I've heard from several readers who want to get their hands on the book but can't because they live outside of North America. Either the price is completely prohibitive to ship the book to where they live or it's simply unavailable. The book is not currently available in e-book format and won't be for a while, I suspect (this is entirely out of our hands). So… I'm trying to figure out the best way to get these books to people who want them.
The only thing I can think of is to purchase the books here in Canada and ship them to who wants them. The shipping costs will be less than Amazon charges, I'm sure. I suppose I can set up a PayPal account for these costs that people can pay directly to me. Does anyone else have any other possible solutions? This seems like such an odd and low-tech solution.
Also, could I possibly get a "head count" of how many people would be interested in this sort of arrangement? I've received some emails and some comments, but I'm not sure if there's anyone else that would be interested. If it's just 8 or so people, I'm happy to do the shipping myself and get the reinbursement through some easy payment method. I feel a bit funny about getting into the nitty-gritty of shipping costs, but the book itself is only $12 Canadian, so it's really this shipping detail that's stumping all of us.
I would be interested depending on how much it would cost to ship it. I’m in Italy.
I would also be interested. For reference, I am in Germany, and amazon.ca charges $16 for regular shipping to Europe, which takes 4 to 8 weeks. I would gladly pay $16 shipping if only it didn’t take two months! For delivery within a more reasonable span (5-10 days, I think), they charge $25 or so, which starts to make this a pretty expensive book.
I have a lot of overseas friends, and we go through this kind of dilemma fairly regularly. What we’ve found is instead of shipping individually to each person, it comes out cheaper if each area gets a point-person. So, in Europe, one point person gets all the books, and that person ships to all the other people in the area. It makes more work because it involves more people, but it gets to be much more affordable, since a bulk of the cost is going over the Atlantic. Shipping within the EU seems much more sensible.
@fahmi: I’ve just had someone VERY generously offer to be the hub distribution person for Europe (in Germany) — basically the point person you mention. I believe it’s Kelly who posted just above you. So… that’s probably going to be the best answer. I checked with my publisher and because of various problems with “rights” and such, HarperCollins won’t directly distribute to Amazon in Europe before they sell the rights to the book in Europe (which they don’t even know that they’ll do).
So, I’ll purchase the books, send them to Kelly and then she can send them out to everyone who is interested. How to get payment to me and Kelly still needs to be worked out, but it can’t be that difficult…
I think what I’ll do is put up a post asking people who are interested to email me their addresses. Then I can forward these to Kelly. Stay tuned!
Brilliant! I’m in the UK and would love a copy. I look forward to more info.