Russ Towne's A Grateful Man

This is to clarify my comments regarding my plans to send books to seriously ill children and/or hospitals or other facilities who support them around the world. I don’t want to give any false impressions.

While I hope to over time give away hundreds or thousands of my books to seriously ill children on every continent, initially the free book giveaway is likely to be fairly modest. The reasons for that include costs and logistics.

Postage for international mailing is relatively expensive and is likely to cost as much or more than the book itself in some situations.

The initial production runs are of only 100 each, and I estimate that each book in the initial run cost me over $22. The costs of having a book printed are ALL front-loaded. So why on earth would someone ever spend over $22 for each copy when they are only likely to retail for approximately one-third of that amount? The answer is that since most of the costs were absorbed in the first 100 books printed, IF there is demand for more than 100 books per title, each additional book can be printed for about one-half the retail cost.

I have no idea as to what the demand for my books will be. Hopefully, I’ll have a better idea once some of them are listed for sale on Amazon.com and elsewhere.

My guess is that about half of each of the 100 copies of the initial production runs are already spoken for based on my commitments as incentives and rewards to Kickstarter donors, and I plan to give quite a few more away to seriously ill children, but I want to have enough let over to sell on Amazon.com so that I’ll be able to have at least a little inventory in case they sell.

If they seem to be selling well, I can then order more production runs, and give more away to seriously ill children with each production run. In that way, over time I hope to give hundreds or thousands of my books to seriously ill children. But I want to do it in a sustainable way.

Also, I plan to get ideas for recipients of my books Kickstarter donors and then other of my online and physical world friends and loved ones. I plan to give higher priority to suggestions from Kickstarter donors as they helped to make this dream come true, but I plan to consider everyone’s suggestions.

Also, my bias will be to send them directly to the families of seriously ill children if possible. Since I–and probably you, too–know people on every continent except Antarctica, I believe it is likely that I’ll be able to get suggestions for each of them. And I even have a friend who has a friend who recently spent several months on Antarctica, so I might even get suggestions for that continent too.

If you know of any seriously ill children or hospitals, clinics, or other medical entities around the world who help them, I’d love to hear suggestions from you as to whom I should consider sending my books.

Please note, however that it is likely that I’ll get more suggestions than I’ll have available books from the first production runs of the first two titles, so I will most likely not be able to send books to everyone suggested.

With love,

Russ