Walk before trying to run

 

Wow.  What an impressive service from Fasthosts and impressive price too – web space up and running and DNS updated within about two hours of transferring in.  That’s how to live up to your brand name and no mistake.  I took the space for the scripting ability.  It’s been quite a while since I played with PHP and MySQL, so hoping it’ll all come back to me once I get stuck in.  Whilst the book and ebooks are taken care of by Amazon and Createspace, there are other publications I’ll have to control.  Things like cards from the photography, needlework charts by PDF and knitting patterns (if I ever design any more of them) that I can’t easily sell by other means.

Of course, I’m getting miles ahead of myself here.  How am I going to manage inventory and shipping for these things when I’ll soon be back to work?  How am I going to stay awake long enough to barrage social networking sites with sales messages, let along fulfil orders?  That’s assuming I ever receive any orders of course. 

Before I can even sort out the ‘real’ book sales channels, I need to complete forms for the IRS.  HMRC, all is forgiven – you make it so easy to find out what needs to be done.  The American IRS site is really difficult to fathom out and the documents are in English, but it’s very legalistic English and I haven’t a clue what I’m doing.  At the worst they’ll send it back, I suppose and tell me to start again.

If I don’t fill out these forms, I’ll be charged income tax by the IRS that as a UK citizen I’m protected from by tax treaty.  It’s a painful 30% from any royalties and since sales of this first book are for charity, that thought really bothers me.  That’s 30% of a donation, not just 30% of royalties and it won’t make much, if anything, to begin with.  I’ll get my head around it all somehow.

Now I’m having misgivings about the website too.  I really quite like the neat grey and orange tabbed format, but that throws up a few problems.  A tabbed page means all the code is embedded on one page and organised by javascript.  Problem?  Linking to items is hit and miss and traffic statistics will report one page view when someone might have been checking every tab ten times over.  It completely screws up hits versus views and means I can’t spam people with links to a specific item.  Back to separate pages per category and a messier overall look than I wanted.  I might seem scatty but my tortured little brain likes things to be simple and straightforward.  

This all seemed like such a good idea in the beginning.  I did think it through and I thought ok, go for it.  It’s for a good cause.  I’ve not lost motivation at all.  Just hope I haven’t grossly mistimed launch.  Maybe slow down a bit and stop pressuring myself so much.  The only person with any expectations is me, and I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to what I want from me.  Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes.  My little charity empire doesn’t have to be either.  Will I listen though…?