Readers and writers blog

Orders for our new songbook, Sing along with ease, are now coming in, and I thought we should explain some of our sales philosophy and procedures.

First, we don’t use any online payment service such as PayPal or Google Checkout. Having grown up in a different era than most of today’s consumers, we feel really uneasy about letting someone we don’t know into our electronic bank accounts. So we use an older method — the honor system.

When you order a songbook, we ship it to you. When you receive it, you mail a personal check or money order back to us. That’s it.

So, you ask, what if someone doesn’t mail back the payment or their check bounces? We look at it this way: Our book is just a big collection of old songs that we’ve sung at nursing homes and senior residences for the past 17 years and that we think would be useful to others who want to do the same.

If we can’t trust somebody who loves old songs and wants to sing them along with old folks or maybe just their own family members …. if we can’t trust them, then just who can we trust?

So that’s how it works: You order it, we ship it, you get it, you pay. A few other details: The sales are conducted by The Hat Band, which is the name of our little family band (we all wear hats), and payments are made to The Hat Band in care of me, Sid Leavitt. Our mailing address is 868 Neighborhood Road, Lake Katrine, NY 12449.

Another detail, this one that I regret: We’ve raised our shipping cost from $3.16 to $5.40. The lower figure is the U.S. Postal Service’s book rate, its lowest mailing rate but also its slowest for delivery. We originally intended to ship the books in simple envelopes made of Tyvek, an extra-tough (and inexpensive) Dupont plastic that also is used to wrap houses as a water barrier. But then we realized some of these parcels could be five to seven days in transit, so we reconsidered and chose instead a heavier bubble-wrap envelope that accounts for the extra $2.34 in our shipping cost.

On the other hand, we expanded our original songbook offer by adding a free set of templates for making lyrics sheets for audiences. So we hope that’s some kind of offset.

You know, I ordered one of those TurboSnakes the other day — it’s a twistable wire snake that you use to unclog a drain — and it was only $10 for two different sizes. And better yet, they doubled the offer — four TurboSnakes — and all I had to do was pay separate shipping and handling. Well, the S&H was $6.99, and doubling it made it $13.98, plus the original 10 bucks — my $10 order all added up to $23.98. But if you’ve ever struggled with a clogged sink or stood in six inches of water while taking a shower or bought a couple of jugs of liquid drain cleaner at $6 a pop, the TurboSnake still looks like a pretty good deal. Provided, of course, that it works.

Sing along with ease does work. Even if the real price, including the shipping, is $45.35. Because it’s real sheet music — simple melody lines and chord changes that require only basic vocal and-or guitar or piano skills, all the lyrics, each song in a singable key and each on one page (no flipping required) — and there are 313 songs. Most sheet music costs a couple of bucks for a single song. Our sheet music costs less than 15 cents a song.

That’s the end of my latest, as a musician would say, pitch.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is, of course, Felix the Cat, that wonderfully naive feline whose innocence never seemed to get him into serious trouble. His origins date from the early 1920s, although there’s some dispute over who created him — either Australian film producer Patrick Sullivan or American cartoonist Otto Messmer.