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New Moon Rising: Birth of a Children's Book Publisher
INSTALLMENT #9: DISTRIBUTION IN PLACE! Our First Sales, Nice Marketing Hits, and the Hazards of Magnetic Baboons
We received wonderful cover art for HAMLET AND THE MAGNIFICENT SANDCASTLE from author/illustrator Brian Lies. Publication is scheduled for Spring 2001.With the October publication date for Hello Willow creeping inexorably closer, things were getting tense on top of Moon Mountain, where no distributor was yet ensconced. We were accepted by a company with a great catalog and a persuasive pitch. But then we received their terms, which included "listing" fees, steep charges for catalog insertions and warehousing, and other questionable items. Right around that time, our favorite listserve discussion group had an extensive thread on that very distributor, who was denounced for oppressive and unfair practices by everyone who posted with direct experience on the subject.
Shortly thereafter, we were rejected by another distributor, and then by a well-known children's publisher who had agreed to consider distributing our line. With our options dwindling, I took another look at Words Distributing Co.
We had met with Words at BEA, and had been impressed by their integrity and their business model. They had expressed interest in our line, and presented themselves as eager to broaden the scope and variety of the subject areas they represent, to include more general trade books. Thinking at the time that we had better prospects with distributors who were stronger in children's titles, we politely declined to submit materials for review.
Now humbled, I realized that we -- a new publisher in a difficult genre -- would have to accept some compromises with any distributor willing to take us on. And the manifest decency of the Words people, and their commitment to make an effort in children's titles, made me tuck my tail between my legs. Please, I cringed, would you give us a look?
They were magnanimous. It took a few weeks for them to reach a decision, during which time I followed up aggressively, and lost my temper with everyone else around me (poor Cate! poor three-year-old Max!). But Words agreed to distribute us. We are pleased, relieved, and confident they will do an excellent job for us. And I, as director of sales and marketing, get to keep my job. Brian Lies, author/illustrator of our upcoming HAMLET AND THE MAGNIFICENT SANDCASTLE frequently visits schools, where he discusses his work and demonstrates the development of a new character in real-time, as the students make up the story.
THE BUSINESS END Our application for a credit card merchant account was accepted, and we accepted a proposal from a website developer to create a shopping cart for our site, tie it into an online card authorization gateway, take over our hosting, and oversee general site maintenance. The improvements are in process, and we plan to have our shopping cart operating by month's end.
Almost as soon as we could take credit cards, we received our first consumer orders -- one by phone, one by snail mail. It became immediately clear that we needed procedures for taking and fulfilling orders, so Cate developed a script and a form that we both keep beside our desks. We determined reasonable shipping and handling charges for domestic orders easily enough, but got lost in the complexity of overseas postal rates. Eventually we determined that no single mailing method is most economical for all areas of the world and all our expected package weights. In the interests of convenience, we created a simple schedule for overseas S&H that covers our costs in most instances, while overcharging on some and losing a bit on others. We decided against installing a toll-free number for consumer orders, at least for now. We still have to set up a mailing station in the storage room, and finalize procedures for generating invoices and mailing labels.
This represents a lot of effort to take consumer orders, with the hope that soon we won't do it at all. When volumes get large enough to seriously impinge on our time, we'll sub the work out to a fulfillment house.
Our state-paid business consultant reminded Cate of the importance of revising our business plan in light of all we have learned since it was written. Without question, we were way off on many of our assumptions. And while there are still assumptions that have yet to be tested, we agreed about the necessity to get a better handle on our financial prospects, so Cate completely revised our income statement forecasts for the next three years (bottom line: not terrible), and next will revise the cash flow forecasts (prospect: frightening).
LOTS O' MARKETING
We finalized arrangements for author and illustrator readings and a
children's activity program at the Providence Children's Museum on October
7, Hello Willow's publication date, and I began planning an adults-only
party at the museum for the evening of the same day. Between catering, room
rental, decorations, invitations, etc., it's going to cost us a bundle. But
this is a serious marketing expense, not a vanity fling. In an effort to
establish ourselves as a known entity in Rhode Island, we're inviting many
of the state's leaders in education, politics, the arts, mass media, and
publishing. Now the trick is to present the event as a useful opportunity
for networking and seeing-and-being-seen, so that they actually show up.
It was good month for publicity. I was able to interest the book review editor at the Providence Journal in doing a feature about Moon Mountain, scheduled to appear the Sunday preceding the museum events. Another feature, by children's author Linda Crotta Brennan, appeared in Children's Writer, and resulted in a surge of manuscript submissions, while the alumni magazine of the University of Rhode Island (from which I received a degree unrelated to publishing) began work on a feature about us for the winter issue. We also got our first "hit" in Publishers Weekly.
Our contributors were clamoring for flyers that they could distribute to family and friends, and use when talking with book buyers, soliciting venues for readings, etc. With our merchant account in place, we were finally in a position to respond. Cate designed a one-page sell sheet with one title per side and an order form. We printed just 1,000 to satisfy our immediate needs, and sent off several hundred to our authors, illustrators, family and a few close friends to pass around.
Our contributors have been active in uncovering opportunities for readings, but have generally been waiting for Moon Mountain to make specific arrangements with the bookstores, libraries, and schools in question. We postponed doing this until we had our sales structure in place, and now we must follow up on these contacts to set dates and times. This is not as simple as it appears, because we're not privy to our authors' and illustrators' personal schedules, and we have to commit them to availability three or four months in advance.
In our pre-distributor days, setting a publication date for Petronella caused us much indecision. On the one hand, a spring pubdate was desirable because we had already missed the chance for fall/winter sales to the trade. On the other, we wanted to capture direct sales during the holiday season. We opted for the latter, reasoning that, no matter what distributor's catalog we finally appeared in, we could still present Petronella as a newly available featured title, even if it were not in frontlist.
Making that decision enabled us to get flyers out to the illustrator, Margaret Organ-Kean, who had a near-term use for them in her display at the Worldcon science fiction convention, where she will also do a reading of Petronella. Margaret is the Director-At-Large of the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists, and at her request, we donated a copy of Petronella for that organization's fundraising auction at Worldcon. And she will participate in a program called The Inside Story, in which writers and illustrators get to present their books to Seattle-area bookstore buyers. May half of our future illustrators be one tenth so energetic marketing agents!
Editing Janet Graber was a breeze, because her JACOB AND THE POLAR BEARS was nearly perfect right out of the box, and she was so agreeable to excellent editorial advice (ahem). We've nearly reached agreement with an illustrator for the comic tale, which we have planned for fall 2001 publication.
Other marketing notes:
... Cate gave a talk at a weekly luncheon meeting of the local Rotary club,
where she explained what a publisher does, handed out flyers, and was
solicited for membership. She hasn't decided whether to accept, but it might
be beneficial to our proprietary publishing business.
... We planned for the New England Booksellers Association fall show in
Boston, where we'll share a display table with other members of the
Independent Publishers of New England.
... We pursued sponsorship opportunities with various non-profit
organizations. We're offering to donate a quantity of books that the
organizations could use as membership incentives or rewards, in exchange for
publicity in their house organs. No takers so far, but some expressions of
interest.
... We followed up with some of the book clubs to whom we had sent review
copies, and one of them indicated that Hello Willow is under consideration.
Now that we have Writers House acting as our agency for subrights, we'll
allow them to pursue this, no doubt more effectively than we could do.
Hold the presses! As I type, we have just received our first trade order: one (count em!) copy of Hello Willow from Baker & Taylor! Now we're got the interesting problem of somehow transferring the order to Words, as our exclusive distributor to the trade, for processing and fulfillment.
TITLES IN PREPARATION
Progress was made on our 2001 list. Author/illustrator Brian Lies provided
spectacular cover art for Hamlet and the Magnificent Sandcastle, which we
have scheduled for spring publication. We're now rushing to design the cover
in time for the Words Distributing spring catalog.
Delighted with Jennifer O'Keefe's work on Hello Willow, we hired her to
illustrate Mercedes Lawry's The Sleepy Babies, scheduled for fall 2001. Cate
and I immediately began imposing conflicting priorities on Jennifer -- Cate
wanting to see progress on Sleepy Babies, and I wanting her attention on
marketing Hello Willow: We found an acceptable compromise, by agreeing that
Jennifer should not sleep.
I completed edits with Janet Graber on Jacob and the Polar Bears, and she
proved to be a pleasure to work with. Edits are in process on Star Dusters,
by Gene-Michael Higney and Ann Garrett, and on Louie Larkey and the Bad
Dream Patrol, by Linda Kay Weber. In the latter, a teddy bear character
named Nilla is described as "the color of vanilla wafers." This caused me
some concern, "Nilla" being a registered trademark of Nabisco for vanilla
wafers, but I ran it by our publishing lawyer, and he said it wouldn't be a
problem.
TECH TIP OF THE MONTH
Max slipped a baboon-shaped refrigerator magnet into the G4's internal Zip
drive. We only discovered this when I tried to insert a disc, and it went in
very hard and had to be extracted with small-nose pliers. It took several
hours and the intercession of a minor deity to get the drive working again.
Soon thereafter, I advised our outside designer of the inadvisability of
putting magnetic baboons in the Zip drive. He thought I was speaking
metaphorically.
Warning: keep these away from your Zip drive.
Visit Moon Mountain on the Web. Feel free to contact us at hello@moonmountainpub.com.