You’ve not heard from us for a while. Besides ongoing health issues, I’ve been plagued by website challenges, supplier closures, and difficulties involving supply chains. Following is a brief explanation.
First – as deals with my health. As most of you know, I had Covid in January of 2021. That morphed into Long Covid, which (among other things) caused extreme fatigue and brain fog. After personally walking away for a while, I finally got through it. Looking back, I think I dealt with it for a year. I’ve had spinal arthritis for about 5 years. It’s gotten continually worse, and I now see a pain doctor once or twice a month. He’s found ways of cutting the pain to a manageable level. But its also cut into my schedule (pun intended).
Second – we essentially lost our newsletter (The Genealogy Newsline) on January 13, when enough people marked my newsletter as being SPAM to cause Google to stop The Genealogy Newsline from even reaching folk’s Inboxes. This immediately followed a promotion we sent to our list for Ancestry.com. We worked with our newsletter sending company, Emailcontact.com, to get our subscribers to opt-in again. That was largely unsuccessful. However, I’m starting over and an email is going out on Feb. 24 to those who have opted in. Please – if you don’t want to hear from me, unsubscribe by clicking on the link at the bottom of the newsletter – simple as that.
Third – a criminal found a way to run stolen credit cards using the FamilyRootsPublishing.com shopping cart. A card would run every 12 seconds or so until Converge (the banking unit that processes our cards) would automatically shut our sales ability down. After working with our programmer, and Converge, to rectify the problem, we realized that we couldn’t fix it. The program was too out-of-date to modify. Although we’d done security patches right along, we could not stop someone from making purchases. We gave up and ceased to take credit cards at the FamilyRootsPublishing website. This essentially killed our online business. People do call us with credit cards for our manual processing, but it’s inconvenient, and most don’t want to deal with the hassle. I guess I should be really angry, but at my age, I don’t have the energy to waste on it.
Fourth – Getting paper to print books has been a source of all kinds of grief. We print most books on 11×17 60# text paper. We’ve been forced to cut down huge sheets of paper to fit our machinery, but still can’t get enough. We’re now paying over twice what we paid for paper less than a year ago – and often can’t find any paper at all, let alone the correct size. To make matters worse, the vinyl we use in binding several of our most popular titles hasn’t been available for some time. One company went out of business, and others are struggling due to their own supply chain issues.
Fifth – our local short-run bindery in Seattle closed about a month ago. We are now driving to Ballard, nearly doubling our drive time, to get books perfect bound (soft-cover books). We purchased the machinery from the owner of the closed bindery, allowing us to bind our own hard-bound books. We made the machinery move over the last week, but have yet to install any of it. We currently have a truck and enclosed trailer full of bindery equipment setting in the yard. I’ll write a separate blog about all that.
A NEW WEBSITE
We are building a new website, using Shopify eCommerce platform. We plan to launch within days – offering a limited selection of titles. However, it’s a big job, and we’re still entering the merchandise on the site – as well as dealing with design. I will let you know as soon as we are ready to launch.
In the meantime, we are still making a fair number of sales at Amazon and Biblio. Those sales, as well as those made through our distributers, have kept us operating through this rather rough patch in our lives.
Thanks for the support from many of my friends and customers. I’ve heard from many of you – and I know that Patty and I aren’t alone in having had extreme challenges the last couple years. It’s been an interesting time to be alive.