Hey folks,

I'm working on putting together a single Google Forms survey that covers every known participant in the bookstore. The idea would be to give prospective buyers a chance to see everything that will be available and projected price, so they can plan accordingly, and to give us, the booksellers, some idea of demand so that we're not going into this thing completely blind.

The landing page asks both if the respondent plans to attend BC and if they're interested in paying for shipping on the books they want if they don't go (the thinking with the latter question being -- "how risky is overstocking?"):

The second page lists available titles and formats and their price points, so the respondent can go through and check off which ones they're interested in:

I'd like to get as many participating authors represented in the survey as possible, and then get the survey shared as widely as possible sometime next month, in an effort to help everyone decide how much inventory to send to the con. (The results of the survey will of course be shared with everyone.)

I'll be DMing the authors I'm aware of who are participating in the bookstore, but I'm sure I don't know all of them -- if you're participating or know someone who is, please point them my way so we can increase the usefulness of the survey and the number of authors helped by it!

Cheers,
RBDash47

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I'm not aware of one.

6869045 For me, at least, I plan on bringing X+Y books where X is the number I expect the BCB to sell regardless and Y is the number of people who told me "Yes, I will be at BC and plan on buying that book." So if you tell me, "Georg, I'm going to give a copy of The Traveling Tutor to everybody in my High School English class, so I'm going to be ordering forty of them" I'll add that to Y (rather nervously) so I can put in my lump-order to Lulu and save on postage. Then after BC is over, I'll open the Lulu page of the respective books to *linked* requests (instead of flinging it wide open and risking catching a Hasbro lawyer) so people can buy one if they missed it earlier, only they'll have to pay the full shipping so it will be a little more expensive.

I suspect part of the BCB will be several stacks with fannames on them so when Bob shows up with a fist full of bills, they won't have to dig through the inventory for his order, but no promises.

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I’m intending to submit three books to the bookstore. I don’t know how many copies of each I’ll bring; depends on what I expect people will want and then a buffer . . . sorta Georg’s plan.

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6869658

I don’t know how many copies of each I’ll bring

That's the primary point of the survey, to try to figure out how much interest there is for a given title in a centralized place so potential buyers can see (close to) everything that will be available.

I intend to participate, and I’ve already got an idea of how many copies I want to bring, but this’ll be a nice clue to how many I should. So yeah, send that thing over.

Quick question: How can I take the survey?

I am going to do at least one book. Likely two.

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If you mean, fill it out when it's ready, so you can indicate which books you're interested in buying? I'll post it here, and hopefully the authors you're interested in will also blog about it!

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PMs sent!

6869726 Okay, thanks, RBD! I appreciate it.

And indeed!

My two cents: make the first question simple yes or no. Having yes, no, and two different levels of 'maybe' will probably not be very useful data to work with.

Are the results of this survey going to be public in any manner? My own fandom-related hobby is creating Goodreads listings for fanfic, and I'd love to have a list like that to work from. I expect most already have listings but there could be a few that slipped through the cracks.

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The results, no. The survey itself, listing the books that will be available, of course!

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Yeah, the list of titles is all I'd need. Thanks!

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I feel like I'm still trying to get past the getting-my-act-together phase, but I plan on bringing one book, possibly two.

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I plan on bringing a few copies of my book, go ahead and send me the deal please.