It's stock order season with the music book publishers. It's tedious drudgery but it has to get done. I've been at it for over a week and I finally knocked out two publishers today. Three to go. OK, five to go. But I can get by with three of them.

Here's the way it works - the large publishers in turn buy books from smaller 'allied' publishing houses and printers - many of them mom-n-pop outfits. Plus they print their own. You never know how many books you'll need and when so they buy them or print most titles only once or twice a year. In turn they sell them twice a year and only keep a few boxes around for fill-ins the rest of the year. That way they can give the printers enough time to pull out the old plates and make more. And after the sale is over they can estimate the demand instantly for next time. They manage to get everybody like me to go along because they offer far better percentages during these sales. The profit margin on books is otherwise not even worth selling them at all.

But it puts a lot of burden on me. I wonder how many people are going to think about buying a flute and clarinet duet book and what kind of music they're gonna' want to play. Classical? Jazz? Metallica? Don't laugh. If I had it last week I would've sold it. Sheet music? I don't know more than about a tenth of the songs that people ask for. If I don't know it and never heard of it it's kinda' tough to buy it for them. But it all boils down to pages and pages of stock numbers. It was about 300 pages in total for the two orders I finished. And I haven't done the biggest one yet.