Just Push the Button

All I wanted to do was something very simple: just push the button. All I was trying to do was sell one of my children’s books on my new website.

That’s it.

First, I had to build the website and test it.

I wasn’t launching a satellite.

I wasn’t opening an international bank.

I just wanted somebody to click on a book, give me twelve dollars, and have that book show up at their house. This absurdity actually happened. When I thought I’d reached the end of Step 2, the instructions directed me to just push the button at the bottom of the page.

And I did.

Seems Step 2 required Step 2A to be completed first. When I completed it, the instructions told me to just push the button at the bottom of the page.

So, I did.

That button sent me to Steps 2B and 2C and then Step 2C required an account. An account I didn’t know existed. I filled out all the paperwork to open the account I didn’t know I needed, and you guessed it, the instructions told me to just push the button at the bottom of the page.

So, I did.

An error message popped up. Before you can do this, it said, you must do something else first. So, I went and did something else.

Except, I couldn’t.

Before I could do that, I had to do two other things first. And before I could do either of those…

Well, you get the idea. At one point, I had already put $50 into an account to pay for shipping labels when I discovered I needed yet another account with the United States Postal Service. That account wanted a credit card, and a $500 authorization hold. 

Five hundred dollars?

I’m trying to mail a $12 children’s book, not a grand piano.

After spending hours trying to understand why I needed one account to calculate the postage and another account to actually pay for it, I finally decided there had to be an easier way.

There was.

I decided to have a little chat with my new best friend, ChatGPT, an AI wonder who will carry on a conversation with you anytime, day or night. Now I’m learning about payment processors, sales-tax calculations, shipping zones, weight tables, checkout settings, website publishing and product weights – and discovering that apparently selling a book requires an entirely different education from writing one. I even learned to calculate shipping by the quarter-pound. That particular skill was nowhere on my bucket list.

Then came the comic payoff.

After spending a week building the website, I deliberately tried to break it by ordering 20 books, and discovered that, yes indeed, my site would happily sell them to me…for $1,000 shipping. Somewhere along the way, I also learned about QR codes – you know, those little square boxes filled with squiggly lines that you point your phone at and hope something happens.

I now have two of them.

I guess in case one gets broken?

It’s now a week later. I’m considerably older, marginally wiser, and apparently qualified to calculate shipping by the quarter pound. The website isn’t turned on, and I’m still not selling books.

At least not yet.

But I’m getting close.

Does life imitate art, or does art imitate life?

I don’t know. But apparently both require a payment processor, a sales-tax calculator and a shipping table before they’ll let you sell a twelve-dollar book.

Come back to this column next week for a special article about where you can buy our new books, trading cards, and limited-edition books. Between now and then, there is still one last thing I have to do to make sure everything is working correctly.

Just push the button.