As you can see from the right hand side bar...payments can be made

Looks as if blogger is going to be my transactional site. I'll use the main Fluffylittlekitten site as a beard for the blogger site. I can put in a paypal checkout. Do not attempt to buy anything off me if you visit this site.

The shopping cart is soooo easy. just login to paypal, go to merchant tools and pick standard shopping cart. Then all you have to do is fill out a form and paste stuff into an html/java box on the template part of the blog!

this is really encouraging. much the same as finding out that flash is not as hard as you would imagine if you only want to do one thing... of which more later.

packing

http://www.aid-pack.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/DevisRequestView?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10051

it looks like the boxes for 1-6 books will be less than a quid each. I'll have to look at the postage.

storage 2

forgot - I'll need packing materials as well. If I buy them in small quantities they'll cost more. Maybe I'll need a bigger room - possibly twice the size. i think I'll budget £500 for storage and hope we shift stock quickly.

Storage

if the books are printed we need somewhere to store them - and i can't imagine the missus warming to piles and piles of boxes of books.

My books are A5 and therefor two of them laid together are A4. I've measured some boxes of 80 gsm A4 paper and you can get 2500 sheets into a box 13 inches by 9 inches by 11 inches tall. My books average twice the gsm and so I'll get 1250 sheets in the same box, with two side by side each book is 52 pages so that means 23 x 2 copies per box, or 46 per box. I'm printing 6000 so that means 131 boxes!! Assuming I can pile them 6 high, so i need to store them in a room that'll fit 22 of them on the floor. 6 boxes by 4. That measures 52 inches by 54 inches.

this means I need a 5ft by 5ft room. I've got some self storage quotes near to my house...

looks like (if sales go well) I'll need at least 3 months of storage at a total cost of £270.75 - probably sensible to budget for about 6 months at £555.75. I'll look at other quotes.