The Story: You've ordered a whole bunch of books for an author visit, because he's kind of a big deal and you know there will be hundreds of people in the audience. You get them in, have your talk, and as you're handing him books people have bought for them to get autographed, you hear an awful CRACK! He's opened the book to sign, and the cover and first page have come clean off! You apologize profusely and grab another book for the author to sign for his fans. Phew! A couple books later, it happens again. You replace it, and everyone moves on. But then it happens a third time, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and it just keeps happening. By now you realize that something is very wrong. You pull in extra colleagues to quickly go through and open up every book on the sale table, as well as those in boxes on reserve, so that you're only selling good books to people to get signed by their favorite author. You make it through this first event (there are more to come later in the day, though much smaller), and your author comments that he's never seen anything like it before, and how sad it makes him that all his books are broken. He may have a word with his publisher. You assure him that you can send back damaged books to your wholesaler, which makes everybody feel more at ease. Eventually you all disperse to regroup for the later panels with this author, which go off without a hitch, as you've gone through most of the inventory, leaving a few boxes untouched that you know you won't need.
Later, you call your B&T rep to arrange return authorizations and you tell them about all the damaged ones. They'll pay for shipping on the damaged but not the unopened or undamaged. Well, undamaged is fair, but given that more than half of the ones opened were damaged, maybe they should pay for one of the unopened boxes to go back, you suggest. They say that's not an option, so you say, "How about I open the boxes and count up the damaged ones and call you back with another number?" because that seems honest and fair, but the rep rejects that proposal as well, so you sigh and accept it. You repack all the damaged ones back in their original boxes and affix the provided shipping labels and send them on their way. The next day, you open the untouched boxes anyway, because you'll be damned if you're paying for shipping and insurance for broken books (after the post office lost three boxes of books that one year after an author event and you had to fax a form from the dead letter office to the book vendor to prove you actually shipped them back, you ALWAYS get postal insurance, which is probably just what the post office wants you to do). You call back and get the same rep you spoke to yesterday, and ask for return labels for the new number of damaged books. This time she sighs and accepts it. Because both of you know that if she tries to argue with you, that you'll ask to speak to her manager.
But just because she wants to make your life more difficult, the shipping labels she sends you are not for two bigger boxes, which are what these books came in and you have so efficiently already packed and taped and are just awaiting a label, but a dozen smaller boxes. Good thing you haven't been to the recycling bin yet and have extra boxes on hand, but now of course you have to unpack, make up return forms for, and repack over a hundred damaged books. It's also a good thing you ordered way more than you would need, because if you'd estimated demand correctly, dozens of kids would be walking around with broken autographed books.
The Lesson: Unbox and inspect all your books BEFORE your author arrives. Count up all damages BEFORE you call your book rep. Be prepared to play dirty, and don't be too efficient.
No resources this time, as I don't think this is one of those things they write articles about in library school. In fact, the whole nuts-and-bolts of the ordering process was largely glossed over in terms too general to really comprehend, or else skipped entirely. Preparing for an author visit should be a whole unit in a programming/events class, if your school even offers such a thing, but no such curriculum seemed to exist in library school for myself and many of my cohort/librarian generation, regardless of which school we graduated from. They filled our heads with high ideals and principles, with some case study examples of problem patrons, but did very little to tackle a lot of the day-to-day stuff we'd be faced with. Maybe I'm just not remembering it. Maybe they did try to teach us and I wasn't paying attention, but this is the kind of thing I know I would've taken notes on.
