Wendyl Nissen: Tips on writing off a basement full of books

I get a lot of couriers at my house. Mostly, it's our Trade Me purchases wending their way across the country to Grey Lynn, sometimes it's a PR gift and once I signed for a packet of tired-looking sausages.

I spend most of my day assuring the courier guys my barking black dog will not kill them and persuading them to come up the stairs and give me the package, rather than throw it over the fence, or in some cases hide it under the trees
at the bottom for the garden to be discovered three months later.

So it was with some nonchalance I greeted the delivery guy on my path the other day and instructed him to simply deposit his load under the house. He looked at me in horror.

"I can't do that," he replied.

"Why not?" I said. "It's just up the path."

"Madam," he said, displaying an unusually courteous tone for these modern times. "It weighs 1.2 tonnes."

"I'm sorry," I replied hesitantly. "Nothing weighs 1.2 tonnes."

"Two pallets of books," he answered, before remembering to add a now rather weighted "madam."

I had just taken delivery of what was left of Bitch and Famous, the book I wrote last year. I was told it had sold well. My publisher said he had some copies left in the warehouse and would I like them at a very good price? It seemed like a good idea at the time.

As I hid inside my house and listened to the sound of hydraulic equipment unloading the pallets on to the street, my first thought was the desperate hope that my neighbour, who knows a bit about publishing, would not look out his window and realise that the aspiring author across the road was having to buy her own books. My next thought was to ring my husband and inform him that instead of going to the gym after work he might like to transfer 1.2 tonnes of books into the basement, quickly, and preferably before it rained.

But what was happening is a new trend in publishing I like to call "shift your own". It involves authors refusing to put the sales of their books entirely in the hands of retailers. Instead, at their launch they buy up a whole lot and flog them off themselves. I know many local authors who are doing it and decided to join them, albeit one year after Bitch and Famous was launched and when it had entered the period of its life where there were

only three options open to it.

1. Another date with the pulping machine. Keen followers of my career as an author (thanks, Mum and Dad) may remember the first edition of Bitch and Famous was pulped _ all 7000 copies of it. We would not be letting the surviving edition anywhere near a pulper.

2. My book could also suffer the fate of a brief appearance at The Warehouse in a bin labelled "clearance". I'll never forget finding my mentor Nene King's beautifully written and wonderful biography in the Warehouse for $2.79.

I bought all those copies out of respect for the author.

3. To buy them myself and attempt to re-sell them.

My family gave me the collective look they reserve for announcements of fun family tramping excursions in the Waitakeres, or putting hens in the backyard. Tolerant, yet deeply worried.

And then I listed them on Trade Me, set up a post office box, convinced women I spoke to at libraries and events to buy them "signed and dedicated to you or someone special!" and settled down to a new business venture.

Week one was hectic. Thanks Dianne, Juliet and Sheryl for your purchases.

"You could set up a stall at the Grey Lynn market," my husband suggested enthusiastically.

I realised, too late, he was joking.

Later that day, my daughter came home to find her mother at the kitchen table eagerly signing and wrapping copies of Bitch and Famous, not forgetting to include a lollipop for good measure.

"It's all right," I told her shocked little face. "When you grow up and write your own memoir you can describe the day your mother started a cottage industry to shift her remaining books and you realised she was, in fact, insane."

"Can I have a lollipop?" was all she could think to say.

Help an aspiring writer and the Cot Death Association. Go to www.Trade Me.co.nz and search Bitch and Famous.