I loved curating my Beaumont Book Boxes, but they didn’t work out. It breaks my heart, but killing them was the right thing to do under the circumstances.
The short explanation for why I made this decision is this: far too many things could (and did) go wrong. The first box went super well, but the Vampirevember (November) Beaumont Book Box was a chain reaction of disasters that left me depressed, disheartened, and unable to continue curating these boxes for my readers.
If you’d like the detailed breakdown of things that went wrong, here it is.
- Some of the items I ordered to include in the boxes got backordered after showing as available at the time that I placed my order. I didn’t want to send out incomplete boxes, so I notified my executive assistant Mel that things had been backordered, but I failed to ask her to send out notifications about that.
- There were two deaths in my family in the space of two and a half weeks, and the emotional distress caused by that set off several of the health issues I’ve been struggling with all year. Mel felt that I deserved a minute to grieve and the chance to try to bounce back from the health flare up before reminding me to check on the backordered items and get the November boxes shipped. Mel also didn’t feel comfortable violating my privacy when it comes to the health issues, so no explanation was ever issued, and that led to an understantably upset customer asking for a refund on her orders. It was issued, but Mel was fiercely protective of me during that exchange, to the point of being abrasive and possibly alienating that reader and customer. I hate that it went down that way because I love all my readers and fans dearly.
- Between my health challenges, barely having time to grieve, being behind on my writing, paying more per box than I was charging to sell them, and losing customers because I was too sick and depressed to clearly communicate about the production issues, I realized that it was a lovely idea, but terrible execution, and that it would be best to close up shop on Beaumont Book Boxes. I’m still devastated and deeply depressed about it. I just couldn’t see a way to continue to sustain them, so here we are.
I have several more updates to go over with you guys this week, including introducing some new team members tomorrow, so check in daily for those posts.
I need to get back to working on Mistletoe Marked, because only 4/10 chapters are finished at the moment, and this manuscript is due by the 19th of this month! [Cue panic attack!]
If you’d like to check out the first chapter of Mistletoe Marked for free, you can do that HERE.
