I had wonderful local sales the month of December and things were a little crazy in my life. I now have 5 local stores carrying my book on consignment and the holiday season was a good season for my tractor book. I have sold almost 500 copies locally. I wonder how many have sold on the internet? It would be great if my publisher had a way to check this online. We won't know until April how many sold between October and the end of December, that is a long time to wait! Not really, but it feels like it.
My illustrator and I are set to meet next week and go through the monetary aspect of this business. I think we have cleared our initial investment with just our local sales but am still in the process of finalizing a total. We are also going to meet to get started on our second book about the bulldozer. He has some things sketched up for me to look at and the whole process starts over again! How exciting! At least this time, we are a little wiser about the whole process.
We are considering looking at a different publisher since I would like to have a perfect binding instead of the saddlestitch. I have found that some of the brick and morter stores will not accept books that have a saddlestitch binding in their stores. I would like to be able to sell my books in the bigger stores, so something to look into.
Some of the other local children's authors that I have met have published their books locally. If we went that route, we would have to sell on Amazon but I am not sure how we would get into the large distributors like Ingram and Baker and Taylor. I think this bears looking into. Would we hire a distribution company? If so, I wonder what the cost would be? It could lower the cost of producing the book but then would we be stuck with hundreds of copies sitting in my living room? Lots of questions and lots to think about. Onward and upward with this whole children's book process.
Thankfully things have slowed down, but hopefully not TOO much!
Stacey
