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Diploma-cy, Take Two
Jan. 7th, 2011 05:21 pmSooner or later, I've always just sort of given up on email communications with the public.
It's a horrible thing to admit, but something happens that makes me dread checking the email box I use for reader relations and then I check it less and less and then I start ignoring it completely, and then the thought of email backing up, unread and unanswered, just makes things worse. When I say "something happens", I don't mean something in particular that I have good reason to fear. I mean I start worrying about something so incredibly specific as to be highly unlikely, or so ridiculously vague that I can't even properly articulate what's keeping me away from it.
If I actually make myself go back in and check it, it's anybody's guess whether there actually will be piles or not. Generally when I stop responding to emails and stop mentioning the fact that I have a publicly facing email address, people stop sending me email.
It's a form of social anxiety, I suppose... the same thing that makes me dread talking on the phone. It's just weird to me that it happens with email when communicating in writing and through the internet is mostly how I dealt with/worked around my social anxiety in the first place. Email and I are supposed to be on the same side. It's an irrational impulse, and like all irrational impulses, it can really only be traced so far. So I've pretty much abandoned a series of contact emails and kept one private one for my friends and family.
I tell myself that I don't owe it to anyone to be accessible in that way. I have a Livejournal and a Formspring and a Twitter, so I mostly don't even care who adds me on Facebook. (Side note: I get the same random heebie jeebies over checking my mentions/replies on Twitter, but tehy're more easily overcome.) So it's not like I've built an invisible wall between me and the public, right? Except when I started selling things to the public that requires fulfillment on my part, I really need to have a way of keeping the lines of more private communication open.
I found out via a commenter on Tales of MU today that I've sold more diplomas than I ever realized, and so three people who ordered them never received them. That's 30% of the total diplomas sold. Better than my last effort (which was more like 50%), still unacceptably bad. I've tried working out exactly how I missed these ones... the email notifications are in my inbox, they're read, but I never did the next steps in my process of Making Sure Orders Get Done, which is making a mailing label. When I have unused mailing labels, I know I have an unfilled order. Simple, right?
If I had to guess... and I do have to guess, because it was last spring and summer that these orders came in... I'd say my hectic travel schedule was probably at issue. If I happened to open the email while I was on the road, it wouldn't be unread in my inbox when I got home, and there wouldn't be a mailing label there to remind me. I can just picture myself saying, "Oh, an order. Well, I'll have to remember to make a label for that when I get home." And then not remembering, because my brain doesn't work that way.
So clearly if I do any of this in the future... and with people asking about signed copies of the "original flavor" MU books, there could be more complicated fulfillment in my future... I need a slightly more refined system of making sure things get done. Like change the mail filter so that orders go into their own folder, and get starred. I'll unstar them when I've made the mailing label, move them to a different folder when they're finished. This won't rely on whether they're at the top of my inbox or unread for me to know that I've got unfinished orders.
In the meantime, there are three people who ordered diplomas and three people who ordered Fantasy In Miniature prints that I'm going to have to contact, to see if they'd prefer a refund or if they'd still like their prints and if the address on the order is still correct. When I started this my plan was that if for any reason I couldn't send the order in 30 days, I'd immediately refund the money, but that depended on me knowing I had orders and knowing I wasn't getting them out the door.
I'm going to be contacting those people over the weekend... via email, using a new address I've just set up. My previous address had "feedback" in the title because I thought that made sense as that would be its primary purpose, but a lot of the email I received opened with lines like "I'm not sure if this is the right address because I'm not sure this really counts as feedback...", and I also got contacts elsewhere (like Livejournal) saying "I wanted to email you but the only address I could find was for feedback."
So the new address is going to be very straightforward: contactme, at the domain that is my Livejournal username dot com. What can you use it for me? To contact me. Will I write back? It's possible. I'll ask that people with short questions about the story and such continue to go to my Formspring, because if you want to ask something about me or my work chances are that other people will want to know the answer as well.
For diplomas and prints, I'm "restocking" the stores even though there are those outstanding orders... missing 3 out of 10 ourders is not something to be proud of, but I think I have a working system and I'm not doing a heck of a lot of traveling in the next three months. One week in February. The people who've received diplomas have had some nice things to say about them, so I don't want to have them disappear.
It's a horrible thing to admit, but something happens that makes me dread checking the email box I use for reader relations and then I check it less and less and then I start ignoring it completely, and then the thought of email backing up, unread and unanswered, just makes things worse. When I say "something happens", I don't mean something in particular that I have good reason to fear. I mean I start worrying about something so incredibly specific as to be highly unlikely, or so ridiculously vague that I can't even properly articulate what's keeping me away from it.
If I actually make myself go back in and check it, it's anybody's guess whether there actually will be piles or not. Generally when I stop responding to emails and stop mentioning the fact that I have a publicly facing email address, people stop sending me email.
It's a form of social anxiety, I suppose... the same thing that makes me dread talking on the phone. It's just weird to me that it happens with email when communicating in writing and through the internet is mostly how I dealt with/worked around my social anxiety in the first place. Email and I are supposed to be on the same side. It's an irrational impulse, and like all irrational impulses, it can really only be traced so far. So I've pretty much abandoned a series of contact emails and kept one private one for my friends and family.
I tell myself that I don't owe it to anyone to be accessible in that way. I have a Livejournal and a Formspring and a Twitter, so I mostly don't even care who adds me on Facebook. (Side note: I get the same random heebie jeebies over checking my mentions/replies on Twitter, but tehy're more easily overcome.) So it's not like I've built an invisible wall between me and the public, right? Except when I started selling things to the public that requires fulfillment on my part, I really need to have a way of keeping the lines of more private communication open.
I found out via a commenter on Tales of MU today that I've sold more diplomas than I ever realized, and so three people who ordered them never received them. That's 30% of the total diplomas sold. Better than my last effort (which was more like 50%), still unacceptably bad. I've tried working out exactly how I missed these ones... the email notifications are in my inbox, they're read, but I never did the next steps in my process of Making Sure Orders Get Done, which is making a mailing label. When I have unused mailing labels, I know I have an unfilled order. Simple, right?
If I had to guess... and I do have to guess, because it was last spring and summer that these orders came in... I'd say my hectic travel schedule was probably at issue. If I happened to open the email while I was on the road, it wouldn't be unread in my inbox when I got home, and there wouldn't be a mailing label there to remind me. I can just picture myself saying, "Oh, an order. Well, I'll have to remember to make a label for that when I get home." And then not remembering, because my brain doesn't work that way.
So clearly if I do any of this in the future... and with people asking about signed copies of the "original flavor" MU books, there could be more complicated fulfillment in my future... I need a slightly more refined system of making sure things get done. Like change the mail filter so that orders go into their own folder, and get starred. I'll unstar them when I've made the mailing label, move them to a different folder when they're finished. This won't rely on whether they're at the top of my inbox or unread for me to know that I've got unfinished orders.
In the meantime, there are three people who ordered diplomas and three people who ordered Fantasy In Miniature prints that I'm going to have to contact, to see if they'd prefer a refund or if they'd still like their prints and if the address on the order is still correct. When I started this my plan was that if for any reason I couldn't send the order in 30 days, I'd immediately refund the money, but that depended on me knowing I had orders and knowing I wasn't getting them out the door.
I'm going to be contacting those people over the weekend... via email, using a new address I've just set up. My previous address had "feedback" in the title because I thought that made sense as that would be its primary purpose, but a lot of the email I received opened with lines like "I'm not sure if this is the right address because I'm not sure this really counts as feedback...", and I also got contacts elsewhere (like Livejournal) saying "I wanted to email you but the only address I could find was for feedback."
So the new address is going to be very straightforward: contactme, at the domain that is my Livejournal username dot com. What can you use it for me? To contact me. Will I write back? It's possible. I'll ask that people with short questions about the story and such continue to go to my Formspring, because if you want to ask something about me or my work chances are that other people will want to know the answer as well.
For diplomas and prints, I'm "restocking" the stores even though there are those outstanding orders... missing 3 out of 10 ourders is not something to be proud of, but I think I have a working system and I'm not doing a heck of a lot of traveling in the next three months. One week in February. The people who've received diplomas have had some nice things to say about them, so I don't want to have them disappear.