As Maritimers do their best to try and return to a state of “normal”, I got a piece of mail today and that just totally made my day.
Since the launching of The Caravan Chronicles in February, I have been slowly selling copies both locally and online. I’m happy to report that thanks to a lot of great local support, all the costs associated to my book have been paid back. My time is obviously valuable as well, but books cost money to produce. Those costs have now finally been paid so the rest is essentially free and clear to me.
But what I’m excited about today is the cheque (yes, that is how you spell “check” in Canada) I received in the mail today. Groundspeak paid me for the books I sold them for their online shop. Why is this a big deal? Let’s put some context around it.
Groundspeak is the name of the company that owns the geocaching.com website. Every official geocache in the world is listed on this website. Geocachers from all over the world use this website as the basis for everything we do relating to geocaching. That website also has a store where you can buy geocaching related items. After connecting with their purchasing manager, I secured an order for many copies of The Caravan Chronicles. Today I received the payment for that order.
Having my book on the geocaching.com shop is a big deal. Every geocacher in the world uses geocaching.com so to be able to have visibility into my book on their shop was a big deal for me. Sure, my book is on Amazon, and Apple, and many other online retailers. And yes, those are far larger than anything related to geocaching.com. But it’s pretty easy for my book to get buried under the literal millions of other titles. A search on shop.geocaching.com for books yields nine results (as of today). One out of nine is a lot better than one out of 32.8 million on Amazon.
But for today, it’s actually the cheque that is the big deal to me. I’ve sold copies of my book to other online, geocaching related websites (Thanks Landsharkz!), but this is the first time I have actually received a real cheque for the goods. With everything being electronic these days, cheques are few and far between. So to get my first real cheque for my book just somehow makes it feel more real to me. It’s also the largest amount I have been paid for my books to date which certainly added to the good feeling I had.
For me, having a moment of pride over my accomplishments just makes me want to do more. Thankfully, I still have a ton of stuff to write about. Stay tuned!
