Hey, folks. Some sad cookbook news — the Mascot quarterly royalties came, and it’s just $200-ish dollars. That’s a massive drop from the several thousand dollars of the first royalty check (three months ago), so a bit of a financial shock.
There’s about $2300 outstanding from Amazon (which often takes 6 months to pay), so hopefully we’ll get that in late February. There was about -$600 in returned books from Ingram, which I think is mostly small bookstore orders that were cancelled — I think that’s the effect of the pandemic. Some of those stores may have gone out of business entirely, alas. 
Mostly, I think this is the result of the pandemic crashing through our regular publicity schedule. We basically stopped all of it for three months (as I switched over to madly learning how to sew masks, panicking about the pandemic, making mask sewing videos, etc.), cancelling all public events, book tour, etc., and so this is the effect of that.
We picked up again with mailing out press releases in late May / June, and that led to a lot of glowingly positive newspaper coverage and some TV/radio publicity, so I’m quite hopeful that there were quite a few orders coming out of that, and we’ll get more funds in 2021. But it’s certainly disappointing for now.
Kevin and I will likely have to loan some money to the press to keep things going through the next quarter, so I can keep paying staff. (The kids don’t really need a college fund, right?) Guess I should’ve applied for those federal paycheck protection funds; I thought others would be in more need, so I held off, but that may have been a mistake. Sigh.
If you were thinking of buying my cookbook for yourself or a friend, now would be a lovely time. I’m offering some nice little packages of cookbooks + curry powder, or cookbooks + dish towels, etc., if you want to buy from me directly, or feel free to order from your local bookstore or from Amazon; whatever’s convenient.
If you want to read it, but aren’t in a position to buy, I’ll note that requesting it from your local library is also good for me — that lets libraries know that there’s an interest, and they may buy a copy or two. Also, y’know, I just like supporting libraries.
And if you’d like to tell your friends about the book, or leave a review on Amazon or Good Reads if you’ve already purchased the book, that’d be much appreciated!
