Inside LabourStart

Sales in the first 3 days of April at UCS now exceed sales for all of the first quarter of 2009.  The numbers are not massive – $797.65, which translates at $79.76 for us (£53.82) – but still, it’s good.

And the Union Books group on UnionBook now has 45 members — seven of whom have suggested books!

It’s important for us to sell labour books – and LabourStart is uniquely positioned to do so.  This article from four years ago explains why and it’s still relevant today.

I wanted to update you on book sales in the first quarter of 2009.  It’s a bit complicated, as we’ve sold books four different ways.  Here is breakdown, listing the gross and our share (net).  All totals are in US dollars.

• Powells – $29.00 – $2.17
• UCS – $712.13 – $71.21
• Middlesex Univ. Press (Global Unions) – $1,589.85 – $387.74
• TUC (Hadi Never Died) – $1,482.79 – $930.87

The total income we received, therefore, is $1,391.99 (£946.95).

Obviously we make the most money when we sell directly from publishers (the TUC and Middlesex University) but it’s easiest for us, and most useful to our readers, when we co-market with UCS.

For that reason, today I’m going to relaunch our book-of-the-day feature, except as book-of-the-week, and hope to promote some of the very best labour books over the next few months.

I’ve also launched a UnionBook group called ‘Union Books‘  to discuss labour books.  We should refer writers, publishers and readers to that group.

• We now have over 59,000 addresses on our mailing lists.
• We’ve sold 29 copies of the Global Unions book — I was hoping to sell more (ideally, 100).
• UnionBook is 11 members short of the 2,500 member mark.
• We’ve helped the CAW in Canada by promoting one of their campaigns – but not as a LabourStart campaign.

We’ve been promoting this book and have sold about 25 copies so far — I was hoping to sell 100, so will continue promoting. Our special page promoting the book is here.

A few things from the last couple of weeks that I haven’t updated yet here …

• LabourStartJobs.org will finally close down this summer.  We needed to give 6 months notice.  Once this is closed, we can consider launching a free jobs board for trade unionists – this is something we might want to discuss this summer.
• UnionBook now has over 2,500 users though not all have confirmed.  We continue to send out weekly mailings to all of them.  In the last 7 days, we’ve picked up another 122 users.  We have a list of things we want done to the site and have hired someone to do these things.
• The ActNOW wire in French has been fixed – this is part of a whole bunch of problems we’ve had after we converted LabourStart to Unicode without waiting for the rest of the trade union movement to join us – meaning that we’ve had to re-convert some of our content back to earlier formats to display properly on union websites.
• We’ve submitted a proposal to Unite, the largest union in the UK, asking for support.
• The link to show more news for individual countries now works properly in all languages.
• Having written our first script that can read the UnionBook database – it shows the size of the various groups – we can now do much more.  We can create our own tools to monitor and administer the system.
• We’ve submitted a draft early day motion to the British House of Commons regarding UnionBook – this will probably be introduced in the next few days.
• The Labour News Network in its most recent incarnation (Jottit) has now been closed down.  UnionBook replaces it.
• We’ll shortly begin selling this book – waiting for final confirmation from the publisher.
• We’re exploring moving our campaigns from the existing 1&1 server – which could not handle the most recent flood of participants – to our new dedicated server which we use for UnionBook.  This should solve the problem.
• NoSweat Apparel in the US has offered to produce UnionBook t-shirts which we will shortly begin selling.
• There’s probably more, but I can’t remember it all.

We’ve sold 96 copies of the book for £10 each, making this one of the most successful efforts we’ve ever had with online marketing.

Copies were ordered by our readers in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Germany, China (Hong Kong), and South Korea.

Packaging and addressing all the books is taking time, but everything should go out in the next few days.

Two days after inviting our readers to purchase copies of the book ‘Hadi Never Died’ I’m very pleased to report that already 68 copies have been sold, for a total of £680.  We have to pay the TUC £2 for each copy and there will be the costs of postage and envelopes, but we’ve made a few pounds and we’ve helped raise the profile of the Iraqi trade unions, so this is a good thing.