Leap Day promo

Ran across this promo announcement on Instagram, anyone heard anything further about it?

Get ready for a special offer to celebrate leap day this year! For every order you place on our website on 29 February, you will receive a free mystery Folio edition. Are you ready to take a leap into the unknown❓📚

(source: https://www.instagram.com/p/C34qgbRtk0h/)

Hopefully it's not just surplus copies of the Diary.

They are answering questions about it on Instagram, one of their responses was "our selection of mystery books include a variety of genres, including fiction!".

So it seems to be a free book, not just a Diary.

I have to confess, I don't see the appeal of such "mystery" giveaways. The chances are that it'll either be something I already own or something I don't want. (Particularly as I suspect the free gifts will be drawn from the lower end of the sale items which didn't sell out - and I picked up everything I wanted in the sale.)

Great from FS's perspective, of course, as a way to clear out poorly selling stock, but not something that'll be encouraging me to place an order, sadly.

>2 Penumbroso: That's good, though I also share the opinion that a grab-bag choice is unlikely to land me a book I actually want. Not trying to sound ungrateful for the promotion, merely that it's unlikely to prompt me personally to make a purchase.

>4 Shadekeep: They are offering one free book per order, so presumably if you order 4 books in one order you would get one free book , if you placed 4 orders for 1 book each you would get 4 free books (partly cancelled out by the additional shipping charges).

I also hate these offers as invariably it is a book that i have or don’t want - i can imagine a glut of unwanted free books turning up on eBay in the coming week.

Anyone know of a code that works for the US presently? My understanding is that in the UK, the current code works: MB24UK

>6 icewindraider: If you’re trying to use with the promo you can’t stack codes - the free book offer uses a promo code & you can only use one code on an order, so it’s either discount or free book.

>6 icewindraider: MB24US according to an email I received.

"Spring" would seem an obvious guess for one of the mystery books on offer given that it was a freebie originally.

I'd imagine a look at what was still available when the recent sale ended would be a good indication of what a buyer is likely to receive...

Just ordered today (was going to anyway even before the promo was announced), so should be interesting to see what the free book is.

I'm thinking the same as other posters: likely something they can't shift, but not complaining :)

I just noticed that FS have again increased the cost of postage of a single volume to £6.99. That's crazy. Most Folio single volumes (even when packaged) weigh under 2kg. Royal Mail charges ordinary customers £3.29 for delivery of a parcel that weights up to 2kg including insurance up to £150 (e.g. their Tracked 48 service), so god only knows how Folio justify £6.99.

>12 cronshaw: Probably due to the meticulous packaging and the people packing the books clearly spending their time doing it right and checking for any issues, which can't be expected of 99% of booksellers on the market today. I spend half my life at the post office, returning damaged books that just fly around in empty boxes with no protective padding, so I suppose that price is worth having to avoid that nonsense.

Maybe it's also a good incentive to go through one's wish list and buy more than one book at a time. :)

>13 santiamen: £6.99 still feels gratuitously excessive to me for one volume, given the actual postage cost. Just the principle of the thing has dissuaded me from what would have been an impulsive Leap Day purchase for the sake of a mystery book. As you say, I'll wait until I've an order for several books before making any purchase now.

>12 cronshaw: Perhaps it's the same accounting legerdemain that excuses the arbitrary markup for US customers?

>14 cronshaw: I'm with you. It seems pretty common for other retailers to offer free shipping on orders over a certain amount, or even on all orders. Of course, the customer ends up paying for the postage eventually through the price of the merchandise. But adding a £7 shipping charge on a £50 book just feels mean-spirited. I would also expect that, as an online retail business, Folio generates enough sales to negotiate preferential rates with a competent courier. So I rather suspect that Royal Mail's retail prices overstate the cost of shipping they could achieve.

>12 cronshaw: I sympathise, but only up to a point - I am stuck with the EU Express Only regime which is £25 for a single book, £31 for 2 or more. Buying a single book is pointless under those circumstances, and the idea of ending up with a duplicate or an unloved Warehouse Clearer makes this offer a no-no.

>15 Shadekeep: The price for two or more titles hasn't increased, perhaps because £9.99 is something of a psychological barrier. So the increase from £5.99 to £6.99 for a single book, after the increase from £4.95 not long ago, feels odd especially coming in just in time for a Leap Day offer that invites customers to order just a single title to get a free 'mystery' title.

>16 ubiquitousuk: Absolutely!

>18 cronshaw: That is curious. Seems like it might be more a materials cost than a purely shipping cost in that case, since the cardboard box to ship one may not differ much from the box used for two. Thus if the box itself has gone up in price, you'd be more likely to see that in the single book shipment first.

>17 ian_curtin: You have my complete sympathy. However, I imagine most of the blame here can be shifted on to Brexiteers rather than the Folio Society, since in their quest for mythic sovereignty (yawn), to control illegal immigration (chortle), to boost Global Britain's trade (guffaw!) and for general nationalistic specialness, one of the principal actual effects of Brexit has been to have saddled tens of thousands of businesses with impossible export and customs costs.

It'd be nice if they had the relatively common "free shipping if you spend above X" rule, even if the threshold were quite high. I'd imagine the encouragement to make large orders would more than compensate for the slight cost.

I hope that Folio's high packaging/postage costs are reflected in the pay of the wonderful people who do the packaging.

>22 gmacaree:

Hear, hear! Fabulous job, folks.

>20 cronshaw: Yes, absolutely. At least Folio is still available, albeit at vastly inflated cost - many other independent publishers I used to order direct from simply cannot or do not ship anymore under the Marvellous Trade Powerhouse Freedoms of Brexit.
>21 PeterFitzGerald: Agree completely. No doubt the threshold would be high, but an arrangement like that would guarantee at least an order a year from me.

I placed an order too. I've long wanted the two Tom Holland volumes (Dynasty and Rubicon) and it'll be fun to see what turns up as an extra volume.

I'm sort of expecting disappointment, but perhaps it could be all sorts of titles.

I think they did this sort of thing many years ago and I finished up with a book with slightly defective printing (which was fine as I think they suggested such things)

>25 DukeOfOmnium: They did indeed do this sort of thing some years ago, maybe more than once. I recall placing an order, and getting Big Chief Elizabeth as my mystery book. I should read it some day.

>23 folio_books: Hear, hear! Fabulous job, folks.

People we actually need, who do something useful.

Thank you to all of them. I hope we pay them enough to live on.

>21 PeterFitzGerald: The two recent times they've had free shipping as a promotion it's been a much better deal than the 10% coupons for me as a Euro customer. Managed to get both the free shipping and a 10% to work which was the best deal they've had for me I think.
I'll add to the choir praising the packaging, perhaps even more important for the longer mail journeys.

>21 PeterFitzGerald: Though as always ‘free shipping’ is never really free shipping - the cost is always passed on somewhere. I’d rather not have free shipping if it meant yet another increase to the prices of the actual books to subsidise it.

>26 coynedj: I remember getting The Surgeon of Crowthorne as a mystery book, which I actually quite enjoyed and probably wouldn’t have read otherwise - I also have Big Chief Elizabeth but can’t remember if it was a deep sale or a mystery book, but I too haven’t read it

The postage charges (effectively adding around 10% on to the bill even in the UK) is one of the reasons I've pretty much stopped buying from Folio. It's a compulsory 'service charge' - it's not as if one can buy a book from them without paying for delivery.

>29 antinous_in_london: I’d rather not have free shipping if it meant yet another increase to the prices of the actual books to subsidise it.
Doesn't make any difference - it's just a device to make the books look slightly less expensive than they actually are.

>17 ian_curtin: same here, I also thought about ordering, but as it’s £25 for shipping for just one volume (£80) and plus tax I was at 112£, no thank you.

Will wait for some other offer, but I am curious what they will send around as mystery folios

It is cheaper for FS to package up eight books in one box than it is to package up one book in eight boxes. It takes less time, uses less packaging material per book and requires fewer orders to be processed. As with many industries, the high volume customer (who buys eight books) is more profitable than the low volume customer (who buys only one).

FS's policy of charging a fixed cost separately for packaging is I suspect intended to recognising this dynamic. Eliminating the shipping cost and putting it on the price of each book does not. The latter approach would have the high volume customer subsidise the low volume customer even more than they probably already do (there are no volume discounts on offer on the books themselves). Or the efficient customer who purchases a few books at a time would subsidise the inefficient customer who buys the same number of books but buys them one by one.

I wait and buy in "bulk" and save delivery costs. All the more important for me as I live abroad and pay way more than 6.99 per delivery. My last shipping cost was 54.

For me, FS do an outstanding job packaging their books and is one reason I am a repeat customer. I am fed up with receiving books from other sellers where the books come poorly wrapped and look worse for wear before I have even touched them.

So, it's Friday morning and the nice man from DPD has just handed me my box of books. I was going to buy these anyway for delivery today, so the fact that I was going to get a free mystery book was a bonus. The books I did buy were Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, Murder On The Orient Express and Ordeal By Innocence both by Agatha Christie. I was expecting the mystery book to be (yet) another 2024 diary. I was massively surprised to find it was actually a book that is from the current catalogue. It doesn't look like it's a damaged or blemished return since looking through it, it looks in perfect condition. Apologies in advance to anyone who may have been buying this book today and actually paid for it - spoilers ahead - stop now if you're likely to be annoyed - my mystery book was A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre.

>34 SnowyDoc: Wow that's a great one to get.

Re: all the comments about postage/packaging/delivery costs - I've just started looking further afield for books to fill holes in my collections, most notably AbeBooks. It's not at all unusual for me to find a book that I want, shipped from the US to the UK, where the cost of the shipping is 200% the cost of the book. So if the book costs (let's say) $30 (or £25), in order for it to get to my door it will cost me an extra $60 (or £50). This is crazy. It will also take 3 to 6 weeks. Compared to that, the Folio Society charges are, well, reasonable to say the least.

If I order books from Amazon US (yes, I know, Amazon ...) for shipping to the UK - flat rate charge via Amazon Global (who ship it via UPS) is £10.99, say roughly $14. And it gets to me (US Amazon warehouse to my front door) in about 60 hours. And all customs charges etc. are included in that price.

Just saying ...

>36 SnowyDoc:

I started using a forwarding service years ago - this could be worthwhile for you, too, especially if it's possible to get several parcels forwarded around the same time.

A DPD delivery man just delivered my box of books, which included the Leap Day mystery book - a nice small volume of The Book of Proverbs, as taken from the Authorised King James version of the Bible. Certainly a lot better than the 2024 Folio diary I was sort of expecting!

>33 Pendrainllwyn:
It is cheaper for FS to package up eight books in one box than it is to package up one book in eight boxes. It takes less time, uses less packaging material per book and requires fewer orders to be processed. As with many industries, the high volume customer (who buys eight books) is more profitable than the low volume customer (who buys only one). FS's policy of charging a fixed cost separately for packaging is I suspect intended to recognising this dynamic.

All absolutely fair comment. But, for me, an ex-fairly high volume buyer (30+ per year) and nowadays only 1-2 annually, it was a factor in that decline*. Once the price of the books started spiralling, charging even more for postage became one of the straws, especially when there was no way of buying them any other way (I used to occasonally pickup from the Members' Room when in London). Like a few grains of sand in one's shoe - small but irritating.

(*TBH a small one. The change in publishing focus was the biggy, against which everything else was pretty insignificant, even the prices)

>33 Pendrainllwyn: “It is cheaper for FS to package up eight books in one box than it is to package up one book in eight boxes.”

Eight books in one box I can understand. But one book in eight boxes sounds like an accident of chapters.

>39 Willoyd:

I do wish they still had a place where you can just buy them in situ. I didn't get to travel to London during that time, but I would really appreciate it these days with expensive shipping and customs fees on top of that. All that in addition to the joy of being able to look at books before deciding whether to buy them or not.

>40 boldface: I wasn't clear! It's cheaper to package up eight books in one box for one customer than it is to package up one book in one box for eight separate customers. And similarly, it's cheaper to package up eight books in one box for one customer than it is to package up one book in eight boxes for the same customer who chooses to order on eight separate occasions rather than all at once.

>41 SF-72: If you think that the cost of books/shipping is expensive now then the old model of maintaining a central London presence where customers can just pop in, browse around & generally loiter would i’m sure significantly raise the cost of the books themselves. Property in central london is not cheap, especially if it is publicly accessible with all of the rules & regulations around health & safety etc that entails these days.

>43 antinous_in_london: They could strike a deal with an already established retailer to stock their books like they had with Waterstones for a while. Come to think of it, do Harrods still sell FS books?

>44 mazzyhope815:
The British Library also used to stock some FS books.

>44 mazzyhope815: Retailers don't stock books for free - they want a cut & some of them quite a large cut & often on sale or return. Why give a retailer a big chunk of your profit for a couple of extra sales (I'm sure Waterstones/Hatchards/Harrods weren’t selling thousands (or even hundreds) of copies of FS books) when you can just sell direct via your own website.

After Harrods moved their bookshop (which is just a concession - Harrods only rent them space) down into a corner of the basement (a sign of how much they valued the book department) they had a few FS titles left, when i went into the store 6 months later the same copies were still on the shelves. The same in Hatchards (owned by the same hedge fund as Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwells and Barnes & Noble - giving them most of the bricks-and-mortar book retailing business). In most bookstores FS titles were dust-collectors. Good luck ‘striking a deal’ with a retailer who has only managed to sell 2 FS books in a year & would rather use the shelf space for something that sells.

>46 antinous_in_london: Okay. You seem weirdly defensive about this subject so I'll leave you to it.

>47 mazzyhope815: Nope, just answering your rather simplistic question as to why FS aren’t ‘striking deals’ to put their books into bookstores (and why bookstores probably wouldn’t want them anyway)

>43 antinous_in_london:

I would have enjoyed the opportunity when it existed, plain and simple, and with how much more than the cover price I have to pay after Brexit, that would be even more so today. I admit I cannot speak for their costs behind this. The way I understand it, the building used to be provided for them, something different from what you describe. But I certainly don't want to start an argument over that. I just really regret that I was too ill to travel during the years when I was already a customer and the store still existed, and later on when I could visit London, the building had been sold and that was that for Eagle Street and the Member's Room. I understand the nostalgia of members who could still enjoy that.

>34 SnowyDoc: >38 holymoorside:

Nice, a couple of good freebies! Glad to hear they aren't simply duff overstock titles.

My package arrived. Time traveller's guide to Elizabethan England was the free book. It's fine, but I was hoping for something a little more exciting.

Just wanted to share what I received from my 3 orders: 2 x On Photography by Susan Sontag. 1 x Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

>42 Pendrainllwyn:

Sorry! Just pulling your leg. I knew what you meant and you're quite right.

Those are actually really nice freebies.

Just received A Perfect Spy as my mystery book (quite pleased with that!).

It looks like they are giving the more expensive free books to those who ordered a batch in one order. Snowy Doc above got the same one as part of an order of three other books while my order was for five.

A Perfect Spy.... nice!

I ordered one book and got Northanger Abbey as my freebie

I only ordered one book (The Hundred and One Dalmatians) and received A Perfect Spy as the mystery book. Of all the books mentioned so far, this was the one I was hoping for. Very pleased!

It really is random then :)

>57 mazzyhope815: oh that is a really nice freebie!!

Wouldn’t have thought they‘d put these nice volumes into the boxes

I took the occasion to order Dune: Messiah, especially since the second part of the movie just came out. My bonus book was Pole to Pole.

I've never heard of it prior to this, but based on the description, it looks really interesting! What a fun bonus.

>61 Unbroken1: The second part of the movie pretty much finishes up the original Dune book, with of course a few changes along the way. I figure the third part will cover Dune: Messiah, which I ordered some time ago. It answers a lot of the lingering questions I had from the first Dune book, though I confess that I have read no further in the series.

My mystery book was The Perfect Spy.