Legend of Haiku Zine
Feb. 28th, 2021 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingOkay! I finally got all my deadlines and public appearances and submissions squared away, so it's time to get back to the Legend of Haiku zine project.
This is super complicated, but it's good to take things one step at a time.
Back in November and December, I was facing two main problems - shipping, and the cover.
The problem with shipping was that, due to the election, the pandemic, and the idiot president defunding the USPS, almost nothing I was mailing out of my Etsy store was getting where it was supposed to go. People who bought from me were getting angry in a way that was entirely disproportionate to the situation, and I was hemorrhaging money. Not only was this difficult to deal with, it was dispiriting. I didn't shut my Etsy store down, but I allowed everything to sell out without restocking.
Finally, across January and February, people gradually started to receive their orders, and I also started to receive mail that had been sent to me in late 2020. Now that the USPS seems to be back on track, and now that the messy winter weather seems to be mostly over, I feel more confident about mailing stuff out again.
I've decided that, for these zines, I'm going to use Media Mail, which generally takes a week or two longer to arrive but has tracking. In order to use Media Mail, though, I need to use stiff envelopes. Office supply stores don't sell these for some reason, so I had to ask around in a few artist networks about where to get them and what brand to use. Nobody could give me a straight answer, though, which was super weird and gave me horrible social anxiety.
In the end, I settled on (these), which I heard about from one of the guys who works on the Boss Fight Books series. I'm also going to wrap the zines themselves in kraft paper bags (these ones) sealed with Zelda-themed washi tape (which I got here). I just ordered all the shipping supplies this afternoon, along with a half dozen Sharpie markers.
So the next thing is the cover, which... I'm just going to need to sit down and work on, I guess.
This is super complicated, but it's good to take things one step at a time.
Back in November and December, I was facing two main problems - shipping, and the cover.
The problem with shipping was that, due to the election, the pandemic, and the idiot president defunding the USPS, almost nothing I was mailing out of my Etsy store was getting where it was supposed to go. People who bought from me were getting angry in a way that was entirely disproportionate to the situation, and I was hemorrhaging money. Not only was this difficult to deal with, it was dispiriting. I didn't shut my Etsy store down, but I allowed everything to sell out without restocking.
Finally, across January and February, people gradually started to receive their orders, and I also started to receive mail that had been sent to me in late 2020. Now that the USPS seems to be back on track, and now that the messy winter weather seems to be mostly over, I feel more confident about mailing stuff out again.
I've decided that, for these zines, I'm going to use Media Mail, which generally takes a week or two longer to arrive but has tracking. In order to use Media Mail, though, I need to use stiff envelopes. Office supply stores don't sell these for some reason, so I had to ask around in a few artist networks about where to get them and what brand to use. Nobody could give me a straight answer, though, which was super weird and gave me horrible social anxiety.
In the end, I settled on (these), which I heard about from one of the guys who works on the Boss Fight Books series. I'm also going to wrap the zines themselves in kraft paper bags (these ones) sealed with Zelda-themed washi tape (which I got here). I just ordered all the shipping supplies this afternoon, along with a half dozen Sharpie markers.
So the next thing is the cover, which... I'm just going to need to sit down and work on, I guess.
