Persistence Pays Off — Two Printers, No Waiting

The headline is talking about the persistence of my wife, Clenise, who has really dug into this project and used her very considerable abilities to solve several problems. Today she again tackled the problem of the first color laser printer we started with — the Brother HL-4070CDW, which printed well for a while, then started putting ugly black smudges on many pages of the books. Its output was unusable, so we switched to using only the second (identical) printer, which is working fine. Clenise had tried cleaning the first printer several times, but the problem remained. Yesterday I ordered a new drum unit, thinking that would solve the problem. It didn’t. I was ready to give up and get a third printer, but Clenise persisted and made one more attempt. This time she cleaned the belt unit, and that worked! Right now both printers are contentedly purring and clicking, pouring out pristine piles of white-margined book pages. That was a great breakthrough, because it takes about 25 minutes for a printer to print one full book, and we’re still trying to pile up enough completed books to fulfill Amazon’s latest order for 27 books. There were only four individual orders today, which is too bad in a way because those make us more money than the Amazon ones, but at least we should be able to catch up with the orders tonight and breathe a little easier.

Next I need to figure out how to get the book formatted for the Kindle and maybe see if I can get a pdf version made, because some readers have asked for that. I added two new countries to the list of buyer locations yesterday — Greece and Australia.

Also, I cut my Google AdWords daily budget today from $20.00 to $10.00. If the orders slow down too much, I may put the budget back up, but $20.00 a day is $600.00 a month, which sounds like a lot of money for a book like this one.

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