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New Moon Rising: Birth of a Children's Book Publisher
INSTALLMENT #5: RUSH TO THE FINISH - As the Printer's Deadline Looms, Moon Mountain Readies its First Two Books
Hello Willow will be at the printer any day now. Moon Mountain's first book will be published in October.
In about a week, we'll take the momentous (for us) step of sending our first books to the printer. We're that close, but it's been a rush for the past couple weeks, and it will get more frantic before we're done. Soon we'll face that moment of truth, when we hand over the files and ask ourselves, "Are they really ready? Are you sure?"
Beginners' nervousness aside, we're confident we'll get it right, because we're getting good advice from many directions. Our outside designer continues to provide invaluable assistance on everything from typography to how to construct a clean file, while our book manufacturer has provided good, clear guidelines about file formats, and our consultant has critiqued and subsequently sprinkled holy water upon the designs. Earlier proofing turned up a number of errors, but fewer have appeared in the last few go-rounds, and we'll just keep reading and proofing and reviewing as long as we have the time.
The last few weeks that have gotten us to this point have been pretty eventful.
DOWN TO THE WIRE
Having received all the art for Hello Willow, Cate got it scanned, then worked on and completed the text layout and jacket design, learning how to use QuarkXpress on the fly. (Somewhere along the way, she noticed that the reason the software documentation wasn't accurate was because Quark had included Windows manuals in our Mac-OS package. It took a bit of arguing before they agreed to make it right.) I wrote copy for two versions of a sell sheet, and Cate designed those as well. When she had the design completed, we handed it off to our designer, who cleaned up the file.
Hello Willow is ready to roll, and Cate is now drafting detailed instructions and assembling an excruciatingly accurate dummy to give to the printer for reference. We don't believe this is really needed, but it makes us feel more secure, and affords Cate the opportunity to play with scissors and paste in the line of duty.
Petronella was a bit behind schedule, and we granted the illustrator a two-week extension, during which time she planned to take vacation from her day job to concentrate on painting. On the day of the extended deadline, we received a package containing all but four of the remaining illos. Two more, she told us, were done, but she was keeping them for reference in completing the last two. One more day?
Of course we allowed it, and then one more, and ultimately received the last of the art, which is very, very good. We think so; our designer thinks so; our consultant thinks so, and so does the guy who owns our scanning service. Let's hope that trade buyers, the general public, and at least one good distributor agree.
We ran into a problem when the texture of Petronella's watercolor paper started showing up in the scans. This surprised us, because it hadn't occurred with Hello Willow, which was painted on equally textured paper. To resolve it, we're having to silhouette all the Petronella art. This won't cause much delay, but it's an unexpected expense.
DON'T LEAVE ME!
Cate has finished maybe nine tenths of the design for Petronella, but we don't have all the scans yet, and she's going to North Dakota tomorrow to visit family whom she hasn't seen in years. This trip was planned many months ago, when she thought that two weeks of wiggle-room in the schedule was more than enough. Lesson learned. While she's gone, I'll have to advance the job -- a task for which I'm not well qualified. But she's leaving me with detailed instructions; we'll be in regular contact by email, phone, fax, and FedEx; and I'll be relying upon our trusty designer, who will be the one who really does the work. Cate was able to reschedule her return flight, so she'll be back in time to make final adjustments before we go to print. We'll also ask the printer if we can get a short extension without losing our place in his schedule.
While she's in North Dakota, Cate will visit the schools where her sister and sister in-law teach, and make presentations to their 3rd and 5th grade classes showing how a children's book is developed. I'll call the local media and see if we can get any coverage. In order to have some kind of gift for the children, we spent far too much time designing and manufacturing bookmarks featuring the two books. They're quite nice, and they cost next to nothing out-of-pocket, but we'll have to come up with an easier giveaway for similar events in the future. In order to market the services of our proprietary publishing division, we developed several dummy covers as examples. Any sporting goods supplier should be able to picture his own products highlighted in a proprietary book of this sort. The same concept works for suppliers of hobby and craft goods.
PROGRESS ON PROPRIETARY PUBLISHING
Among the submissions we review, we occasionally find a manuscript that we don't want to publish as a trade book, but that we think might have potential for a proprietary customer. When we do, we reject the manuscript in the regular manner, but ask for permission to keep a copy in our files. We briefly explain that there's an outside chance of future interest, and describe the nature of that interest, but explicitly disavow any commitment and urge the author to market the manuscript elsewhere.
One of these instances has turned up some potential business -- on the author's initiative, surprisingly enough. The story was a fictional piece about a real not-for-profit organization, and the author has sparked some interest within that organization in funding the book. They want ballpark figures at this point, so we've written printing specs and sent them out for quotation. Meanwhile, we're working on the strategic aspects of our proposal, which involves some interesting issues. Will the book bear the organization's imprint (in which case, we would be acting more or less as book packagers), or will Moon Mountain Proprietary create a new imprint for proprietary-published books (in which case, would we also market the book)? Our concern is to draw a clear line between our two divisions, to avoid any confusion in the trade, or among authors, about the bona-fide trade-publisher status of the Moon Mountain Publishing imprint.
We finally sent out a news release announcing Moon Mountain Proprietary. We're now hurrying to create response literature, in anticipation of any inquiries the release should generate. For this, we are developing a series of tiled insert sheets that fit into a literature carrier (i.e., "kit folder") that we had printed this month. The folder is quite simple (call it elegant), with just the Moon Mountain logo on the front, so it can be used by both divisions. The trade division will use it for press kits and, stuffed with sell sheets, as an interim catalog until our backlist is big enough to justify a real catalog.
BLURBS, BYLINES AND BOOK DISTRIBUTORS
We still needed blurbs for both books. With a fair amount of follow-up calls and emails, we collected four good ones -- two for each -- that make the sell sheets and jacket flaps much more persuasive. (Another lesson learned: if you can avoid offending the blurber, write the blurb yourself and submit it as a "suggestion.") After we finalized one of the jackets, a very famous children's author agreed to review the title. Of course we sent him a dummy right away. If he comes through with a good blurb any time soon, we'll have to revise the layout. Should we receive a great blurb after we've handed the files off to the printer, will we still make the change? We don't know.
With the two covers and a complete dummy of Hello Willow finally in hand, I began contacting distributors. The first 13 phone calls were enlightening. Most of them put you through an automated answering system, ultimately letting you listen to a recording that says you should send them a finished book for consideration, and they'll get back to you, now go away and shut up. When I was lucky enough to reach a real person, I got pretty much the same line, with the further assurance that they don't want to see or talk to you until you can show them a finished book.
Now, that didn't sound at all like what I was looking for. It seems to me that you should have your sales & marketing ducks in a row well before you have finished product to sell. So I was pretty relieved when the last two calls turned up reasonable people who were interested in seeing our covers and dummies and marketing plans and budgets, and who expressed themselves willing to consider distributing our books on that basis. Needless to say, we sent two packages out by overnight the next day (that's today), and boy, are we excited!
Visit Moon Mountain on the Web. Feel free to contact us at hello@moonmountainpub.com.