I thought I had it all figured out until a book I shipped was returned to me in such a sorry state that I started wondering if any of you guys who bought my books ever got them bent or misshapen or disfigured or warbled and wet and my face got red with horror. That's not good customer service. I use these Sealed Air Padded Mailers because they're recyclable and cheap and not ugly looking, but the thin orange paper was torn and the shoddy brown paper-filler was spilled into a kind of homemade crude tape job to hold it all together. The book was bumped on the corners and dusted all over with that brown muck and it made me cringe. "Jesus Christ," I thought, "I need to figure this one out."

As it happens, I'm running out of these mailers, have about 15 of them left, and so I got to researching alternative packaging options and neither of them are a perfect fit for me. Here are the ones I have considered: