Creating a business plan sounds boring, but in reality, it’s crucial to your success in publishing your children’s books. Let’s look at why this is important.
Don’t Spend Marketing Money in the Wrong Places
First, my business plan is to use POD (Print-on-demand); to simultaneously publish with hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook; and to market to the school and library market (think educators!). Once I decided that, I thought hard about what that means for marketing.
When I think about promotions, I never participate in promotions aimed at bookstores. That’s not my audience. Since I focus on the school and library market, I can ignore bookstores. Actually, I’m not set up for them anyway because I use print-on-demand services which require higher prices than the price points at a bookstore.
If I planned to reach bookstores, my business plan would be set up to offset print; my company would be an affiliate of the American Booksellers Association to take advantage of advance marketing opportunities to bookstores; I’d participate in Publisher’s Weekly programs of offering ARCs to bookstores; and so much more.
Instead, Mims House is an affiliate member of the Children’s Book Council who administers many of the teacher-focused book awards; through Ingram’s POD program, my books are widely available in educational distributors; because I produce all formats simultaneously, I also distribute directly to Overdrive for audio and ebooks; I attend conferences for library associations and teacher associations; and so much more.
Your business plan protects you from spending marketing money in the wrong places! This is one of the biggest reasons to clearly lay out your business plan and to think through the ramifications of your choices.
Putting Your Business Plan Together
Last time, we talked about, “What Children’s Books Will You Publish?” You need to know age level or reading level your audience, the format you’ll publish, audience demographics, and something about the inspirational nature of your books.
To take that toward a business plan, we to add a few more things.
Manuscripts. Will you only publish yourself, or will you open to outside manuscripts?
Formatting. Will you format or will you hire professional designers?
Art. Will you hire illustrators for cover art or picture book art? Do you have a contract for that?
Print. How do you plan to print? Offset or POD?
eBooks. Do you plan to offer eBooks? Will you create the eBooks yourself or hire a designer?
Audience. As we talked about last week, who is your audience? This time, you need to go in depth, because this will affect the next question of marketing.
Marketing. Given what you now know about your print options and your audience, how will you market? List organizations that include your audience. Talk to your audience! What do they consider when they buy a book? For example, does it matter to the school librarian if your book received a Kirkus or SLJ review? If you wrote adult romance novels, no one cares about those institutional reviews! But school librarians, using public money, must justify purchases; therefore, they care.
Financing. How will you initially finance your company? Do you have cash to invest or will you bare bones it for a while until there’s some profit? Or do you need a bank loan?
Writing It Down
It helps to nail this down in your head and on paper. I almost never look at what I wrote, but I did write the answers to these things. Mentally, I reevaluate each time a new book comes out. Does all marketing stuff this hold true for this book?
Traditionally, business plans are necessary if you apply for a loan. Informally, though, it will inform all your choices about how to run your business. Take your time deciding! Because once you decide, the business plan should run your business.
Great information Darcy. Do you have any recommendations for an offset printer? Also, with offset printing it would seem the burden of distribution is more on the author/publisher than it would be by using IngramSpark and POD. Any thoughts on either?
Thank you for the information, Darcy. I have a meeting on Friday re: a book contract. There's a lot of variances on pricing for writing and illustrating a picture book for 4-8 yr olds. I'd love guidance, if you're consulting 1:1.