When the real pros of small business shipping throw up their hands and say, “WTAF, we have no idea how to plan for these edicts that are happening every single week,” how am I supposed to figure it out? Expensive trial and error?
If you’re on social media you’ve seen authors who live outside the US announcing they won’t be able to ship their books to the United States. The chaos works the other way too. For example:
- Unpredictable postal increases and surcharges for me, discovered after my shop has tried to calculate the shipping price as accurately as possible. I have never marked up shipping as a profit point, and have always refunded any overage that was charged. My bad for wanting an honest transaction?
- Even worse: A reader in another country is informed they owe another 15-35% before their local postal service will release the shipment. If they don’t pay, the books signed to a specific person are returned to me. Maybe. If so, what do I do with them then?
- When the dust settles one of us – likely both of us – are out real cash, and the entire situation leaves a bad taste all the way around. About books we love.
The cost of shipping outside the US is already about the same as the books themselves. I don’t get that many international orders, but the situation still pains me. Ofttimes the reader placing the order is doing so as a very special gift to themselves or their wife, or they’re unable to get the book they want any other way.
There is literally no reason for any of this.
This situation in no means is as dire in the pure scale of what’s unfolding across the United States. For example, canceling access to vaccines that keep people alive. However, it’s another of the thousand tiny cuts that undermine our private pursuit of happiness, so it feels like yet another malicious pile on.
In policy terms, it’s a deliberate swipe at small businesses. Why? Because the mega-corporations (e.g. those who ship phones) will either find or be handed a way to get the de minimis exclusion for themselves. (This is an allowance that exempts shipments valued under $800 from this kind of tariff.)
Such a simple thing – a signed book – rendered too expensive to cross national borders. Am I happy about this? Of course not. I voted for the qualified, joyful woman.
