Hello, Kalei here, thanks for stopping by. I am the Supply Chain and Marketing Director for Seastars Publishing, LLC. To be truthful, I have never held this title before but I have held a few others in businesses that may seem less complex, but this business and any other venture for that matter can seem complicated due to the many unknown facets that it entails and I assure you I am totally unfamiliar with this niche. With that said, that’s why I am here. At this point with the launch of our first children’s book, we have encountered more than a few issues along the way that needed clarifications and a little more effort to resolve. Some of these issues are normal for anyone trying to publish their own work and some of it is self-inflicted due to a particular direction or path we have chosen to take.
Example #1: For instance, we could have simply chosen to use Amazon’s instant publishing service that would print and bind a brand-new paperback copy when ordered online and shipped to a doorstep in a couple of days, simple. But the book that the author, S.K. Mundon and illustrator, Siera Makanani Snow produced was special and I am not being biased here, I have researched and compared to other children's rhyming picture books and found the poetry to be in line with others; simple, meaningful and stimulating for the young mind, which the story concludes by coming full circle, where some readers want or may expect more? I’ll come back to this later. Now, the poetry is fine on its own, but when paired with the striking illustration visuals, I said, “this cannot be a paperback, it will not do it justice.” At that point, we decided to take the road less traveled by producing a super glossy hardcover book with heavier paper for pages, also glossy, that will hold up better over time, can you say, “value!”? Now, this route can be a whole lot costlier, or is it? We could have just handed off our work to someone who handles all aspects of publishing and charges accordingly with fees and markups along the way, which I totally understand how they make their money, but again, we purposely wanted to do the legwork and research to learn the process first hand as well as maybe save some money? Savings, of course, is an assumption that will be figured out and shared here in the future.
It may seem straightforward and simple going through this one example, but I have skipped many steps which included re-editing drafts, resizing prints, adding pages, many meetings, discussions, approvals from partners, as well as vetting printers and this is even before establishing a proper budget! I am not trying to overwhelm you here, I will hopefully provide one path out of many out there, share our mistakes and our recommendations so if you ever decide to one day publish in the same manner, maybe what is written here will help. One last word regarding our first published book “The Tiny Seed”. To date, there are 37 published reviews on Amazon, either 4 or 5 stars. I cannot help to be drawn to a few who say, “the book seems to finish abruptly” or “we were expecting more,” to that I say, they have missed an important aspect in the product description, “first in a series”, for I too find it hard to put down something that has my full attention.
Mahalo,
Kalei