 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Michael at the Nebraska Library Commission with my cohorts, Krista and Laura here. And we are into the next hour of Big Top from Small Libraries 2014. We have been recording all the sessions. We are continuing to record for the rest of the afternoon. And we will be posting all those recordings and the PowerPoints next week after the conference. The next session we have up here is how to make money on the Internet for your library. So we've been getting donations. We've been buying used books and now we're going to make some money ourselves. And speaking on this topic is Mary Raimi, the director of the Pioneer Memorial Public Library in West Virginia. She has worked at the Baltimore Museum of Art Library, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University. It is currently the director of the Pioneer Memorial Library in Harmon, West Virginia. Mary, go ahead and take it away. Thank you so much, Michael. I am so excited to be here today. I have been energized and inspired by all of the presentations today. And I just want to give a hello and a shout out to all my fellow librarians because, obviously, we are not in this for the money. We are in this for the love of libraries and lifelong learning. The photograph is my cute little library. The Pioneer Memorial Library is a small library in the mountains of West Virginia. We are wild and wonderful. And we are in the middle of the Manangihila National Forest. It is a beautiful national forest. It's about a million acres of rural playgrounds that we have here. Our library population is about 2,000, maybe a little over that. We are open 30 hours a week. And our entire yearly budget is about $35,000 per year, including me. There are two employees at our library. And I am a part-time director. I work 30 hours a week. And our library is closed on Fridays. So I have to say, if you hear my dog barking, it is because I am at my house and he likes to chase the deer. I am at my house today feeding the wood stove and listening to the snow melt. So I started as the director of the Pioneer Library about a year and a half ago. And I brought some skills to the table that I have been sort of honing and working on for the last 10 years. And the title of my presentation today is How to Make Money for Your Library on the Internet. And I have a little help from Clint Eastwood. And the theme here is for a few dollars more, because honestly our entire budget for buying books, CDs and DVDs for the year is $2,000, which is not a lot. So my first goal was to figure out how I could raise more money from my library without having a traditional book sale or a cakewalk or a fundraiser. And this is how I did it. This is my story. Okay. Does your library need money? If not, this presentation isn't for you. But I'm thinking your library needs the money. The state of West Virginia has a bill up in the legislation to cut our aid money by about 10% this year. And that would be about $1,000 for us. And that $1,000 is a chunk of change that we need. Libraries are facing cuts all over the country because our economy is not so great right now. What we're going to talk about today are ways that you can set up on the Internet so that you can have money coming into your library potentially from all over the country. Really doesn't take a lot of time. And with a minimal amount of investment, you can set up these continuous streams of money that come into your library without you really having to do a lot of work. PayPal is one of my favorite places to go. And I know a lot of people here are concerned about the security of PayPal. But if you have bought anything on eBay, you have used PayPal. eBay owns PayPal and PayPal currently earns about $5.6 billion per year as of 2012. Everything is encrypted and very secure via PayPal. Once your information reaches PayPal, it resides on a server that is heavily guarded both physically and electronically. So it's really safe. And how I suggest that you use PayPal is by putting a PayPal donation button on your website. Now, let's just go, there's the donation button in the lower left-hand corner. And when you join PayPal, they give you this little bit of HTML that you can place on your webpage. It's really super easy. Our website is set up so that it's a WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. So you really don't have to know a whole lot of HTML. You don't have to be a professional web designer. I am the person that alters our website. And I put a donation button right on the front of our library website. Let's see if I can go there and show you what it looks like. If y'all can see this, it's down very small actually at the bottom of my page. But anyone from all over the world can click on that little button. They can use their credit card. They can make a donation to your library. That money goes right into your bank account. And the person who donated it actually pays the fee. So there's really nothing that you have to do. It's kind of like a solicitation for donations that is always on your website. And it works for you. Now, we also use Kroger to earn income for our library. Kroger, according to their website, is the largest grocery chain in the country. And it is the only grocery store that we have, really. It's 23 miles from Harmon, West Virginia. It's where we do all our shopping. Now, Kroger has this thing, and it's called the Community Rewards Fundraising Program. They also call it Kroger Cares. There are 2,424 Kroger stores in the United States. And what you do is you set up this gift card program that you and your patrons can use to benefit your library. So how does it work? Basically, you go to the Kroger and you buy gift cards from the Kroger. You have them all preloaded with $5. Then you sell these gift cards to your patrons for $5. And every time they go to the Kroger, you load up the gift card with cash at the customer service desk. You go, you buy your groceries or your gasoline using this gift card. And 5% of everything you purchase comes back to the library. Now, you don't even have to – I mean, I am here to advocate for my library and for libraries today, but you can set this up for the nonprofit of your choice. It could be your school. It could be your local community service. The good thing about the Kroger card is that you really don't have to do a lot. You promote the cards. You sell them for $5. You watch the cash roll in. Kroger sends you a physical check when you accumulate enough cash for them to cut a check. I think the cutoff is like two – but you have to accumulate $200. They send you a check. The negatives to the Kroger gift card is that patrons have to remember to go to the customer service desk to refill their cards. I know that sometimes when I go to the Kroger, it's all I can do to keep that list in my head – milk, bread, eggs, milk, bread, eggs. So it's hard for me to remember to stop at the customer service desk to refill my card with money. And also, sometimes you have to wait in line. Now, I also have started using Better World Books. When I first came to my library a year and a half ago, I would say that my collection had not been weeded in many, many years. And I had a huge task ahead of me. I weeded at least 2,000 materials from my library and, you know, we're a small library too. And I can't house 2,000 books for a book sale. And I certainly don't want to schlep around 2,000 books in boxes for a physical book sale somewhere else. So Better World Books is just a great option for me. One of the pluses of Better World Books is that it keeps books out of dumpsters. Before I had heard about Better World Books, I was taking books and, you know, literally throwing them in the dumpster. There was a story in Fairfax County, Virginia, and I'm just going to click on this link. It's a hyperlink. And it's a story from the Washington Post. The Fairfax County Library had revamped their system, and they had literally gotten rid of a quarter of a million books. And they threw them in dumpsters, which outraged the patrons, as it well should, because, I mean, honestly, as a small library where every penny counts to see that kind of waste is really kind of appalling on several different levels. So Better World Books is great because – let me just go back to my PowerPoint. Better World Books sells books for you on 50-plus internet outlets. You know, that's a lot. That's a lot of different places where they are selling books. And I'm sure that if there are librarians out there amongst you who buy used books, like I do also, that you have purchased books from Better World Books if you don't already use their servos. Better World Books is cool because your library gets 15% of what they sell, plus 5% gets donated to a charity. You get to choose the charity that you would like to donate that 5% to. Currently, Better World Books has eight literacy charities from which you get to pick, which is kind of nice. Even better Better World Books pays for your books to be shipped, so there is zero cost to you for Better World Books. They even send you the boxes. So what you're doing, the minuses are you have to pack up the books and call UPS for the pickup, and you have to provide the tape. And you don't get as much profit as if you sold books on Amazon yourself or on half.com. So 15% really isn't a lot, but then again you think the book is not a dumpster, it's getting into the hands of someone who really needs it, and you're also donating to another worthy literacy cause. Okay, the next resource that I use for bringing money into my library using the internet is my blog. I love to blog. I am a little compulsive about it, and I recommend that you start a blog for your library. I'm in library school right now, and they refer to this kind of behavior as library 2.0, and some people call it library 3.0. I don't want to put too many flashy tags on it. I just think it's the way to communicate via the internet right now. You can use your blog as a platform to reach out to people literally across the world, and to me that's the exciting part about blogging. The blog that I have is called Rural Librarian, which yes, it's very difficult to say, which makes me laugh. And I use Blogger. Now I have another hypertext link, and I'm just going to click on this and give you a peek at my blog. This is what it looks like. It was free to set up. I took the picture of the mountains in the background. I try and keep it updated that you can see. I am woefully out of date. I have not updated my blog since January. And the way that this blog makes money is, I don't know if you can see them, but there are ads on the right-hand side of the blog, and there's ads also here at the bottom of the blog. And these ads are provided through Google AdSense, and this is what they call monetizing your blog. It's really easy to do. It doesn't take a lot of time. And when patrons click on the ads, you get so much money from it through Google AdSense. And I can't say two clicks equals $2. There's no easy math on how you make money, but the more people click on your ads, the more money you make. So if you look down here at the bottom of the blog, this is a review of the book that I just finished reading called The Good Lord Bird. I recommend it. I really enjoyed it by James McBride. At the bottom of my review, I also included these little units that connect directly to Amazon. Now, how I have done this is by becoming an Amazon associate. And if someone clicks on any of these little links and buys either the hardback, the softback, or the audio book of The Good Lord Bird, I believe it's 4% comes back to the library. Okay, so now I'm going to go back to my slideshow. Hang tight. Okay, so we've talked about the blog. WordPress is also a great place to go. Now, another thing that you want to do with your blog is you want to link your blog around. You want to have your blog linked to your website. So if you go to my library website, which we did earlier, you will find a link on the left-hand side for the Rural Librarian blog. And let's see. I've also, when I write a blog entry, I include a link on my library's Facebook page. You can include it on Twitter or Instagram. And really, it's just using social media to promote your blog. And you never know who's going to enjoy what you've written, and they might share it with people. And you might get more page hits than you could ever imagine. The thing that I really like about blogs is it allows me to communicate with my patrons who are more internet savvy. Now, I will say that I do serve an older population. They're not necessarily a tech-savvy population. Like a lot of the people I've heard speak today, we don't have a reliable internet in all areas because we are located in rural Appalachia. We're about 2,500 feet up. There is one cable company. It's very expensive. And so, like I said, when I'm communicating in my blog, I'm probably not reaching a large portion of my patron population, but I am reaching some people. So for example, a lady came into the library about six months ago, and she started talking about my blog and greeted me like an old friend. It was as if she knew me because she had been reading my blog for about a year. She brought her young son into the library, and six months later, when we had a board member leave us, she is now one of our library board members. So this is kind of, I guess, a happy side effect of starting a blog. You never know who's going to read it. Now, Google AdSense is the way that I have monetized my blog. And these are all new words to you. I apologize, but honestly, it's really not hard. I love technology. My background is in graphic design. I love computers. I love software, but this is very easy stuff to learn, and it's very easy stuff to do. You apply for a Google AdSense account, but before you can apply, you have to show them what you have. You have to write maybe half a dozen blog entries, and they have to be relatively typo-free and grammar error-free. They want to see that you're reputable, and they will prove you as a Google AdSense blog. Now, Google automatically places the ads on my blog. I really don't have a lot of control over the ads that they place on my blog. However, you can edit the content of your ads. For example, we serve as a public library, but we also serve as the school library to next-door Harman School. It's a pre-K through 12th grade public school, and I chose not to have dating or alcohol ads on my AdSense blog because I just thought it didn't seem appropriate for my audience, for my patrons. You want to write your blog entries with a meaningful link or two embedded within your blog. You want to include your source materials, and you also want to have good SEO. SEO is search engine optimization, and it's really all about getting Google to rank your pages better. When you do a search on Google, and you're looking for a public library in West Virginia, if your page is highly rated by Google, your library is going to be at the top of the list when you do that search. It is a mysterious Google algorithm that they use to prioritize the page hits that you get in a search. It's a little mysterious. They give you hints about how to get your page better ranked, though, and it's through using these search engine optimization tools. It's all about the page hits. You really want to get people to read your blog. You want people to connect to your blog. You want people to relate to it. And when you learn how to write using good SEO, your blog will get more page hits. So I was going to show this cute little video about what is SEO, but I understand that the bandwidth might not be so great for all of y'all, so I'm not going to run it. Instead, I'm just going to talk a little bit about it. SEO, search engine optimization is really about considering how a person searches the Internet. So if someone was going to look for a review of a book, they might search, for example, the Good Lord Bird James McBride. They might search fiction about the Civil War. They might search historical fiction about John Brown. There are many phrases that people might use to search for your blog entry, and you want to include those phrases in your blog. You also want to update regularly. That's part of good SEO. So my blog has not been updated in over 30 days, and that's kind of an SEO no-no. It means that my page will be ranked lower. But it's about using more adjectives and using more words than you generally might. So instead of saying, like, I really enjoyed this book, you would say, I really enjoyed the Good Lord Bird by James McBride. You're including more descriptive words. So I showed you on my blog the Amazon associate links. You have to apply to Amazon to become an Amazon associate, and you can have those neat little, they supply you with the HTML to plug into your blog page. And it's really a cut-and-paste type of procedure on your computer to put those cute little blocks at the end of your blog entry. And every time somebody clicks on one of those links and buys a book, you get 4%. Now, the more recommendations, the more people who buy things from your Amazon associate blocks, the higher the percentage goes. I believe it goes up to 7%. Now you also want to develop backlinks to your blog. Backlinks are places that will link to your blog. So there are some awesome librarian sites out there. You might be familiar with Librarian and Black, the not-so-silent librarian. And I have written to many of these people and asked them to include a link to my blog on their site, and very kindly many of them have. I'm trying to encourage more libraries, especially in West Virginia, to include blogs so that we can have a page that unites all of the library blogs together. I think that would be very helpful and beneficial to everybody. You know, and like I said about finding the board member out of nowhere, the more people you bring to your blog, the more people literally will come to your library. Board yet? I hope not. Relying on Clint Eastwood for a little boredom breaking up here. And this is just a little bit more about the SEO. If you're writing a book review of Janet Ivanovich, which I've done on my blog, you want to include the phrases that people are going to search for, like American Mystery Writer, Funny Mysteries, Good B Treat. I have even found that putting typos and intentional misspellings can yield page hits. Now, this kind of contradicts the good SEO, but at the same time, you know, when I look at my Google Analytics, I do see that I am garnering page hits from typos. So occasionally I will do this and it's more for, I guess, my pleasure to see if people respond to that or not. Okay, now Google Analytics, I heard somebody talking about that earlier today in one of the lightning rounds. I'm just very happy that other people are using this as well. Google Analytics is not going to bring any money into your library, but it does inform your blog rating. And it's really important to know which of your blog entries are the most popular, which of the backlinks is providing you with the most page hits and links to your blog. It's a little scary, I will admit, Google Analytics is a little scary and intimidating because it's all numbers and graphs, and honestly I am not a number and graph person, I went to art school. However, if you look at these statistics long enough, they really are very informing and helpful for you as a writer and as a librarian. I was also, let's see if we can go to Google Analytics here, and I'm just going to show you what my page hits look like today. I have a couple of blogs, but this is my rural librarian blog. For some reason, I had disconnected from Google Analytics for a while. The code had been erased accidentally, I'm not sure how that happened or why, and I just replaced the code last week. But if you look here, there's all kinds of reports. There's an overview, I can see, let's see, there's my little graph. You can see if someone's a new visitor, if someone's a returning visitor. You can see that the average, this is probably just the last few days, the average visit duration, 35 seconds, that's actually not so great. I have a bounce rate of 76.92%. That means that three-quarters of the people who look at a page are like, that's not what I'm looking for, and they go somewhere else. That's okay too. It's a big internet world out there, there are millions and millions of blogs. Let's look at the acquisition overview. You can see that some people found my blog by doing an organic search. That means it's just a Google, probably a Google search. Some of them found me directly, maybe they have a link. Some of them found me through social media, and some of them were referred to my Rural Librarian blog. I love looking at my Google analytics, sometimes I obsess about it a little too much. Let's see if we can go back to Clint here. The other way that I make money from my library, and I have to confess, this is my favorite way to make money from my library, is by selling books on Amazon. One of the gentlemen who spoke early on about buying used books online, I was like applauding him in my living room because I do the same thing. With my very tiny $2,000 book budget, I buy books used on Amazon. I go to my local Goodwill and buy books. But then I also sell books online. And the books that I sell are typically books that are donated that I don't want to add to the collection. Or they are books that are weeded out of my collection, and they're still in good condition. Like I said, I had a $2,000 book weeding job, and I had the time to really go through them and figure out which books had resale value and which books don't. Okay, now how to get started with selling books on Amazon. First of all, you need someone who's going to commit, who's going to say, yep, I'm going to try this. I'm going to do this. You want to invest in bulk bubble mailers. I typically go through a company called ULINE.com. You can buy them 100 at a time. You can buy 500 at a time. What you don't want to do is go to your little dollar store or post office and buy them one or two at a time. You really want to buy them in bulk so that you are making the most profit possible. There are some seller obligations on Amazon. You want to make sure that you mail your sales quickly. Within one or two days, you want to make sure that you mail them via media mail. And if you're selling a book that's worth over my limit is $40 or so, you want to get delivery confirmation so that the person doesn't say, hey, I never got that $40 book, now refund me because that hurts me. It hurts my library. Now I also tweak my Amazon inventory once a week or once a month and typically I tweak my inventory on Friday. And what I mean by tweak is I go in to my inventory and Amazon gives you an awesome inventory sheet and they tell you whether you wear your prices. If you're the lowest price and then they show you, if you're not the lowest price, they show you what the lowest price is. And typically what I do is if I am not the lowest price on a particular item or book, I will, I mean I hate to say this word, but I will lower my cost. I will undercut the highest bookseller by about $0.10 so that when someone is looking for that book and they go to buy it, they choose my book because it's $0.10 cheaper. And I know that sounds crazy, but honestly that $0.10 makes a difference. Now the plus is about selling books on Amazon. You will get reimbursed $4 for shipping, which is great. However, you have to put the money out upfront to ship that book. So it's, you know, it's this leap of faith that you make in cyberspace. And I think it's twice a month Amazon deposits our profits right into our bank account. So it's not like I receive a check and then I have to deposit it. It just magically appears in our bank account and I, you know, it really is magical to me. Let's see. Let's go on to the next one. The downsides of selling on Amazon. Amazon takes a big cut. They are going to take between 20 and 30% of your profit. They are not, Amazon is not very transparent in how much they take out of your profit. I resent that. However, you know, I'm able to make money from my library from the middle of the mountains in West Virginia. And I appreciate that and I appreciate Amazon for that. Customers may be unaware that they're not buying directly from Amazon. When you buy a book on Amazon, I think a lot of people think, oh, it's coming from this giant warehouse in Amazon land being shipped to my house. Well, that's not the case. You know, there are a lot of what are called resellers like me. I am a book reseller who sell on Amazon. So a quick story, I sold a book to someone and got a call about 7 o'clock in the morning. I had put my first and last name on the return address and they called me to tell me they were not satisfied with the book they had received. And then I had to explain to them, hey, I'm not Amazon. I am a, you know, a person, a real person who just sold this to you. Sorry, you're not happy with the book. And I learned a valuable lesson to never put my, if I personally was selling a book, never to put my real name on the return address of a book. The other minus is you have to go to the post office regularly. Now for me, that's not a big deal. Honestly, our post office a lot like Rachel's post office is right around the corner. It's less than a quarter mile from our library. So it's really not that far. But if you, you know, if your post office is inconveniently located, it could be a little bit of a hassle. A book inventory can take up a lot of space and it has to be managed well. I have about, I would say a hundred items on sale right now on Amazon. And it's taking up maybe three shelves in my, in the back room of my library. You know, and that's, I guess that shelf space that could be going for other needs. But right now for me, this is okay. I have enough space that this is really not that big a deal. Now there are other selling venues online. I mean, if Better World books can sell to over 50 venues online, there's got to be just a ton of them. I have also sold on half.com, which is a fun place to sell too. And the cool thing about half.com is that they take a much smaller cut than Amazon. So you're going to make more profit here. But the catch is that more people use Amazon than use half.com. So you're more likely to sell on Amazon than you are on half.com. Now, you can also list the same books on both Amazon and half.com. And I have done this before, but you have to be really vigilant about deleting that book from either half or Amazon once you've sold a book because I have also made the mistake of not deleting inventory and then accidentally sold it twice, in which case you have to write a very apologetic letter to the person who bought it saying, hey, really sorry, my bad, here's your refund. Okay, now I've sold books online for 10 years. I sometimes refer to myself as like a book bottom feeder. But there is some skill to this. Most books have little to no resell value. And it can take, like I've said here, it can take years to hone your book buying and book selling skills. But I have a few tips here such as nonfiction generally sells better than fiction. Bestsellers, like if you're going to try and sell Stephen King online, you're going to see on Amazon there's a million copies for a penny. So bestsellers usually have little or no resell value unless it's a signed first edition. It's very different. Small press and academic presses, books, they tend to sell better because they have smaller press runs. Therefore, there's fewer of them. There's a million Stephen King books and Daniel Steele books out there. But there may only be a few thousand of small nonfiction type books. That's why they sell better. There's just fewer of them. Textbooks, I generally try not to buy or sell unless they are very current within the year or two. Textbooks that are older than a year or two immediately lose their resell value. It's one of the ways that textbook publishers make a lot of money is by updating those textbooks every year so that you have to buy a new one. Another little tip for you if you're selling on Amazon is don't sell large heavy art books. You lose money in the shipping. When you take a book to the post office and the post person puts it on the scale, they're weighing that book and you're paying per pound. So if you have a very heavy book, it doesn't matter to Amazon. They're still only going to give you that $4 in shipping. So people ask me all the time, how can you sell a book on Amazon for a penny and make money? Well, it's in the shipping. If you have a teeny tiny book and you can ship it for $2, you have not just made a penny, you've made $2 and a penny. Now, it doesn't sound like a lot, but if you have a book inventory of 10,000 books and you're selling literally hundreds of books a week, that money really adds up. So my next tip is don't sell books that are marked up or in questionable condition. I also smell books when I'm evaluating them because some people are very sensitive to books that are kept in, say, the households of people who smoke. Some people who buy those books will immediately return them saying, you know, I have allergies and I'm returning this book. And it also causes me personal pain as a librarian when someone writes in a book because it immediately diminishes the resale value. So I'm kind of coming to the end of my presentation and I'm sure that you're all asking, well, how much money did you make, Mary, in one year at the Pioneer Memorial Library? Amazon's selling use books last year I made $1,000, which is going to make up for the money that we lose from the West Virginia state government. From PayPal, I have made nothing. But this is what we call in the marketing world a long tail investment. That PayPal button didn't cost me a dime. It's going to sit there on the front of my website indefinitely. And someday someone's going to see that little PayPal button. They're going to click it. They're going to make a donation. And I'm going to be doing the happy dance on the circulation desk in my library. Okay, maybe not. But I will be very happy. Kroger, I have maybe two or three patrons at the most who are using this program, myself included. And last year we made $500. I mean, out of the blue, Kroger sends you a check for, you know, $200 a year in there throughout the year. That's awesome. It makes me very happy. Now, my Google AdSense blog, again, this is a long tail investment. Last year I made $8. But I also am using this as public relations. I'm using this as a way of communicating with my patrons. And this is, when you blog, there's a cumulative effect. Next year I hope to double the money that I made this year. Amazon, as an Amazon associate, I'm very sad to say I have made zero income. But again, those reviews are going to sit on my blog forever and ever. Someday someone's going to click on those little links. They're going to buy a book. I'm going to be very happy. And, you know, I'm also sort of educating my patrons about the books we have available and what books are about. Okay. Now, this is something I have not done before, but I am planning to do later this year. CafePress.com is a great place to create items for sale. You create the merchandise. Now, for me, I have to say I have a little advantage because I used to be a graphic designer and I can design things in Photoshop. For me, it's not so hard. Maybe you have a patron, however, who uses Photoshop, who could set this up for you. People buy library-themed or region-themed merchandise directly from CafePress.com online. And as they are ordered, CafePress creates the merchandise and mails them. So these are like virtual products that you never see that exist in the world of CafePress.com. And, you know, magically, money appears in your bank account. Your library gets a chunk of change. You don't need space for the inventory, and CafePress does all of this for you. Okay. This is my last word here. There are many other ways, I'm sure, that you all out there are using to make money for your library on the Internet. You know, be creative with the ways that you use to promote your library and make money all at the same time. And Clint, of course, has his closing message there. And I want to – I have a last page of website references. If you want to connect to Better World Books or Kroger Cares, you want to buy Bubble Mailers and Balk, if you want to read more about selling on Amazon, I have links to all of that stuff here. You are also free to email me at my cute little library. I love helping people learn how to set up these revenue programs for their library. It makes me feel empowered that I'm not relying on traditional ways to raise money from my library. So, you know, I would say at this point, it's like 3.45 my time, do you all have any questions? Are there any questions or comments out there that I can address? Yes. Thanks, Mary. We do. We've gotten some questions and comments, and I'm going to kind of take a point of moderator privilege and ask the first one myself. Anybody there? Did you have to work or run any of these blogs? Can you hear me? Hello? Uh-oh. Mary, can you hear me? I can hear me. I just can't hear anybody else. Oh, this is weird. Hold on. Can you hear me now? People on the line have said participants can't hear. Okay. Unfortunately, however, she can't hear us. Mary, you cannot hear me at the moment? Well, now Laura Murray says we can hear you both. What? But if she can't hear me, she can't hear the question. Sorry about that, guys. I must be lost in somewhere. Mary, can you hear me now? Yeah, I still can't hear anyone. Okay. I don't know how we're going to ask a question. This is funny. The audience can hear both of us, but we can't hear. And I can hear her. She cannot hear me. Oh, there you are. Oh, can you hear me now? Yes, I can. Sorry about that. Okay, great. It was weird. Everybody could hear each other except you can hear us. I don't know what's going on. I'll start back over. Thank you. Very, very practical advice. And as a point of moderator privilege, I'm going to ask the first question myself, which is, in setting any of this up, did you have to run this by or seek permission from anyone from your municipality as this being kind of an external revenue stream for the library? Quick answer? No. That's one of the beautiful things about a small library is that there's not a lot of bureaucracy. Okay, great. Yeah. Yeah, I've just, I've heard of libraries who said, you know, we went to our city to ask if we could do this. So I just wanted to kind of check on that. One of our viewers does observe that forgiveness is much easier than permission. Oh, I'm all for that too. I just, I don't know why anyone would object to raising money this way. Well, yeah, there might be legal reasons. I, you know, I don't know what, what the actual reasons were and the indications that I heard of. But anyways, so questions from the audience comments. Gosh, we have a lot. Okay. Someone says, do you have someone help with this? It seems time consuming. I don't have anybody who helps me with this. I do this all by myself. And it is, it can be time consuming, but once it's all set up, it's almost like, you know, a little perpetual motion machine. There's really not, it just takes a little bit of work a week. And honestly, I probably spend about an hour a week on all this stuff. That's great. Someone else does observe that this is the sort of thing that friends might do. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I wish I had friends and volunteers who would help me with this. It would be awesome. I would truly love that. And these are the kind of tasks that you can give to the volunteers in your library. I mean, I imagine that this kind of revenue earning model could be used in larger libraries to great effect. Okay. Not a question, but a comment. You might have more success for your PayPal button if it were at the top of your homepage with an explanation of how a donation can benefit the library. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. That was kind of thrown on there when I first came on as director, but you are absolutely right. It should be at the top of the page. It should be bigger and there should be an explanation of how it works and where the money goes. Let me see. Someone observes that Zazzle is similar to Cafe Press. Yes. Yeah, Red Mubble as well. Someone says that you are amazing and you're very inspiring. Thank you. Well, you know, someone asked, have you had any feedback from your community regarding your participation in third-party advertising? I have not. I have not had anyone come in. In fact, I never even thought that there would be ethical concerns about it until one of my instructors raised that as a potential issue. You know, should public libraries be advertising? And my feeling is, yes, I think we should be advertising. I think that in some ways we need to be using the corporate model in raising money for our libraries. You know, we're not just a nonprofit. We're providing an incredibly valuable service to our communities. Okay. Well, let me see. Someone else is asking, do Amazon or half.com charge just to list the inventory? No. Okay. And they'd like to know what size mailers you use. You know, I'm not really sure. I don't have like the measurements in front of me. I tend to buy one size that would fit most larger size hardbound books. That way, if it's a little paperback, I can always put it in there and double it over. And that way, I don't have to buy an assortment of sizes. I would say, you know, just do a little research and figure out what size an average hardbound book is and go for a larger size. And figure out what size an average hardbound book is and go for a bubble mailer that will fit. I think from my experience, that's a number 10, but don't hold it too. Don't hold me to it. Yes. Something like that. Yeah. I have a hard time keeping numbers in my head. Someone has asked if you've ever written an article for American libraries. And they think consider writing an article about this. That's awesome. I would love to write an article. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. In my spare time. I did have one comment on Twitter. Susie says, I have a blog and a personal blog both monetized, but no one ever clicks in the links. I've never made anything off them. Yes, but you won't if you don't put the links in the first place. That's right. Yeah. And just keep going. You know, keep blogging. I find it very cathartic. I find it, you know, it's like, you know, a conversation with myself. I'm in the middle of, you know, a forest. I have very few colleagues. So this is kind of the way that I keep myself going. Somebody has asked if there are any other measures outside of Google analytics to tell you how well all this is working. Well, yeah, I mean, for example, I know what my most successful articles are. My most successful articles are the ones that I write about the history of West Virginia. And that really helps to inform what I choose to write about. West Virginians are very into their own history. They're into genealogy. It's a very interesting history as well. And our library is a depository of a lot of genealogy information. And so it really helps to inform who my long distance patrons are. There are a lot of people who have moved from West Virginia to get jobs, because honestly, we're in the middle of Appalachia. There's not a lot of jobs here. So I am actually reaching people who are former West Virginians, but who miss being here or who have a family connection. And looking at Google analytics and seeing my number one blog article is John Alexander Williams, the history of West Virginia. That says to me that I need to be writing more of those kinds of articles. Ah, yes. Someone observes that when they sell books, when the library sells either donated or weeded books, sometimes the city, the money will go into the city coffers instead of the library coffers. And I can answer that one. That's why you have a foundation or a friends group. If you have it done that way, the money doesn't go back to the city. It goes into your friends or foundations coffers for the library's use. Yeah, our libraries are not set up that way. We are a quasi-governmental organization and we're very independent. I mean, we receive funding from the state, but we receive no funding from our local municipality, the city of Harmon. We don't receive any funding from your county. We do receive funding from our county commission. Yes. Well, yes, someone else has observed that the friends can bypass the municipal funding restrictions. So you do have to think about that. And that is one really good reason to have a foundation and a friends group. It is not a dodge. It is making the sure that you're getting things are going the way they need to go. Right. Yes. If you have time, maybe for one more question if there is one. Sure. I think we've kind of, I've tried to sort of, well, I've sort of tried to combine a few of them here because there are a lot of questions. I think you've really opened a lot of people's lives today. Well, thank you Mary. That was a wonderful presentation. So lots of practical advice. And as everybody can see on the screen, there's Mary's contact information. So by the fact that she's put it on the screen, I'm going to assume that means it's okay to contact her. And every now go click on her blog. Right. Yes. Go buy something on Amazon. Thank you very once again. And that's going to wrap up this session. This presentation of Big Top from Small Libraries.