Just a reminder…the June 13 fundraiser is days away!

 

Light of Islam Bookstore

Houston’s new nonprofit bookstore and educational center

Cordially invites you to

A fundraising dinner

Friday, June 13, 2008

7 p.m. - 10 p.m.

Islamic Society of Greater Houston’s Main Center

3110 Eastside Street, Houston, TX 77098

Special Guest

Dr. Fady Joudah

Reading from his new book, “The Earth in the Attic”

 

Dinner ~ Silent Auction ~ Book Sale

 

RSVP by June 8 to Ruth Nasrullah 832-205-1457 or dinner@light-of-islam.org

 

 

Under construction

Light of Islam blog is currently undergoing renovations.  Check back daily as it’s completed.

 

Light of Islam at Bear Creek mosque (Masjid Al Mustafa)

If you’ll be at the Summer Fest tomorrow at the Bear Creek masjid, look for Light of Islam’s table.  The carnival starts at noon and Light of Islam will be there till around 4:00.  Money raised at the carnival goes toward construction of the masjid, so it’s a good cause and fun too!

 

Blogging from the expo

This is day #2 of the book expo and I’m feeling a bit less confused than I was yesterday.  Yesterday I kind of wandered around unsure of what to expect and what my purpose was.  I found many of the exhibitors to be a bit cold and wasn’t sure why.  During the day I went to the ABA lounge (where I am now) and spoke with an experienced buyer I had met at lunch the day before.  She told me that in the past few years the publishers have become less interested in dealing with “small fry” like me.  (The ID badges are huge, so you can see a person’s name, hometown, and category - bookseller, author, exhibitor, etc. - immediately.)  Today I had a bit more of a plan based on my experiences yesterday.  I went to the other section of the convention center that I missed yesterday and walked the halls there.  I actually got a little more response there.  I spoke with Constant Contact reps here who were kind enough of get my logo onto my account and show me how to translate RGB colors into hex so I can reproduce them on my newsletter.  In a little while I’m going to visit the large publishers’ booths.  I had avoided them, thinking I would have more luck with smaller houses, but that may have been an incorrect assumption.

The ABA’s day of education on Thursday was really helpful.  I went to a seminar on co-op advertising that gave me some good ideas about making additional revenue for the store, and a seminar about negotiating your lease. 

 

Off to the expo

Thanks, Abu Harun and Irving, for your supportive comments - I appreciate it!

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Book Expo.  I think I’m ready, or as ready as I’ll ever be.  I’m definitely ready for the ABA’s day of education on Thursday, and I think I have a clue about what to do at the trade show itself.  We’ll see what it’s like.  I guess I’ll post again when I get back, unless I get access and motivation.  The ABA has a “lounge” at the show and I think I might be able to get on a computer there.  We shall see…

 

ICNA was a beautiful thing

It’s 11 p.m. and I just got back from the ICNA convention.  I left the house at 7:30 this morning and pretty much worked straight through without a break except for prayer.  A brother from the table behind mine was kind enough to deliver me lunch from the stands downstairs and my husband brought me dinner.  My feet hurt but I’m too exhilarated to really be tired.  We made just shy of $700, mostly in sales, with some donations.  I was amazed as I watched the stacks of books dwindle down.  I brought my 2 x 4 foot folding table and had books laid out on it; by the evening all those were gone.  “Does My Head Look Big in This?” was, as I expected, a big seller, and also my attention-getter, as “Girls Gone Mild” was at MAS.  Anyway, two girls from the Bear Creek masjid invited me to have a table at their carnival on the 8th, so I’ll be doing that and will cater my next book order to that crowd.

As always, I’m amazed at how many people have heard of the bookstore and of me.  Apparently news about LOI has gone viral, and of course I am famous across Houston as the Chronicle blogger (and some people are also fans of MuslimMatters).  One really gratifying thing happened - one of my best donors stopped by and I thanked him again for his generosity and he said, hey it’s easy to do that - you’re the one on the front lines doing the work.  That really validated the attitude I’ve been developing that I’m working for the community more than the community is helping me in my endeavor. 

I’ve mentioned before on this blog how important a book cover is.  Here is an example of a great book that I just can’t sell:

People barely look at it.  The stark black and white does nothing, it doesn’t make sense that “IS” is in red, and the tag line is too tiny to read.  I have a stack of those books that I carry around from show to show.  They just don’t sell.  It’s like trying to sell a chocolate chip cookie in a green bean wrapper - and yes, you can quote me on that

Alhamdulillah, all in all it was a great, long, gratifying, lucrative 14-hour day.  Tomorrow the work continues.

*****
Light of Islam is a nonprofit bookstore whose mission is to provide the Houston-area community with accurate and accessible information about Islam and Muslims. Find out more at http://www.light-of-islam.org/.

 

Going postal

This afternoon I took a well-deserved nap and watched a well-deserved hour of “Judge Judy.”  It is SUCH a relief to have all the formally addressed invitations out of my hair and my life forever.  Now I just have to keep assembling unaddressed invitations for people to send out, plus make the flyer, which I’m using a template from good old Publisher to create.  Let me try to summarize what my advice would be for someone setting up standard mail (which is the correct term for bulk mail).  These points aren’t in any particular order but just constitute my advice.  They are also based on using precanceled stamps as your postage method, since that’s what I chose.

1. Assemble the entire mailer, taking into consideration every aspect of it, including the USPS guidelines for standard mail pieces.  Have the assembly mapped out.  Have all pieces in place at the same time and don’t start until they are.  In my case the pieces were: The outer envelope; the mailing label; the return address label; the invitation; the response card; the return envelope; the label for the return envelope; and the precanceled stamp.  Have everything together at once and assemble everything at once and you’ll be happy.
2. Make sure you fully understand the USPS guidelines for zip codes.  I still didn’t understand it when I took my last trays to the post office today, and honestly I still don’t understand it.  They offer a class and I guess if you regularly use standard mail you might want to take it.  It might have helped to ask the woman who processed my permit application to list out for me every step, as though I was stupid.  I did end up doing a stupid thing and having to go downtown and delivery trays of bulk mail twice.  I also wasted a good chunk of money using first class stamps on mail I didn’t’ realize qualified for the nonprofit standard rate (16 cents versus 42).  Fortunately I decided to quit and go to the post office with the standard mail I had already put together, and when I got there is when I found out the other mail was eligible; hence the second trip to the post office - no third, since the first trip was to get the permit.
3. Recruit volunteers.  Many. 
4. Double check all the pieces of your mailing.  I wasted a ridiculous amount of time during the only evening I had volunteers to help me because the person who gave me the mailing list duplicated multiple pages.  Because of that I had to sort everything I had done by zip code, looking for duplicates and disposing of them.  I re-used the ones I had already stamped by sticking labels over the old ones, and this morning my last step in the whole bloody process was to retrieve the contents of those duplicates.

That’s all I can think of for now, and the list probably reflects the aggravating things that happened this week.  It literally took days and days to get the daggone thing done. I put in two 12-hour days this week and stayed up till the wee hours last night.  Don’t do what I did.  Make sure you have everything in place and you understand everything thoroughly in terms of what zip codes are eligible for what rates and which zip codes go together.

Moving on now…

*****
Light of Islam is a nonprofit bookstore whose mission is to provide the Houston-area community with accurate and accessible information about Islam and Muslims. Find out more at http://www.light-of-islam.org/.

 

Editing

I’m exhausted from putting together the invitation mass mailing yesterday but the mailing still isn’t done.  It’s so much more work than I anticipated.

You’ll notice some posts are missing - they are temporarily away pending some editing I need to do. 

I got the bulk mail permit yesterday but I got so far behind one way or another that there was no way I could finish yesterday.  Today I have to finish the mailing, the process of which involves the following:

• Labeling the return envelopes
• Stuffing the return envelopes
• Labeling the envelopes
• Stuffing the envelopes with the invitation, reply card and return envelopes
• Stamping them with the precanceled bulk mail stamps (which I left out of the process yesterday and didn’t realize it until my volunteers and I had done a good chunk of labeling and assembling).  I also didn’t realize till after I started that I had no return address information, which I believe the USPS requires for bulk mailing.  I’ll have to figure out what to do about that today, whether getting a rubber stamp or running labels.
• Packaging them in the Post Office trays per USPS instructions and completing the mailing form.
• Taking them back downtown to be mailed (there is only one post office in all of Houston where bulk mail can be dropped off and processed).

I have to get back to it.  On top of everything else, I found out yesterday that there is no guaranteed delivery time with bulk mail, which can take 2-9 days.  Through this whole process I struggled with thinking maybe it’s not justified, but if nothing else the reply cards make it basically a direct mail piece.  So much work…

 *****
Light of Islam is a nonprofit bookstore whose mission is to provide the Houston-area community with accurate and accessible information about Islam and Muslims. Find out more at http://www.light-of-islam.org/.

 

Assessment and planning

Well I’ve recovered from yesterday.  The carnival was not a sales success but I did do some marketing, got some names on my newsletter list (I highly prize that because as long as people are getting news about the bookstore at the very least they won’t forget that they ever heard about it).  So many people know who I am, either by word of mouth or because of my blogs - I had so many people say “Oh aren’t you the one with the blog on the Chronicle/MuslimMatters?”  One sister even found this blog by searching for info about yesterday’s carnival.  Also, the associate director of the SW zone agreed to distribute invitations for me to the people in that area of the city.  It was definitely worth doing despite the long drive and the sunburn from standing outside all day.  And my new plastic crates proved far superior to the old boxes I’ve been transporting books in.  I’ve really got the bazaar/show thing down now. 

So I think I’ve finally made my decision regarding mailing the invitations to 1200 people, and the decision is that I will.  The reason is that even if my friends and colleagues throughout city hand out invitations, that’s only one contact (per potential guest) and there’s no guarantee of how organized it will be  - or even if they’ll get the chance to do it or do it timely.  I need to know that every single ISGH member in the city has received an invitation, and any additional solicitation they get will be a second or third reminder.  I’m trying to really take the idea to heart that fundraising requires individual person-to-person contact and multiple interactions.  The cold invitations will be just one of those interactions.  As for the can’t-attend-but-will donate-reply cards (what should I call them? donation reply cards?), they will go out also, using return labels rather than imprinting. 

You know, things are very cheap if you don’t put a value on your time.  That’s how I’ve saved a lot of money in this whole process.

So I’m just waiting for Dr. Joudah’s bio and tomorrow I will finalize the printing with the printers.  Hopefully I can get everything ready to go by Tuesday afternoon, which is when my number one volunteer can be at the main center.  I can imagine the next two days being consumed by the invitation process…finalizing the copy, finalizing the order, arranging the bulk mail, printing the return labels, organizing the mailing and then the actual stuffing and labeling.  I also have to update the web site, input the newsletter sign-ups from yesterday and then send the Constant Contact invite and record my sales from yesterday and recent expenses.  45 days to go and they will be busy.

I’m still trying to get registered for both ICNA and ISNA.  And Book Expo is in less than two weeks.

*****
Light of Islam is a nonprofit bookstore whose mission is to provide the Houston-area community with accurate and accessible information about Islam and Muslims. Find out more at http://www.light-of-islam.org/.

 

There will be a reading

Success!  I spoke to Dr. Joudah at the film festival last night and he agreed to do a brief reading.  <Big sigh of relief.>  I just have to have him approve a bio that I can print on the back of the invitation and then I can go ahead and get the dang things printed.  Alhamdulillah!  I still have to make 2 decisions, as discussed a couple posts ago:

1. Mail to the ISGH mailing list or not? 
2. Include a return “I can’t attend but here’s my donation” card.  The printer quoted me $250 to print the envelopes, which clearly is not going to happen.  However…my board president Melissa was kind enough some time ago to donate a whole bunch of office supplies, which included several packs of labels - so if I decide to print address labels it will be free materials-wise.

Today is the Synott carnival, then at 5:30 is the interview and at 8:00 I have a party to go to.  I’d better get going.  46 days to go.

 *****
Light of Islam is a nonprofit bookstore whose mission is to provide the Houston-area community with accurate and accessible information about Islam and Muslims. Find out more at http://www.light-of-islam.org/.