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Nine Months in New Offices

June 29, 2012 by Sam Henrie, President

batsThe other evening at about sunset I was walking out of our offices and saw what had to be one of the most awe-inspiring sights I’ve ever seen: a river of bats in the sky, emanating from under a bridge and extending as far as the eye could see. (I wish I’d had my camera with me. But the picture below is close to what I saw.) Apparently a large colony of bats, about 40,000 strong, lives under the Campbell Avenue bridge that crosses the Rillito River just a few hundred yards from our offices. These bats summer in Tucson and emerge around sunset every day to feed on unsuspecting bugs. I later discovered that there was even a “bat night” event at the bridge last month including a lecture, entertainment, and, of course, a witnessing of the mass fly-away.

As readers of this newsletter know, we moved to our new offices nine months ago. The offices are in a better building, in a nicer and more convenient neighborhood. We all now have covered parking spaces—those of you familiar with the Arizona desert summer know what a necessity these are. The view from our offices is spectacular. We overlook the Rillito riverbed, which is usually dry, but very, very occasionally hosts an impressive torrent of flash flood waters. We were amazed when we came in to work the second day at these new offices to find that the carpets had been vacuumed, and the trash had been emptied … we hadn’t even known that daily cleaning was included in the lease. We love our new digs!

And nesting bats are traditionally regarded in China as a sign of abundant wealth to come. I’m not generally a superstitious person, but the sign sure seems to be on target for us. The last nine months have been the most profitable ever for Wheatmark. I credit this to:

  • Better management of income, expense, and business processes. (We’re constantly working on these.)
  • The growth of ebook sales, fueled partly by our adding the Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple iPad, Sony Reader, Google Play, and Kobo eReader formats to our Amazon Kindle offering.
  • The Authors Academy, now in its second year. I believe the outstanding education in book marketing it has offered to many of our authors is partly responsible for the 20.2% increase in book sales we’ve seen over the last nine months.

Auspicious signs or no, we’ll do everything in our power to ensure that the next nine months are even more profitable for our authors and for us … from the comfort of our new offices!



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