well, we did have two things going for us. Peter of Eco-Logic Books also runs a wholesaling business. He would have some off us for a start. But not 2,000! Maybe a dozen. Maybe two.

The other option was much grander. The editor of The Organic Way had been most encouraging, and was pretty sure that readers of my 'very popular' column, up to 30,000 people, would snap up all 2,000 copies virtually overnight. This meant I had to be prepared for the rush and spent a lot of time trying to find the best way of packing books for post. Jiffy bags looked too floppy. What else? 'Book-boxes' my local bookshop told me.
These are actually slabs of corrugated cardboard, cut and scored to fold up and over into a very neat sort-of-box. Drop book in, wrap round with vinyl tape, and Robert is your close relation.

I wish I'd been better informed. We ended up buying 2,000 of these things, at an outrageous 35p each. I pre-wrapped 600 copies of 'Scenes', stuffing all available space in the spare room and waited for the Christmas rush I had been warned about. Would I need to employ temporary staff? Or alert the Post Office to have a couple of trucks standing by?
Eighteen months later, we sold the last of the 600 pre-wrapped books. The good readers of TOW resisted buying 'Scenes' in their tens of thousands. After two full years of advertising the book at the foot of my 'very popular' column, only 300 readers had bought a copy. That's one in a hundred: I'd have been better off offering toilet fresheners. Clearly, my column wasn't nearly as popular with members as it was with the HDRA staff.

We didn't have a Plan B! What to do?
Well, the good news was that people who had read the book invariably said how much they had enjoyed it, so we were pretty sure we had a saleable book. All we had to do was reach the right people.
Advertising? No… far too expensive, and extremely unreliable.
Local bookshops? Well, yes, but they tend to be keen on Sale or Return, and to only want 2 or 3 copies at a time. And, living in the country, bookshops are few and far between. To reach the ten nearest would take a whole day and cost a fortune in petrol. No real use. But some use.

What we needed was some sort of exposure. Reviews in the national press? No.. they wouldn't be bothered. 'Smallholding?' Pah! 'in Wales??' Double pah, and tish to boot. Waste of good books.

In the end I found a useful solution. A couple of magazines, notably Organic Gardening, and Smallholder, did a deal with me. I wrote them a free article, and they put in a free ad for 'Scenes'. Slowly, we sold a few more copies.
In the summer, we took a series of risks and booked into the local agricultural shows. Some were awful (£120 to be sat all day behind a ghastly fairground amplifier playing ghastly rubbish music on ghastly clapped-out speakers turned up to 12? We didn't cover our costs).. and some were great (£30 for a delightful pitch overlooking Cardigan Bay. We sold 30 books and celebrated with a bag of chips on the way home).
I also worked hard at selling one copy here and two there wherever I could. I managed to persuade two estate agents to have a couple each, to give to smallholding purchasers; the local vet took four; a posh household furnishings place took three; two wholefood shops took a few; two cafes took three each. And so on.
Every time we went to visit the kids, down in Guildford or Brighton, we'd stop at every bookshop en route and sell a couple of copies to most of them. (The Welsh Book Council was meant to do this for us in Wales.. but oddly, every shop we went to had never been offered 'Scenes' by the WBC, and wished they had been. Still don't know what that was all about.)
Slowly word got round, and slowly we began to get re-orders. (Eventually Ottakars in Carmarthen sold over 70 copies. More on this later.)

We realised we ought to take advantage of this new-fangled wide world web thing, but knew nothing about it. By chance, Anne came across a local ISP called Flashgranny. The name appealed… I rang them. Yes, they would do me a nice cheap website, very basic, for what was it? £50? Something like that. Very expensive, we thought. Then we discovered that everybody else would probably charge at least twice as much. FG's Sheila (the 'Granny' of the outfit) bought a copy of the book and enjoyed it so much that she made us up a website on tick: 'until the book's a bestseller and you can afford to pay'. Thankyou so much, www.flashgranny.co.uk . We sell a book about every three weeks via PayPal. Every one counts.

So, one way and another, we sold the books. Gradually, we covered our costs. We were in profit! Then we sold all the books! The risk had paid off!
Now what?
Orders still trickled in, so it seemed to make sense to order a re-print. Again, 2,000 copies seemed to be the most economical number to order. We were a bit anxious, though. It had been hard work selling the first lot. What if we couldn't sell the new lot?
Well, if the worst came to the worst, we knew we'd paid for the reprint out of the profits, so if we didn't sell any at all, we'd not actually lost money, and it would all have been a grand adventure; something for the diary. And we'd have a lot of firelighters and doorstops for many years to come.

We did sell some. But after about 500, sales began to dwindle, and then virtually stopped. We had exhausted our market. We could have taken out full page colour ads in The Organic World and Organic Gardening and it would have made no difference. Them as wanted one had already got one, and them as didn't want one still wouldn't want one. And that was that. The adventure was over.

Then one day I happened to be walking through the kitchen and heard someone talking on the radio….

Part III of this gripping yarn soon.. provisional title… 'A Man Called Scott..' (FADE UP WESTERN RANGE-RIDING MUSIC….)