09/08/2026
Long day today,
We are trying out our new shipping rates again that require 300 orders per shipment. Our warehouse is ran by Weston (my friend and first employee The Happy Book Stack ever hired). We enjoy building things out from scratch and this warehouse didn’t even exist one year ago and now we have almost 50k books in it.
I spent the day shipping all of these while Weston helped run the store today. Standing all day and walking the warehouse is definitely a bit harder on the body than it used to be. There have been a lot of hours of manual labor working on this business for sure.
Hopefully the post office and our software play well with us this time. When we tried this two weeks ago we had to take all 300 packages back to the warehouse and spend about 12 hours reshipping them. We should be good now but you never know.
We are attempting to build a national online website with thehappybookstack.com Right now we sell on Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other platforms because we have to as we grow our brand. The benefit of our own website is that we can encourage people to buy multiple books at once and shipping and marketplace fees don’t eat up all of the revenue.
If you sell a book on amazon for $8, you are lucky to walk away with $1 in profit before your item cost, warehouse storage fees and labor so it is basically a losing game for many books. On our website it is a different story.
The same is true for indie authors who publish through traditional publishers. Many of them are lucky to make a few dollars when their book’s sales for $25. They get such a small piece of the pie because the publisher and the distributor are taking so much from them.
Getting these new shipping rates and growing our national brand will be so important for helping us one day here soon publish and stock books for indie authors too where we can handle their distribution and help them make more money and catch more eyes.
All of this is only possible with your support. Amazon may have fancy robots pick and pull their packages, but you have us and we have you and that can be the difference.
