The US Post Office was the envy of the world for its speed, reliability and almost-real-time tracking capacity. People are depending on it for their bills, pension checks, medicine prescriptions, voting; and businesses, especially small ones, would be unable to function without it.

Now it has come to pass that the USPS is being kneecapped and is rapidly unraveling in the midst of other pandemic dislocations. Many articulate people have analyzed the agenda behind this, so in this post I’ll restrict myself to the concrete repercussions on Candlemark.

In the last month, one book order and one contributor’s copy, in transit when the dismantling started, got stuck between stations. Today the sole remnant of the contributor’s copy reached its destination: a piece of cardboard bearing the recipient’s address, along with a note apologizing for the “damage” (read: utter destruction) of the package’s content. A search has been launched for the other package that’s in limbo, but my hopes are dwindling by the hour.

Candlemark print books are printed on demand and shipped directly from their printer/distributor; so I pay them for both printing and shipping, and they pay the shipping charge when they send the book on its way.  Unless I pay a huge shipping fee per copy, which would make print copies too expensive for customers, the printer doesn’t insure copies sent as basic media mail, though it issues tracking numbers that I follow until I see the green delivery message in the USPS system.

While USPS was efficient, orders and deliveries of print copies worked with an affordable shipping fee, but now package delivery has become so unreliable that it’s risky. The cheapest next level of shipping, though it would make the package insurable, would triple or quadruple shipping fees. And of course it doesn’t guarantee that a package will get successfully delivered, given the global issue at hand.

So I earnestly request that everyone who wishes to order directly from Candlemark choose the digital versions exclusively. If I receive a print order, I will contact each customer individually and go through alternatives: go through with the print order but with higher shipping fees, or refund the print portion of the order (since Candlemark print orders are accompanied by their digital counterparts).

We don’t get that many orders via the website, so the individual approach may work until we get back to a semblance of normalcy. If things do not improve by October, I will have to permanently increase shipping fees—reluctantly, and with a very heavy heart.

I want to thank all our readers for their unstinting support of the tiny but indomitable starship Candlemark; and here’s hoping that we all gather when the storm has subsided with our lives intact, and continue to tell stories around our campfires.

Important update: After discovering the fate of the second missing package, I have been forced to sharply increase shipping fees for website orders of print books; this will afford delivery by UPS, which is trackable, insurable and leaves us recourse for refunding if something goes awry.  I’m deeply sorry to have to do this, and fervently hope it proves temporary.  I realize what the price increases will mean to print sales, but doing right by our readers is among our highest priorities. Please order digital versions until the storm subsides.