Creative Packaging

Published: Apr 6, 2021 by Richard Sezov

Over the weekend, I started shipping books. This was something I’d planned for, and of course I wanted to maximize my efficiency in several ways:

I wanted shipping to be prompt and fast.
I wanted my packaging to adequately protect my books.
I wanted to spend as little as possible on packaging materials.

I used to be big into retro computing. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s the hobby of buying and refurbishing old, out of date computers from the 80s and 90s. I even taught a class at the local homeschool co-op on how computers work by using these old machines and emulators. Maybe I’ll write a blog entry at some time about why this is cool, but it’s not germane to this post.

If you plan to get into retro computing, you have to use eBay, and I used eBay a lot, probably to help grandmothers clean their attics of ancient machines their children had long abandoned. One of the things I really appreciated about all this eBay-ing was the creative packaging that many eBay-ers use to effectively cut costs but at the same time protect their merchandise well.

I decided to have the same philosophy when it came time to publish my book. For the past year or year and a half, therefore, I’ve been saving cereal boxes. Cereal boxes turned inside out make great packing boxes. And, of course, they’re incredibly cost-effective.

One of the other hobbies I’m into is 3D printing. In this hobby, you wind up collecting lots of spools of plastic filament, which is what you use to print your 3D objects. These spools come in nice cardboard boxes that are the perfect size to fit multiple books, so I’ve also been saving some of my filament boxes. If anybody decides to order multiple signed copies direct from me, they’ll probably be shipped in a filament box.

I’m new at this, so I have no idea if this is sustainable or if I’ll eventually need to purchase packing materials. But for now it works, and your books should arrive in great condition because of it.

So what are you waiting for? Buy Providence today!

My blindness to the difference between creating at the keyboard and formatting a document came from all the business writing I was doing. In 1997, I’d made a career change from server administration to software development. I’d begun coding, first on Lotus Notes platforms, and then on Java. By the turn of the century I’d switched jobs and was lead developer at a Fortune 500 company. One of my first assignments was writing an RFP, or Request for Proposal.

You have to understand, at this point in my life, I’d been building my own computers from parts for almost a decade. And even though I’d just purchased one from Gateway, that didn’t mean I didn’t keep upgrading parts of it. A new hard drive (and reinstall) here, a new video card there. Modem too slow? Install a faster one. No network card? Let’s add one. Buy a SCSI scanner; install a SCSI card to run it. That’s the way you did things back then. USB as a standard interface didn’t exist.

My original plan was to get an English degree, become a high school English teacher, and write novels on the side. By my junior year (after three years of taking secondary education classes), I was sent into a local high school to observe, and what I observed was that I didn’t want to be a high school English teacher. I dropped the secondary education minor required to become a State-certified teacher and started taking computer classes in my senior year. There wasn’t enough time to get a minor in Computer Science and still graduate when I wanted to, but it had been enough to land me my first job out of college. My first job was for a small computer consulting firm called MC Systems of NJ, Inc.