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Feature
New Moon Rising: Birth of a Children's Book Publisher
Installment #4: OTHER PEOPLE'S INKMoon Mountain Garners Publicity, Works on Covers, Sets Up A "Rejection Factory," and Receives the Last, Beautiful Piece of Art for its First Book
It's been a good month for publicity. We mailed our first news release, announcing Moon Mountain's existence, and it generated quite a bit of interest. Features appeared in eight local newspapers; two more have conducted interviews that should appear next week, and we have another two scheduled. We've also heard from two alumni magazines interested in using the release (one of which also wants a review copy), and learned from Cate's father that we got pickup in his hometown paper in North Dakota.All this publicity won't be a lot of direct help in selling books, there being no books to sell for another six months. But it's a promising indication that we'll be able to generate publicity later, when it really counts. More importantly -- and the real reason we did the release at this time -- was that by demonstrating our ability to generate ink, we'll make ourselves more attractive to a distributor, hopefully before our first books are published.
Covers and Interior Illos
We're not quite ready to approach distributors, though, because we still don't have the cover of
Hello Willow, our first book, finalized. After much frustration and too many iterations
on the original design concept, we finally threw it out and starting from scratch. Bingo! Almost
immediately, we resolved the design problems, brought the illustrator back from the brink, and
are now within a day or two of finalizing the details of a very appealing cover.
The other good news on Hello Willow is that today the FedEx man delivered the final illustrations, after only one deadline extension, and still well within our production schedule. Cate's many meetings with the artist paid off, and we are delighted with the complete package. We already had one illustration scanned and a match-print produced, and the results are spectacular; we seem to have found a scanning service that knows what it's doing. Tomorrow, the rest of the art goes out for scanning and, when we've got the scans, Cate will finalize the text layout and font choices.
The cover to Petronella, our second book, was finished a couple weeks ago. We already had superb cover art, and Cate's design and calligraphy turned out very well. This was a big relief to me, both as a business partner and a husband, for I didn't relish the ramifications of passing negative judgment on her work. Cate took a printout of the cover to the local Barnes & Noble and set it up, face out, on a shelf to see how it would look. And how did it, you ask? Like a well-designed, beautifully illustrated children's book.
Meanwhile, Petronella's interior illustrations continue to come in bit by bit -- leaving us enthralled with the art, and increasingly nervous about our schedule with the printer.
Whither the Blurb?
I spent time analyzing the details of other children's book covers, and writing cover copy. I
couldn't find an answer to why the price on the inside front flap of many children's books is
preceded by the letters "FPT" (full price trade?), but I guess it's not important. Our consultant
told us not to bother printing a price in Canadian dollars unless we have a Canadian distributor
who requests it. As we already knew the price for the books, we decided to include pricing in the
EAN barcodes; I bought these over the phone, and they were emailed to our designer within
minutes as .eps files.
Next to the designs themselves, the biggest cover-related issue was blurbs. Galleys provide publishers of "regular" black-on-white books with a convenient mechanism for soliciting blurbs to use on their covers. It's trickier for us as a picture book publisher, because there won't be any galleys, and folded-and-gathered sheets will only become available long after we've finalized the cover and sent the whole package to the printer. So at least for the first printing, there will be no Kirkus Reviews or Publishers Weekly blurbs on the covers. Instead, we're imposing on friendships and distant connections, and doing a little arm-twisting, to try to wrest blurbs out of writers and editors outside of the context of published reviews.
Wading Through Manuscripts
From a decent-sized trickle, the flow of manuscripts grew to something like an open spigot over
the past month -- and we don't suppose we'll ever be able to turn it off again. We received 100
submissions in the last 30 days, and after the mailman complained, had to install a larger
mailbox outside the house to handle it. There should be no problem making up a good list for
2001. In fact, the hard part will be choosing the best of several good alternatives.
Publisher, president, and art director Cate Monroe shows off the just-completed artwork for the first book on Moon Mountain's schedule: Hello Willow, by Kimberly Poulton, illustrated by Jennifer O'Keefe.
We had to refine our mechanisms for dealing with this volume of submissions, including: a new filing system; a spreadsheet to keep track, and, alas; form rejection letters. We know how much emotional capital authors tend to invest in their works (especially, it seems, children's book authors), and wanting to treat them all considerately, we had begun by writing personal notes for every manuscript we rejected. But we soon realized that rejection letters would become all-consuming unless we assembly-lined the process. So from now on, most rejections will get cranked out on one day each month, with just the author's name and the title of the work merged in. We still personalize the occasional rejection, however: mainly for literary agents, or when the submission is really good but just not for us.
The volume of submissions, rejections, and queries have also caused us to revise our submission guidelines considerably. Every few days we receive a manuscript for a type of story or a publishing format that we haven't yet considered, and it forces us to decide -- independent of the merits of the submission at hand -- whether this is something that we would consider doing. We find it's easy to make a list of what we don't want -- much harder to explain what we do.
"Special Sales"
I attended a presentation at the Small Press Center in New York by Jerrold Jenkins of The
Jenkins Group on "special sales." This was both enlightening and encouraging, because I saw
that Jenkins Special Market Sales is doing for its clients exactly what Moon Mountain plans to
do on our own behalf -- that is, offer books in quantity to third-party business entities for use as
promotional materials. Jerry's a good speaker -- relaxed and open, and he kept his "pitch" far
submerged beneath his willingness to provide useful information about how to find and
approach potential customers.
Moon Mountain Proprietary, our "special sales" division, is creeping into being -- not at all the quick cash-flow source that we envisioned when we decided to launch it nearly simultaneously with the parent company. We had planned to mail our first news release a month or two ago, but it still hasn't gone out, because we're not far enough along in developing our own company literature. We'll need this to use as a "response piece" to answer inquiries when (and if) the release is picked up in the marketing trade media. We're re-thinking the literature format and content for about the fourth time, and getting revised design and printing quotes as I write. Once again, Alan Greco, our outside designer, has come up with some creative ideas to get a caviar look on a canned-sardines budget.
We've fielded a couple inquiries that were generated by our website (which we're not yet promoting heavily), but the first proposal that we sent out for a proprietary book came to naught. The prospect couldn't find the time to read it, and we were able to get her on the phone only by calling at odd hours when she was unprotected by a receptionist. It comes as no surprise that any given pitch doesn't result in a sale, but we did expect that a customized proposal would at least get us past the gatekeeper. Live and learn. We'll repackage it for other companies in the same industry and ship it out again and again. The 99-percent finished cover of Moon Mountain's second scheduled title: Jay Williams' classic, Petronella, newly illustrated by Margaret Organ-Kean.
And what else?
Here's the monthly laundry list of other items we worked on, are working on, or are trying to find
time to work on:
* Cate is learning Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark Express, all from scratch, all on the fly. She
says it's a mountain of a learning curve to scale, and that we'll continue working with Alan for
quite some before we have the skills in-house to design good-looking, professional-quality
materials.
* I made my first tentative attempt at editing our website. It seems like a very squishy medium to
work in and it makes me nervous, but we've got to go there.
* We mailed a downpayment to our book manufacturer, buying (we presume) a place in the
printing schedule.
* We interviewed a couple New York publishing lawyers, and will soon have to make a decision
and put one of them to work for us on some interesting trademark and rights issues.
* We met with a literary agent who deals mainly in foreign rights for Russian publishing
interests. We saw lots of finished books with wonderful illustrations, and Russian text begging to
be translated for the U.S. market. There were a few items of interest, and we're now awaiting a
page or two of rough translations so we can understand what the stories are about.
* Shel Horowitz of frugalfun.com is the driving force behind the Independent Publishers of New
England, and Cate was in frequent communication with him, trying to set up a meeting for the
embryonic trade group. Only four people showed interest in a face-to-face, so the meeting has
been downgraded to a teleconference. Given the existence of the Publishers Marketing Group
and the pubforum listserve (http://www.onelist.com/group/pub-forum), I question the need for
such an organization, but it can't hurt to put out feelers in this manner.
* We met with the production manager of an ad agency, who wants to go freelance and work
with book publishers. Her comments about our work in progress were insightful, and the work
she's managed looks great. She clearly has "the stuff;" we'd be glad to provide a discrete referral
to other publishers.
* I had a brilliant brainstorm for a $100 million e-book concept. We'll get back to you when
we've figured out the next step.
Visit Moon Mountain on the Web. Feel free to contact us at hello@moonmountainpub.com.