6000th Book Sold

We sold our 6000th book last week.  I am not sure what that means.  Is this good or bad? Since I am my own publisher, and have only been doing this for a little over a year, I don't know whether I should congratulate myself or shake my head.  Seriously.  

We published our first title in June of 2012 - "Go Hokies Go!".  Our second two titles came on September 1st, 2012.  These were "Go Wolfpack Go!" and "Go Tar Heels Go!".  Our final two titles, "Go Mountaineers Go!" and "Go Pirates Go!" came on November 1st, 2012. I had set a goal of selling 1500 copies for the three major schools, NCSU, UNC and Va Tech. The two minor schools, Appalachian State and East Carolina, I set a goal of selling 750 copies in a year.  

On September 1st, I had met one of my three goals for the major schools - NCSU.  I place the mantle of success on the fact that I am a graduate of NCSU and received a lot of support from my alma mater.  They have been extremely gracious to let us do several book signings at football games, an article was written about us in the on-line publication of the school newspaper, and both the artist and I have been well supported by school friends.  The school book store has also been successful in selling our books.  

We came close to meeting our goal of 1500 per title with UNC and Va Tech, by selling around 1250 per title in the first year.  What is astounding to me is that the UNC book store has yet to sell out of the 50 books that they started with.  A tiny store like the Lolli Pop Shop in Greensboro, NC has sold over 100!  Why?  Well, the student store is actually divided into two parts, one half is t-shirts, gifts and such, the other is a true book store.  Our "books", which I would actually classify as a "book shaped gift" is located over in the book store side.  Sadly, books do not sell as well as school related gifts.  I feel certain that if they chose to move my "Go Tar Heels Go!" over to the gift section, we probably would have passed the 1500th book mark.

My excuse for Va Tech not meeting my goal is because for the 9 months that we had the book, we were relying on a gift rep group to try and place it in stores.  Once our failed relationship with this company dissolved, I started mailing samples to stores I found online that I thought would be a good fit.  We placed the Va Tech book in quite a few stores from March to June.  These stores did not have adequate time to re-order the books, thus we fell short of our goal by 250 books.  Had we taken the initiative ourselves from the start, I do believe we would have reach our goal of 1500.  

Why 1500 a year?  I have a fantastic cousin and her equally fantastic husband that run a publishing company called Small Beers Press. My cousin, Kelly Link, is a famous horror and sci-fi writer. Her husband, Gavin Grant, runs the publishing company.  I thankfully get to pick his brain on occasion.  When we spoke back in the spring of 2012, he asked me my goals. I threw out the 1500 number. He didn't quite laugh, but he did indicate that maybe I might consider myself lucky to sell a 1000 in a year.  It wasn't a taunt, or put down. It was just an opinion from a very experienced publisher.  Being a competitive soul, I adopted a goal of 1500.  

I should mention that I lowered the bar for Appalachian State and East Carolina, because of their ranking in merchandise sales according to the two licensing companies, LRG and CLC.  They put these two schools at around 75th and 80th on the ranking system.  They are more regional than national and they have less alumni and a smaller fan base than the three other schools.  I will post in November of 2013 how each of these schools did in my first year of having them out.  
At the moment, these schools have sold 693 and 668, with three weeks to go.  I am not sure I will make this goal either, but we will be close.  

So have we been successful?  Yes and no, is the best I can tell.  We have a high quality product, order one to see for yourself! It is not cheap, we are not in the $10 range. We are a $19.95 to $21.95 product.  The eternal question is should we lower our wholesale price from $10 to $8.70 and then let the retailers sell if for $16.95?  Would we increase our volume enough to offset the $1.30 that we would have made? Would our online direct sales increase with this price drop? These are all big questions that currently don't know the answer to.  If you know the answer, let me know! In the meantime, we will continue to move forward.  

Cheers!
Bryan Jones

Sales Reps, Distribution, and Warehouses Oh my!

Wow. It has been a while since my last post, but as that vaguely funny insurance commercial reminds, life comes at you fast.  Everyone's life changes every three months.  Nothing could be truer for me at the moment. I have taken on a lease for a warehouse, written 7 books, run a real estate company, have been a father/dad to two wonderful girls and even attempted a husbandley duty every now and then.  Proof of this is my bride is now preggo.  Nevermind that we have two girls ages 7 and 9 and that wife, who works 3 full days a week has gone back to nurse practitioners school.  The Man upstairs likes to remind us that we are not in charge. "Point well taken Sir!"

I signed with a sales rep group this summer.  The purpose was/is to help with distribution.  I went into this knowing I was going to be a small fish.  Each rep would carry one to four different books.  A Virginia rep is most likely not going to sell an ECU book in there territory.  However, I am coming to find out that VA reps can't sell VT books in there area.  Since I am not a person to sit around I made an excursion up to Richmond.  I called on Pharmacies, Hardware/Gift stores, Baby stores, Toy Stores and even Fan stores.  In three days I placed 100 books in multiple stores. Most stores only bought 5 (my minimum).  Hey, if they sell they will order more, which by the way has happened!

Anyway, when I returned from the sell-a-thon, I turned in my orders to the rep that covered the territory. He turned in the orders and got paid. My goal is make the reps see how easy a sale it is.  I don't want them to view me as competition. We are in this together.  The rep did tell that he had been in the business quite awhile and had never had a company do what I did.  Nice to know, now sell them!

The part that I cannot figure at this point is that I have not received one order from the rep that covers the DC area, the rep that covers the east coast of VA and the rep that covers SW Va.  Hmmmm.  Va Tech territory? During football season?  Not sure what is going on here.  It looks as though I will have to make another trip into Va to do the job that my sales force should be doing.  Not what I had in mind, but what else is there? My hope is that they will see the light and start making the sales on their own.  I will give this company a year. Hopefully it will last a lot longer.

My experience with the NC reps have been a mixed bag.  One of my reps is better than Paul Newman in the movie "Tin Men".  She can't be stopped. I think she is the only one that has actually read my books.  These are 12 page children's books with scratch and sniff, moving parts, flaps and rhyming lines.  I am not asking much for a rep to get to know the product.  I have one other rep that is starting to turn it out and I think will do well.

The other NC reps? Not sure, they haven't answered my emails or phone calls.  Well, not exactly true, her manager finally provoked her into thanking me for orders that I turned in for her.  No joke.  The other rep still has yet to thank me for her orders...

Enough about my rep experience for the time being.  I mentioned that I now have a warehouse. I do!  Downtown Hickory, across from the post office, 2500 square feet of concrete man space.  It even has dueling shitters. Not facing each other, but side-by-side, they have yet to be used in unison, but we haven't figured out how to turn on the light in there. Until then, they will strictly be for solo use only.

The warehouse is not a good deal for us until we have 7 titles. We have 3, though 2 more are on the way.  I get to pay power, which has not broken $40 a month yet and internet through century-link, which to set up, was a disaster.  It seems to work fine and for 11 cents more a month, we got phone.

This is my life at the moment.  Children's books.  I haven't covered our book signing(s). One success, two disasters.  Next installment. Until then...