Publishing Advice - Saving on shipping

Posted by: Andrew Kenrick On: Dec 7th 2009 edited

At Dragonmeet last weekend, Rich suggested clubbing together for printing and shipping from the US to save money.

Ruth spotted an article about Bundlebox in the Guardian and I thought it might be quite handy for saving money on shipping books from the US to the UK. The premise is simple - you register, and they give you a US shipping address you can get online orders sent to. Then, when you're ready, they consolidate all the orders in your box and send them over together, saving on postage.

I wonder if this would be a good way to handle it - create a single Bundlebox and then individual publishers ship their printing to it, then it gets sent over in one go to one of us (whoever is next at a con I guess). I've only done a quote for Threadless t-shirt orders so far - can someone who has a better idea about shipping costs and book weights do a quote to see if it works out cheaper?

Posted by: Paul On: Dec 7th 2009

This looks good, but the only problem is that over a certain weight and/or contents value and we would need to pay duty on the package as it will be flagged at customs. As none of us earn enough to be VAT registered we would need to apply for a pseudo turn number from HMRC which, and trust me on this, is no fun at all.

But if you want to try it, here are some numbers to get a quote:

50 copies of Hot War, including packaging weight just a tad over 30lb with a shipping cost of around $200 with UPS. I take it Bundlebox will us USPS to ship to the UK, so they will arrive with us via Parcelforce. I'd imagine we might be able to sell the undamaged books!!