THE UNIQUE SELLING POINT

Harry's Horse dummy

Generating a following and identifying a specific market for your book can be a challenging process. This week, author and illustrator Gillian McClure examines her experiences running a small press.



It was when my editor phoned to ask if I would help her come up with a unique selling point for the new picture book she was taking to an acquisitions meeting the next day, Harry’s Horse, that I realised a nice story and pictures were not enough to see a picture book into print; a business criterion needed to be met and I was going to have to review my way of thinking. In the end the book my editor wanted for her art series never got published as she was unable to convince the sales team. That was back in 2009. 

    A year later, I started Plaister Press in order to publish my own picture books. The decision was primarily a creative one - I wanted to proceed with a book rather than run a business. Luckily, the first Plaister Press book, Selkie, was a reprint. It had been on the National Curriculum and had a good sales track record. Just as well, for I still wasn’t thinking too much about the selling strengths of books.

 It was only after two years of Waterstones signing events that I really started to see things from a business perspective and realised that the second Plaister Press title, The Little White Sprite was quiet with no bright, in-your-face cover to act as its selling point. Memories of past letters of rejection ending with, ‘a little too quiet for us,’ rang in my ears. I needed to come up with a unique selling point for this book and learn how to get my message across if I was going to convince people to buy it:

 “Yes it is quiet,” I would say to customers (parents, grandparents and teachers.)  “Ideal for reading aloud at bed time with a gentle rhythm and rhyme and soft coloured pictures.” I would read them the opening pages plus the final one and then, to make doubly sure, point out that the theme of The Little White Sprite - a child going through a hole in a tree to a magical world inside - was one that would be encountered later in books like Alice in Wonderland where a child falls down a rabbit hole into another world. Teachers, looking to inspire the imaginations of their Year 1 pupils, liked this and parents and grandparents sometimes would say The Little White Sprite reminded them of a book they’d had as a child, Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree. It was evident customers like to see a new and unknown book in the context of books they already know about.

So there was a market for The Little White Sprite but it was not going to be a mass market and it was going to need some dedicated selling to shift copies.

    As the Plaister Press list gradually lengthened, increasingly, the business side of me would ask the creative side to identify the selling strengths of each new project right from the start. It was obvious now why my editor could not get Harry’s Horse through the acquisitions meeting.  It was a story based on a picture hanging in Parham House, but unfortunately Parham House is not part of the National Trust so the market for this title would have been limited to just one shop instead of the many National Trust shops. I too have rejected that title even though I’m fond of the story and pictures.

  Reviews can often help identify a selling point as they highlight what aspect of the book appeals. Here are two reviews of the fourth Plaister Press title We’re Going to Build a Dam:

Carousel review

Teach Nursery review

When I’m selling this book I now talk about beach holidays and hazy purple and yellow beach colours. This works even in the winter when we’re all yearning for summery outdoor activities.

 The fifth Plaister Press title, Flood was published after a winter of floods in 2014. I wondered whether that theme, along with the ink splattered, splashy pictures, would be its unique selling point.

Flood was taken in dummy form to the Bologna Book Fair and there received a conflicting response from Japan. One Japanese publisher liked the story but wouldn’t consider buying it because it was too soon after the 2011 tsunami while another thought it would be just the thing post tsunami. The unique selling point of this book obviously lies elsewhere – perhaps ‘teamwork and animal characters cooperating in the face of adversity.’

 Despite one’s best efforts, however, publishing a book, whether for children or adults is a lottery; nobody really knows which book is going to succeed and some of the classics have had their selling points completely misunderstood or ignored by publishers: the following rejections are taken from Rotten Rejections by Bill Henderson.

Animal Farm - 1945 by George Orwell
‘It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.’
The Time Machine – 1895 by HG Wells
‘It’s not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.’

The Good Earth- 1931 Pearl Buck
‘Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China.’

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On 28 June Gillian  will be leading an SCBWI workshop from a business perspective, Ways into Publishing, for writers and illustrators. Participants will be encouraged to look at their picture book projects, old and new, with a view to selling them to a publisher or directly to the customer if self publishing.

Her official website is here.

Plaister Press

Author-Illustrator Gillian McClure has enjoyed a long career working with publishers creating children's books - and then she began publishing herself. Here she offers the story behind Plaister Press.


Early in 2010 I formed Plaister Press in order to self publish new picture books – physical books - alongside my traditionally published books.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of running a small publishing company is acquiring a greater knowledge of the publishing industry; for all the paths I’ve been following are the same as those followed by big publishers. 

    Publishing is like doing the Lottery. It takes only one winning book to turn things around but that winning book is unpredictable; the most unexpected of books win. And all the other books - well they need a lot of dedicated marketing and selling to shift them out of the warehouse. It’s the winner, the best seller that subsidises the rest of the list. Until that happens, if it does ever happen, the advantages of running your own publishing company are not all financial. So what are the other advantages?

• You have the opportunity of creating a brand – your own list.

www.plaisterpress.com website

• You have books coming out and getting reviewed when perhaps there may not be much movement on the picture book front. 
• You have new books and new workshops based on them for school visits. 
• If you’re an illustrator, you have new artwork to sell one day.

All this keeps your name alive out there when it might otherwise be fading away as you wait for traditional publishers who take their time in deciding whether to take your next book. My agent Stephanie Thwaites at Curtis Brown agrees; she is happy with what I’m doing; sees it all helping raise my profile. 

My initial reason for starting Plaister Press back in 2010 was a creative one rather than a business one. I’d found myself becoming, over my thirty-year writing and illustrating career, a smaller and smaller cog in a bigger and bigger business and I was becoming frustrated. So when a friend gave me a sum of money to ‘proceed with a book’, I joined up with a typographical designer and started my own publishing company.

Working with typographic designer, Lisa Kirkham.

The creative rewards were great. I love the autonomy and control.
I love experimenting with new formats and working closely from the rough stage with a typographic designer – something I was never allowed to do before. However, ‘proceeding with a book’ means going far beyond an author/illustrator’s usual comfort zone if that book is going to end up on a child’s bookcase.

A business sense is needed. I saw ahead of me a huge learning curve - dealing with -
 

• Printers - Chinese printers – getting files to them, working within their schedules – avoiding the Chinese New Year

• Wholesalers & distributers – Gardners and Bertrams

• ISBNs and barcodes

• Invoicing and returns

• Marketing and promotions

• Trade fairs – the Bologna Book Fair and the Frankfurt Book Fair

• Selling

• Stock keeping – I needed an efficient excel sheet showing how much stock I owned rather than counting boxes under beds or in the attic

• Bookkeeping – double of everything because I’m still running my self employed business. Double accountancy bills

• And, on top of all this, leaving enough time and space to create new books  without losing the quality expected of me when published the traditional way

• I also needed an exit strategy: it helps on sleepless nights to know that, with one click of a button on the Companies House website, I can make my company go dormant. After that, all I have to do is clear my remaining stock in school and bookshop signings before a holiday on the profits! A simple exit strategy has been one of the reasons I’ve not wanted to complicate my business by publishing other people’s books alongside my own

Seeing how big the learning curve ahead of me was going to be, I decided, when I started out in 2010, to cut my teeth on reissuing a back list title with a good sales record where the rights had reverted.  After that, I’ve been publishing new picture books; one a year.

I discovered, early on, to my surprise, that I liked marketing and selling; enjoyed mailing out to all the UK Independent booksellers and spending time in bookshops, learning who my customers were.

So now to the drawbacks: small is beautiful but it’s also a problem. A small publisher, as I said earlier, is following the same route to market as a big publisher. Big publishers are my competitors and one of the real drawbacks of being so small, is that everything in the publishing industry is geared for BIG:

• Discounts are big
• Costs are big
• Print runs need to be big if you are going to make any profit at all   

• Turnover and numbers of titles need to be big to interest any sales agent 
• Even the lorry delivering the books from Felixstowe docks to my house was big – too big to get down my street. The driver phoned to say he would have to meet me in a lay by on the outskirts of Cambridge. I had a vision of 1,500 books left unguarded on a palette on a damp autumn day as I made several journeys by car getting them back to my house. I had to come up with some solution quickly or all those cartons of books would go back to the docks. With physical books you have physical problems. 

So three years after creating my publishing company, I found I was a bit stuck. My books were selling but the profit was only just covering the production costs of the next book. I could go no faster than one book a year if I was going to maintain quality.  Alone, I was never going to notch my business up to the next level.

So I signed up to Martin West’s organisation Authorization!   - a very newly formed umbrella organisation for small publishing companies or authors bringing back into print back-list titles. Authorization! has solutions to many of the ‘big’ problems and can help when you’re too small to proceed beyond a certain point on your own.

Gone now are the problems with large lorries delivering cartons to my house. Gone are all the books under the beds and all the trips to the post office. I now have warehousing, a sales agent, rights agent and four reps.

Martin West talking about Authorization! plus Susan Price and myself on a self-publishing panel at the 2012 CWIG conference. He will be speaking again on self publishing at the Society of Authors on Tuesday 16 July 2013 at 6pm: CWIG – Children’s Self-Publishing: Authors in Control?

I wonder whether, in the future, authors and illustrators who are already doing a lot of their own marketing through social media will be expected by their publishers to also foot the production costs of any risky or niche-market book – publishing it themselves. Then, only if a book is seen to be a winner, will the big publishers step in and take it over for the mass market. Perhaps, in this way, self publishing might be the way forward for publishers and authors and illustrators alike.
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 Gillian McClure is the creator of dozens of picture books for children, and former member of the Society of Authors CWIG committee. See her website here, and blog here.