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Feature
New Moon Rising: Birth of a Children's Book Publisher
This was the most significant month in Moon Mountain's brief history. Our first two books went to the printer; we received three offers from distributors to handle our line; and we've entered talks with three authors whose stories we want to acquire for our 2001 schedule. We're happily excited, slightly disorganized, and extremely busy.
NORTH DAKOTA AND SOUTH KOREA
During our last installment, Cate was visiting relatives in North Dakota
just at the time of our deadline to get materials to our South Korean
printer. We asked the printer how badly our schedule would be set back if we
delayed materials by a week, and he told us that Hallmark calendars was next
in line. Now Hallmark carries a bit more clout than Moon Mountain, but with
a certain amount of pleading and sobbing, we managed to limit the damage to
a mere week's delay in printing.
Cate cut her vacation short by three days to return to Rhode Island and put finishing touches on the books, working with our outside designer to make sure the files were "clean." We packaged the CDs, Zip discs, dummies and various other materials and shipped it all off to the printer's U.S. office, who forwarded it to the Korean plant. We received color proofs just 15 days later. Not realizing that the printer uses direct-to-plate methods, we were surprised that these were press proofs, not match prints.
We had looked forward to receiving the proofs with great anticipation, and were disappointed that the colors were dull. (An illustrator we know says the printed version usually looks just like the originals, only covered with maple syrup.) So we asked the printer to bump up the magenta, and we're now eagerly awaiting a second set of proofs. In order to stay on schedule, we had to turn around the proofs in a half a day, which meant that we paid lots of attention to color balance and hickeys, and (maybe wisely) avoided looking for errors in content. Ever tried to overnight three pounds to South Korea? Be prepared to write an $86 check, and be told that overnight might mean five days! If we have to go beyond two reviews of proofs, it will definitely delay production.
While Cate was in North Dakota, she visited the public school where her sister teaches third grade, to give a presentation on how a children's book is published. As an introduction, Cate showed the students our website on a monitor-projector. Then she read the (very brief) text of Hello Willow, our first book, aloud, and showed the students the numerous iterations of art and layout, moving gradually from concept to finished design. Then she had a the students read the book aloud -- one student to a page. Finally she distributed our custom bookmarks, and took questions and comments. Cate's sister had told her to expect an attention span of 15 minutes, but Cate held the audience rapt for a full 45-minute class period. Back at the ranch, I took what information I could glean from the event and quickly wrote a short feature, which I emailed to Cate's sister. She got it approved by the school's principal and submitted it to the local newspaper, which duly ran it with a photo. Cate's presentation to two North Dakota 3rd grade classes was fun, generated some publicity, and got a lot of kids interested in publishing.(Photo: Cynthia Meidinger)
GOT DISTRIBUTION?
From an initial hit list of eleven distributors, we eventually found four
who were interested in seeing our dummies and marketing plans. (By the way,
we found the process of producing color dummies extremely time-consuming,
and I hope we won't have to do this often.) While waiting for a response
from the first of the four, I had learned enough about the company to become
very skeptical. Although they were listed in Literary Market Place as a
distributor, their own website indicated they were in a totally different
area of the publishing industry, and a call to the purchasing department at
Borders turned up the interesting tidbit that they're not an approved direct
vendor. So when the company's principal called to say that he was interested
in distributing our books, I was less than thrilled. I asked for client
references and he couldn't provide any credible ones, so Distributor Number
One went onto a way, way, way-back burner.
The second positive response was from a medium-sized distributor with good credentials. What an enormous relief, that I would not have to rely upon my own dismal salesmanship to get into the retail pipeline! I was absolutely giddy, and as Cate was still in North Dakota, I celebrated with dinner out by myself -- which I enjoy.
Then a third offer came in from a small but perfectly respectable distributor. He offered us better terms than Distributor Two, and clearly demonstrated his command of sales and marketing. So now we face a choice between the relative strengths and weaknesses of two good companies. Not a bad position to be in! Still no word from the fourth distributor to whom we sent materials. He is the strongest of the bunch -- one of the industry leaders, in fact -- but even if he turns us down, we're still okay.
GOING TO BEA
In order for us both to attend Book Expo America, and the PMA University
sessions that precede it, we had to arrange for Max, our three-year old, to
spend the week with relatives, which involves a lot of driving to and fro at
both ends of the trip. Cate also spent a lot of time making plane
reservations, trying to find a cheap hotel room close to the sessions (no
luck), and setting up a lunch meeting of the still incipient Independent
Publishers of New England group at the show. Aside from attending the PMA
marketing seminars, our objectives at BEA are to get a broader view of the
publishing industry, do some networking, and familiarize ourselves with BEA
itself. My original, main objective of finding a distributor there has since
been altered to one of meeting with Distributors Two and Three and deciding
between them.
As this sample shows, children's picture book fiction can be used as a marketing communications tool. Moon Mountain is about to submit a proposal to a not-for-profit for just such a project.
ACQUISITIONS AND COMPLICATIONS
Having read some 275 manuscripts since we opened for business, we finally
made some hard choices and selected three that we want to publish in 2001. I
called the authors and told them of our interest, promising them contracts
in a couple days. Then we gave a close look at our standard publishing
agreement for the first time since we contracted for our first two books.
Having recently read contracts from our two prospective distributors, which
gave us a better understanding of prevailing discounts, we discovered some
serious problems in the royalty structure of our own publishing agreement.
I contacted the authors again and told them there would be a delay while we fixed the contracts, then contacted a publishing lawyer whom I'd interviewed a few months ago and asked him to help us fix the problem. While we were at it, I asked him to assess the contract as a whole, for we were never very confident that it was a good one.
Although he came back with a few suggested changes, he pronounced the overall contract basically sound, which was a relief -- not only because we had paid another lawyer a great deal of money to draft it, but also because we already had two books under contract. We're still awaiting revised language from the new lawyer for a number of clauses, and hope to be able to get drafts of the agreement out to our new authors this week. Meanwhile, they're getting anxious about whether our verbal offer was for real. As for the royalty problem as it relates to the authors and illustrators of our first two books, we'll just have to live with that, and possibly pay out a bit more than we had originally intended.
Our early plans called for us to publish three books during 2000, but the author/illustrator of the third book had had to postpone work on it, and had never signed the agreement. Finally he called, after months of silence, saying that he had read the (old) contract and had some issues with it. We had to tell him that that was now off the table, and that he would soon receive a new one. We're glad that he remains interested, and pleased that we've got a probable fourth title for our 2001 schedule. Two more to go!
PROPRIETARY PROJECTS
Last month we began developing a proposal to publish a fictional work about
a real not-for-profit organization. The proposal had its origins in a very
good children's book manuscript that we chose not to publish under the Moon
Mountain imprint, but that, we thought, might be of interest to the
organization itself. During the past month, Cate and I spent much time and
effort structuring the proposal in a way that, we hope, will be affordable
to the potential client, and profitable to us.
We also completed work on "corporate capabilities" literature for our Moon Mountain Proprietary division, in the form of a series of tiled insert sheets for our kit folder. These were two-color-printed as a blank form, almost like letterhead, and we will overprint them on our laser printer with specific content. Together, this gives the impression of four-color printing at a fraction of the cost, and gives us the additional benefit of content flexibility.
With the new literature in place, we are almost ready to submit the proposal to the not-for-profit. And we received another inquiry from a food novelties company looking for a custom publisher. Since we haven't yet published any books, we glad to have collateral materials to send out, as a boost to our credibility.
GET ORGANIZED!
With the time approaching when we will have to begin actively marketing our
first books, and facing an ever-increasing complexity of projects and tasks,
we are becoming concerned that important details may begin falling through
cracks unless we begin managing our projects more systematically. To address
this, we contacted the Rhode Island Small Business Development Center, a
state agency, which is making a management consultant available to us at no
charge. He is showing us the basic tools of project management -- Gantt
charts, Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT), Critical Path Analysis
and such like -- and we've begun looking at various software packages to
automate the process.
I posted a query to a list-serve, asking other publishers about their PM methods -- particularly, what software they use -- and was surprised at the meager response. It appears that most small publishers are not using anything more complex than a day-timer and a spreadsheet to maintain control over projects and tasks. Those few who have experience with PM software said that it's too complex to maintain unless you're building a spaceship. Maybe I'm just anal (maybe!, snorts Cate), but it still seems potentially useful, so I downloaded a couple trial versions from websites. Oh Joy! More software to learn!