INTERVIEW: JOI NOBISSO

Josephine Nobisso was fed up. She knew from the feedback she'd received that there was still a huge demand for three of her picture books, but her publisher wouldn't change their out-of-print status. So she got the rights back and recently reprinted the books as the first list of her new publishing company, Gingerbread House. In this interview, she shares her journey from author to independent publisher.

CBI: Was there a "defining moment" when you knew you had to start your own
publishing house?

JN: Two “moments” converged to provide the impetus I needed to launch my own press, and (this is significant for anyone wanting to do the same), to enable it to be successful: the personal moment and the cultural one.

The personal moment is the protracted one that most creators in this field live: that endless moment of “waiting” for things to “break”. You love the field; you could eat your favorite children’s books. You pour your time, dedication, and resources into your work. You bookworm yourself through library and bookstore stacks, devouring not only text and art, but also imprints and editors’ inclinations. You update every markets list, attend the conferences, and submit and submit and submit carefully and diligently.

And still, you find yourself wiping the frost off the windows while frowning in perplexity over so many mediocre books that do make it to publication. You learn early that the selections and the execution processes are subjective, and imperfect, and sometimes downright unfathomable
If you’re like me, during this “moment”, you have the mixed blessing of placing a few manuscripts with wonderful editors at prestigious houses. These successes encourage you like wins do a gambler. With them, however, often come dizzying frustrations: your book is produced or positioned or – very likely- marketed poorly. Your editor must get up to join the industry-wide game of musical chairs, or your house gets gobbled by the Giant Who Ate Publishing. Eventually, you find yourself swamped in the backwash of disasters you can see coming but from which you cannot run.

You might go through this for almost thirty years, as I did, working constantly, publishing occasionally, and getting the greatest rejection letters. (I’ve also had three pseudonymously written romance novels published, and dozens of short pieces.) My personal “moment” lasted so long I rarely heard the clock ticking the seconds!

All the while, I’m thinking how I might “do” publishing better, given the chance. But the cultural “moment’ had not chimed. Self-publication was ridden with taboos and kinks in reasoning- pre-conceptions that resisted their own logic. Self-publishing was equated, for instance, with vanity publishing. Professionals know that would-be writers turn to vanity presses either in total ignorance of the workings of the field, or truly for the vanity of the author or the piece. Vanity’s benefactors are not professionals who realize that vanity publishing is called so because it is done “in vain” in that there exist no serious efforts at producing a valuable book, and that once printed, these are not truly “published” in that they are not brought to the public by intelligent positioning, targeted promoting, or vigorous marketing. Savvy authors and illustrators frustrated with traditional picture book publishing are not good candidates for the even greater frustrations of vanity publishing! And they do not want to risk losing reputations with the fruitless practices of vanity presses!

Another misconception was that a self-published book was not “good enough” for the established houses. There do exist writers and artists who can’t tell that the egg they’ve laid is smelly, and there are some who go to the trouble of hatching that egg in the heat of the self-publishing incubator. But, the next time you read a book put out by the big houses with text or illustrations that, in all modesty and honest professionalism, you KNOW is just as good as, or perhaps not even as good as, the text or art you’ve already had rejected by the very editor who acquired that book, you should once and for all put to rest this knee-jerk notion that self published books are per force inferior to traditionally published books. If a trained and practicing author or artist can find little to objectively admire in a book published by a big house, what does that say about that publisher’s ability to discern “good” books? It might say that the big houses do not own the patent on knowledge of what makes a book “good”. They make the same smelly-egg mistakes some self-publishers make, only they have many more eggs with which to practice.


When a well-published professional self-publishes, he may be showing an even greater commitment to his work than ever. Which of the struggling talents in the children’s field wouldn’t want to live on his work and not be forced to “support his habit” by other means? Self-publishing is a declaration of independence. It is saying, “I love the children’s books I have created so much that I resolve to be responsible for them, and I resolve to dedicate not just the stolen moments “when I have time”, but to channel all my energies toward seeing that they are well-conceived and well-perceived. If The Author’s Guild and The Writers Union find it necessary to hold regular contract seminars because book creators keep coming up out of the pearl dives of publishing with empty shells, perhaps it is the “smart” writer who dives the deep alone, harvesting the wealth.

That old idea of self-published books not being “good enough” so permeated the field that some review venues would not look at self (or independently) published works. That is all changing now because of the following reasons, and because of the instances of self-published books’ becoming phenomenal successes.

When did that cultural “moment” finally dawn? Years ago. I didn’t see it until two years before I inaugurated Gingerbread House, and most creators of children’s books have yet to see the chink of light over the horizon. But it IS getting brighter all the time, and soon, very, very soon, the little guys in children’s publishing should be giving the big houses a run for their money.

Two factors helped bring about this enormous opening up of the skies: technology, and the conglomeration and downsizing of big houses. Technology has demystified the process of producing books (finding a printer or broker, getting established with ISBN’s, making contacts, etc. can all be done online, and so much design work can be done with the right software.)

Technology allows us to get the word out about books, too. So many promotion and marketing advocates in countless books, web sites, and reports cover this aspect in helpful detail, so I needn’t go into the benefits of technology now. It’s an appropriate place, however, to post a caveat: technology does NOT hold all the publishing answers- mechanical or qualitative- especially for children’s picture books. We must keep in mind that the segment of publishing that is getting so excited about e-books is the publisher. E-books solve many problems of production and distribution for the publisher, but it’s difficult to see how they benefit the lovers of picture books so much that they will replace that form. Be an adjunct, yes, but replace it? Try printing out a 32-page full color picture book and see how much paper and ink you’ve used up- and all to get loose pages!

Ironically, the downsizing of the big houses has helped pave the way for their own competitors. There had always been many talented editors, copy editors, designers, art directors, indexers, and pre-press experts at large in the field. Now even more are setting up shop, establishing associations and societies, and working from their PC’s. A serious independent publisher can find and utilize the same professional services the big houses always used. Publishing shot itself in the foot when it let all that talent go.

Downsizing sounds a spooky bell in society at large. It means that fewer and fewer minds in a publishing house control the tone and subject matter of books. That means that fewer mind-sets are driving the tastes of children. The needs and interests of people’s intelligence have not changed in a parallel, downsized way. If anything, the reader has become more expansive and savvy, and since reading is a very intimate activity, there will always be room for the “break-out” book, or that niche market book, or that book which is ahead of its time, or nostalgic in style. Given the larger houses’ pressure to always find “hits”- those “big” or “timely” books, the stage is set for any publisher to fill in the gaping gaps of tastes the big houses (with their big overhead) cannot afford to court.

CBI:The books were all published first by Green Tiger Press, then S & S
before you got the rights back. What made you believe in these books so
much that you kept reselling the rights to publishers? And how were you
sure that the market hadn't been completely tapped out before publishing
them yourself?

JN: It wasn’t I who resold the rights to Simon & Schuster. Most authors don’t get the break of having a second house buy rights to a title, no matter how much the author loves the book or believes in it! The only reason those books got a chance to see light of day with Simon & Schuster was because their originating house The Green Tiger Press was bought by the larger company, which then printed most of Green Tiger’s titles for one run before letting them die. I’m quite certain that on my own I would never have placed these books that had already been around the city block.

Why this certainty? When I asked the editorial director at Simon & Schuster why Grandpa Loved and Grandma’s Scrapbook, were continuing in their out of print status even though they each had almost 1,000 back orders, I was told, “These titles have reached everyone they’re going to reach,” This from the very house that had acquired them, ostensibly because they saw their promise!

I then approached an editor with whom I have a nice relationship, enclosing copies of the good press Grandpa Loved had gotten, (since it’s been with Gingerbread House, it’s garnered dozens more raves), including its having been named “One of the Best Kids Books of the Year” by Parents Magazine, and its having been cited as one of the all-time children’s books with the ‘most unforgettable language’ in What a Writer Needs. I sent royalty statements to prove it had more than earned back its advance, and I enclosed over one hundred letters from librarians, teachers, kids and counselors begging me to tell them how to get copies. Her response? She’d always loved it, she’d bought copies for kids even before she knew me, but because it had done so well, she was sure it would not have a market left.

Although Grandma’s Scrapbook had slipped through the cracks of the acquisition, and had never been submitted for review through the usual venues, in their own quiet way this book and its companion volume Grandpa Loved, had made it onto several lists. Neither the originating house nor its successor had ever explored the special markets I’d been suggesting for years. It was readers’ letters that convinced me Grandpa Loved and Grandma’s Scrapbook had a waiting audience. It was the disappointment of people who ran to my table when they saw “For Display Only” copies of the books at author and illustrator events that told me these needed to be reprinted. It was the librarians who called wondering how to replace their worn copies with new ones that convinced me. It was the fact that I could not afford to buy my own book from book searchers at $107 per copy that convinced me. And it was the encouragement of scrapbook-keepers that put my decision over the edge. Some scrap-booking consultants were sharing Grandma’s Scrapbook at meetings. When one of them in Hawaii posted a call to her e-group listees about the book, she sent me a wad of the posts, telling me that her husband was getting tired of getting so much mail on his server. I still keep in touch with that woman, and I still thank her for having given me that final shove.

I wrote those two books before I turned twenty-five years old. This is how a children’s book becomes a modern classic: enough people from one generation must love it, and it must continue to stay in print (or be brought back into print) when those readers are in a position to buy for other children. Modern classics are not so much self-driven as they are publisher-perpetuated. Don’t you have a childhood favorite that looks like it will never see light of day again? And don’t you think yours is better than so many of the “classics” out there that take up the prime real estate on bookshelves, face out? Everybody keeps buying them because everybody keeps buying them. Every new mother is buying the book she loved as a child. Understanding that Gingerbread House books are dearly cherished by many readers, and understanding that it is up to us to create its legacy, we intend to never, ever put our books out of print, and we will never feature our backlist in black and white or- Yikes! - as a line listing, like in a telephone book.

So when the rights, by contract, for those two titles and for the third I’d done with illustrator Maureen Hyde, Shh! The Whale Is Smiling, became available, I wrote to Simon & Schuster to have them reassigned to me. It’s a straightforward process. Then I went through a maze of wishing and hoping as they tried to locate the printing plates. The Author’s Guild had to intervene (I encourage every author to join!). Eventually, I polished the texts, took another mortgage on my home, and had them printed in both cloth and paper as the launch list of Gingerbread House.

Grandpa Loved and Grandma’s Scrapbook are picture books not just for children, but also with “cross-over age appeal”. Because they are both intergenerational and deal with the life and death of a grandparent, they can easily be positioned in certain niches: bibliotherapy, hospice, funeral direction, counseling, etc. And they have only just begun to find their audiences.

We sent rough dummies of only Grandma’s Scrapbook to the four largest industry magazines of only one of the markets I’d been urging the original publishers to approach: the scrap bookers. We got enthusiastic calls from each of the editors who have not only reviewed the book, but also featured its cover in full color and recommended it! An editorial is infinitely more powerful than any ad we might have bought. In fact, an endorsement from an expert is the kind of press money cannot buy. Our phones and our shopping cart are continually busy with orders from scrap bookers.

Shh! The Whale Is Smiling is a densely atmospheric lullaby book, to be read to very young listeners, and it does not readily lend itself to a niche. Even aquaria might not pick it up because it isn’t a non-fiction “about” whales. This was one book that had not gone out of print, but had actually been remaindered. I would have been taking a very big chance with it had I not tested the market by some fluke (no pun intended!) before I ever became a publisher. When I was offered remaindered copies, even though they were at a very good price, I could buy only less than 1,000 of them. Within three months I was sold out.

Still, my daughter and partner Maria and I have been a little taken aback by the success of Shh! The Whale Is Smiling. Not only have several kindergarten teachers, unrelated in demographics, told us it is their “favorite” naptime story (I believe in other mss. that I intend to publish more than in this one), but Scholastic Book Clubs in both Australia and New Zealand have acquired the soft cover in volume, and one has even placed a second order. Now we are seeing hardcover orders from those two countries on our distributor’s monthly reports. To someone, they have become “keepers”. Just now, we are in contact with our printer in Hong Kong instructing them to go into a second printing on the soft cover. So even a book that has no obvious niche market, and was deemed the stuff of remainder piles, is finally taking off- ten years after it was originally published.

You see, early on I saw that the promotion and marketing departments of my publishing houses were already over tasked. Like many other authors, I do lots of signings and appearances, I print promotion materials at my own expense, I buy cartons of my own books because my ten author’s copies won’t stretch to all the opinion molders who might help it find its way onto certain lists and shelves, and I always donate copies of my books to the institutions that book me. The authors I know who are involved in the work of promoting their books might sense relief if they self-published. They would have free rein in promoting their work, and would no longer worry about duplicating or sabotaging the efforts of their publishing houses while they avoided stepping on collective toes.

CBI: Did you do any revisions to the text or artwork before publishing them?
with Gingerbread House?

JN:Grandpa Loved went around for seven years before I placed it with the Green Tiger Press. They kept it for six years before it publishing it. You can imagine my delight when the dummy arrived after all that time. It brought a surprise, however. “It’s a boy!” I exclaimed when I saw how Maureen Hyde (with whom I had never been put in touch) envisioned the child. I had written the text with a girl in mind, but had done the narrative in first person, singular and plural. Most authors had little say over the illustrations. I respected the house’s role of connecting art to words, and would have held my peace even if I had not loved the art as I did. Maureen made the subtext come to life, sandwiching the child’s reminiscences (during which she has him growing up) between first and last pages that show him as a teenager. I was impressed by the instinct and intelligence she brought the project.

My acquiring editors and I had done some minor edits on both Grandpa Loved and Grandma’s Scrapbook, and I was told that we’d fine-tune it again as publication got closer. In time, all the editors left their positions. I never did get to insert changes I’d wanted. When Gingerbread House was conceived, one of the first things I did was that editing. None of the books had been changed “substantially” enough to require new copyrights.

It’s an interesting sideline that in thirty years, no two of my books- whether for children or adults- were acquired by the same editor. None of my editors ever landed in quite the same kinds of acquisitions positions.

CBI: All the books are illustrated by Maureen Hyde. Was it difficult to move
from being the author of the book to her publisher?

JN: Difficult? No. My decision to become a publisher did not come as a surprise to her. Maureen and I have become great friends over the years, and we had always commiserated over the vagaries of children’s book publishing. I kept her informed as we took steps to establish the house. Working with her been the personal and professional pleasure I’d expected.

Maria and I spent a wonderful day in Florence with her this summer, and we expect to work with her when we bring Gingerbread House to the children’s book fair in Bologna next April. She’s been teaching and studying art in Italy for some years now and has grown tremendously as a painter.

Right now we’re preparing another project together, all of us lining up time in which to realize the work.

CBI: Can you please give authors a glimpse at what the publisher's role is like?

JN: Choosing a worthy manuscript is easy; it’s the one that excites, the one over which you lust, the one you desire because it charms or delights, surprises or enriches you. The author has put in all the years of advance work, becoming the very best she can be. Her few words take on their dedicated meaning in the recesses of your heart. In your brain the synapses explode and, “Houston, we have ignition.” I don’t mean it’s easy to find a manuscript like this; I mean that once it’s found it’s easy to recognize it.
Choosing the illustrator? You’re a kid with a dollar in a candy shop: you have to match the taste to the mood, remember old flavors or risk new ones. You fall into an illustration and lie there looking not only at line and form, but also at the narrative content. The elements that help me choose an artist are those that drive my writing: the subliminal economy and the power of the subtext and the tonal qualities, the quicksilver meaning of an arced line, etc.

I was informally trained in the arts in Italy where I went to college in Urbino, and I later worked part-time for a printmakers’ gallery, for eight years, representing over 100 artists to private and public collections.
Going to contract? Advances, royalty schedules, flat fees? I have a simple rule that lets me sleep well at night: offer the very best terms Gingerbread House can for the projected book, and build into the royalty schedule a nice bonus so that the creator can share in the bounty in case there’s a runaway success.
We print with the venerable firm, Regent Publishing Services, in Hong Kong, headed by George Tai, a most personable man and a knowledgeable printer. His wonderful brokers in Missouri handle all our questions and concerns Stateside, filling us in on the options we have, acting as go-betweens for problems, etc. For our launch list we sent Regent text on disc and on clean printouts, and we provided either films or existing books from which films were shot. Our next projects require original artwork so that we will be shipping those to Hong Kong, if necessary, or working with a pre-production house here to create the electronic files for art and text.

We expect to be working with a calligrapher, and are researching that now, and we always keeping open the discussions about the issues of trim sizes,.

Because two of our books are “gift” books, the kind one buys as keepsakes, I felt sure that I could challenge the conventional publishing wisdom that says a children’s book released in both hard and soft formats will compete with each other. I’ve seen that libraries will buy hardcover for durability, that chain bookstores will try the soft first but will go to hard when customers ask, that independent stores prefer one of each, that online retailers will capture people in the same sensible way I do at author/illustrator events: if the need and the funds are enough, people buy in hardcover, if not they venture a soft cover.

At every stage of the book printing, we were given proofs that had to go into immediate turn-around to avoid printing delays. As these began to look more like finished books, we sent them express to book club editors, hoping that early interest would help increase our print run, thereby reducing the per-book price. The editor from Scholastic Australia placed a large order for the soft cover of Shh! The Whale Is Smiling. We ordered f&g's (folded and gathered pages) from Hong Kong and sent these to key review media such as Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, etc. We had some doubt about traditional review journals’ picking us up since our list made up of revised, reissued books. (Months later, when it looked as if no review would be forthcoming from two of the journals, we took out a co-op ad with our distributor, in a targeted issue, for a mention in those venues.)

Foremost in our minds was the question of distribution. We knew that if we could not interest a reputable distributor, notwithstanding the substantial discount they must require, we would be up against a mountain of trouble as we tried to get our books into the traditional markets. We knew we would be handling the special markets, but the traditional ones often provide the publishers’ slow and steady daily bread. Independent Publishers Group took us on but had a time snag: they were switching warehouses and the last thing they needed to do while trying to empty out one facility and transfer to another was store books for us. While our books were making their way by ocean freighter to California and Australia (one of the advantages to getting the advance order was that the books shipped directly to the book club, saving us costly additional freight), we made arrangements with a freight firm that dealt with customs to bring our books from the Port of New York (which is not New York, but Newark, and is not a shipping port, but a train terminal!) to us here while we readied a storage space for seven tons of books.

CBI: Are you focusing most of your marketing energies to special sales and
unusual sales outlets that the larger publishers overlooked?

JN: This question hits upon THE key to our having been able to launch a press and THE secret to our success.

Because we wanted a presence in the “legitimate” book world, we could never, ever ignore the established routes books take into bookstores, libraries and school libraries. We’d be foolish to try to reinvent that very well oiled, wheel. There do exist returns in that world- a problem all too familiar to creators of books- wherein unsold books are returned- for full refund- in any condition, over the period of the edition’s life’s, but this is a prevailing industry convention that shows no sign or waning, especially now that chains place big orders and give those books only a limited time to sell from their highly-coveted shelf footage.

Selling to the usual suspects requires a dedicated sales force that knows whom to contact where and when. Self-distribution CAN be accomplished by a small publisher, and it is every day, especially if that publisher puts out highly specialized books for specific interest groups.

We might have hired reps to add us their collection of publishers and take us into the field, but we had positioned ourselves so that we’d be a desirable company to an established distributor in the world of children’s books, a route that would give us much more exposure. We had published not just one, but three professionally produced and printed titles, giving a prospective distributor some faith in our intentions, and some tooth when presenting our line. Two of these had cross-over age appeal: while a child listener hears engrossing and authentic stories of grandchildren’s lives with grandparents, the adult reader is genuinely moved by the universal themes of love and loss. We believed our books would make it, too, because we had created a small list that had something on it for both genders. This may not seem like a big issue, and it was one that happened almost by accident for us, because Maureen Hyde so many years ago had envisioned a boy instead of a girl speaking the “I” and the “we” in Grandpa Loved. If you’ve ever attended a children’s book fair, and seen how boys reject titles that feature a girl heroine on the cover (no matter how “strong” she looks), and vice versa, you know that reader identification holds very true even in books for youngsters.

We had approached the most well known of the independent distributors but by they vacillated before deciding on us. During a break between two of those waves, we had come to know more about a very good distributor, IPG, Independent Publishers Group, and we decided to approach them. They agreed to distribute Gingerbread House.

So, is our work with the conventional book-selling world done now that we are well distributed? Hardly. We have to do what I had become very accustomed to doing before, but now with an abandon which the big houses had never allowed- I have to support someone else’s marketing efforts with promotion of my own. It has never made sense to me that publishers who gave me only 10 gratis copies then went on to charge me as much as a bookstore pays for my books. I used to go broke buying them for promotion, and the practice, by necessity, limiting my efforts. We have made it a Gingerbread House policy to offer our books at a much deeper discount to their creators. We want the desks of special markets people blanketed with our books. We spend so much time on promoting our titles to niche venues and marketing them in very direct ways that a large house would fold concentrating its efforts on three titles like that!
It is what I term my “ironic success” that is helping to bring in sales, too. I was trained to be a teacher, and was certified by New York State. Instead, I wanted to be a writer. Now I find myself conducting about 100 writing workshops per year: I am teaching writing! One of the key elements of Gingerbread House’s success (and this cannot be understated if anyone is thinking of doing this) is my personal involvement with the very people who are most interested in what I’m doing: children, teachers and librarians. The sales force of a big house is not rolling up its proverbial sleeves and crouching over a desk to guide students in the very thing I do for a living: writing. In this way, authors and illustrators are uniquely qualified and advantageously positioned to be successful as their own publishers.

CBI: Will you be eventually publishing other authors and illustrators? If so,
will you focus on books that have a lot of special sales potential (niche
markets) or do you think you can compete with general fiction?

JN: For many CBI readers, the answer to this particular question is probably the most interesting one, and up until a month ago my “Yes!” would not have been as qualified.

As far as the question concerns illustrators, Maureen Hyde cannot possibly have the time or the inclination to illustrate all the books we will be publishing, and certainly we will be working on some titles for which her style and range will not match.

Maria and I have a file cabinet drawer full of artists’ samples from agents, from having attended Frieda Gates’ May events, from tear sheets, and from many other sources. It might be heartening for illustrators to know that publishers keep their work in mind for projects that are not ready to be set into motion. Competent efforts in the arts- written or illustrative- are never wasted, and this is one reason one continues to create until the body of work takes on a life of its own and people are interacting with it even when the creator is absent.

We have five books for future lists earmarked for certain illustrators, only two of whom have any inkling about our intentions. The other three probably don’t even know we exist. When the time comes, we’ll contact them or their agents, offer competitive terms, and hope we will work together. We wish we could move ahead very quickly on future lists because we have stories about which we are both exceedingly excited, but we must wait until we can offer everyone involved the right terms, and that takes a careful building of the business. I never want someone who works with us to get the kind of blues I have experienced when an editor has left, or a house has folded.

Gingerbread House is a family business, run, for the moment, out of half of the upstairs of our home in Westhampton Beach, New York. I’ve been publishing children’s stories (in magazines and as books) for almost thirty years. My daughter, our Operations Manager Maria Nicotra, was raised on the field. An only child and a home-schooler, Maria has come to luncheons and meetings and conferences with people in the industry since she was a baby. She has been involved in many a late-night discussion with authors and artists and editors. (My slide toward pride is that six authors have dedicated and/or acknowledged books to me.) She- literally and figuratively- cut her teeth on children’s books, so much so that she has an inner ability with it.

Last year, we visited the office of a well-known editor before we had lunch with her. In the car on the way home I was thinking about that house’s upcoming books, which the editor had shared with us, and apparently, so was Maria. “Mom” she asked about a particular title that was already printed, and for which any adjustment was too late, “did you hear how that one line (she recited it) didn’t scan?” I HAD indeed, but no one else had seemed to notice. “It needed another beat,” she said, providing the perfect solution. She had JUST turned fourteen years old!

Maria and I had worried about “branding” Gingerbread House as a Josephine Nobisso/Maureen Hyde entity when the first list with which we decided to go would consist only of books with those by-lines, but we took that risk because those three made the most sense. They were the ones that: 1.) all three had rights available to us, 2.) two had built-in markets, 3.) we decided on Shh! because we needed a third to give our company credibility, especially with a distributor and with the Library of Congress, 3.) would not present too many pre-production costs (or so we thought. It turned out that the films for two could not be located by the time we went to press,) and 4.) Since I was the author, we saved having to give me an advance. Since Maureen had no new artwork to create she was willing to accept a good-will advance.
When we started Gingerbread House we thought of the launch list as being just that- a list that would catapult the press and get us airborne so that we could peruse any project we wanted to- others’ or mine. When I was “just” an author, I had very serious interest in several mss. from diverse editors, but the editors left, or ran out of steam on the piece, or they asked for re-writes and then were unhappy because the re-written books were not the same ones with which they had fallen in love. We can almost taste the flowering of those books, and we can’t wait to hold them in hand

The frustration of being “just” an author stems from the conditioning one gets to hearing “No!” or “Maybe”, or “Not this one,” to our proposals of so many of the projects we want to see realized. The big shock for me personally as a publisher is that doors keep opening everywhere. As an author, I had come to think of a phone call as distressing when inquiring, for instance, on the status of a ms. in which the house had been expressing interest for two years. In contrast, now I hear “Yes!” and “We’ll get back to you in an hour,” before comes another “Yes!” There a sense of liberating release now, a direct contrast to the frustrations of being at the mercy of others, especially when they had power to reject projects that I was sure I could prove worthy –given the chance.

It looks like Gingerbread House will be doing an adaptation of an adult story we found in the book of a friend, but we haven’t progressed to contract yet. The deeper we go into independent publishing, however, the more we see that our taking on other people’s projects would defy the very points I am making here: that anyone who has the material and the drive would do well to go it alone. This is not to say that we will never publish another author. It just means that at this time, we believe so much that independent publishing is solving the problems I had when I was “only” an author that we would feel more like part of the old problem than of the new solution were we to put other authors under contract. As we grow and can do more of the work in-house, we will be able to offer authors the kind of terms I had always dreamed of, and which now, given the current percentage with which we must work, are the stuff, only, of dreams.

General fiction? We can compete in that arena; our promotions efforts allow it.

The future for Gingerbread House? As we work on upcoming lists, we do not stop our efforts for our three launch books. What a relief it is to have free rein in driving these titles into those markets that have a built-in need for them! Every niche has its own protocol and venues, and each must be identified and respected before a publisher can have entrée into it. When we saw that the nature of the funeral industry, for instance, was less open to direct dealings with unknown entities than were other venues, we signed a contract with the innovative on-line clearinghouse of interest to that industry, HeavenlyDoor.com, to offer Grandpa Loved and Grandma’s Scrapbook. We hired a promotions firm, The Jenkins Group, to explore avenues deeper into it. A funeral director I know used to occasionally buy cases of Grandpa Loved and Grandma’s Scrapbook in hardcover to give as gifts of hope to families who’d lost grandparents. I urged Simon & Schuster to approach his special market with discount incentives, but they never acted on it. He’ll be very happy when he discovers that Gingerbread House has made those titles available in paper!

CBI: Can you briefly outline the tasks involved
in setting up a publishing house?

JN: I’ll take you through this as though they are stages or steps, but the fact is that most of the events are concurrent.

If you already know the children’s field well and you have had the useful experiences of studying it, creating projects, submitting, getting rejections, or having something published, you are a good candidate for self-publishing. These processes initiated you and afforded invaluable on-the-job training!
Read everything you can about self-publishing. Even though the self-publishing expert, Dan Poynter at Para Publishing, focuses his advice mostly on non-fiction adult publishing, much of the information he offers can be applied to any discipline in the field. He provides downloadable e-documents from his web site. http://www.parapublishing.com/ We obtained many useful reports and lists from his FOD (FAX on Demand) system. Some of this is free; for some there is a charge. Expect to pay about $300 for the items you’ll need.

Subscribe to PW (Publishers Weekly) $189, and School Library Journal, $97.50. We assume that you already belong to SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) http://www.scbwi.org/, and that you read its Bulletin and that you subscribe to the CBI (Children’s Book Insider) http://www.write4kids.com/index.html.

The underlying force that drives you to create a publishing house is, of course, a passion for what you intend to publish! You should have at least one project in hand, but if you intend to grow this into a larger publishing house, and create an immediate presence in the field, you might start, as we did, with three titles to give your launch list credibility. Don’t be discouraged if you have only one title, however. We know of two publishers with one self-title each who, for their purposes, are doing very well with local sales to schools, fairs, etc. One recouped his printing investment in about three months! Your book may have enormous niche potential. Some publishers have only one book to offer and keep finding great demand for it.

Choose a company name and check with your attorney to see if another business has that name, and with your web server to see if a web domain is available with that exact title or something similar enough. We are Gingerbread Publishing House, LLC, dba Gingerbread House because a builder owned a name similar to ours, but our website had to become GngerbreadBooks.com because other people had gotten our name first. To avoid this confusion, choose a snappy name that no one else has.

Apply for local business licenses. (Cost varies.)

Draw up a business plan. We worked with the Small Business Administration. They will lead you to the conferences and seminars about running a business. This process of attending meetings, composing the plan took three months for us. Conference fees: about $500

One of the reasons we at Gingerbread House did not put out calls for unsolicited mss immediately was that we know how underpaid authors are, yet we knew how hard it was to turn a profit on a full-color picture book in order to extract a larger percentage for the author. We felt conscience-bound to offer, at least, industry-standard advances, which, today, run about $4,000-$5,000 per ms. to start. Since an advance is, essentially, an interest-free, non-returnable loan against a book’s future earnings, we simply were not in a position to offer them. Also, we knew that any book we acquired would be one about which we’d be totally convinced and dedicated. If we had drawn other talent into our launch, it would have been unfair of us to ask the author of such a project to take a chance on us until we could prove that we could bring that project into the best light.

If you are your own illustrator, you are at an advantage in that you will not be paying any advance. If you are an illustrator who doesn’t write, and are looking for a way to showcase your talents through this press, you might want to consider illustrating a little-known classic in the public domain.
If you are bringing back into a print a book done by another house, you will have to obtain permission from the illustrator to use his work, and this might involve a flat fee or an advance. Advances to illustrators, too, are entirely negotiable. We paid Maureen e a small one, but we began paying her royalties after only five months. If you need an illustrator to develop art for your book, the fee is entirely negotiable, but if you have your eye on an established artist, be prepared to pay an advance of $5,000-$12,500.

The least expensive launch projects consist of your own O.P. books. The only acquisition expense this will involve is the buying of films from your former publisher. If these are available, you will have been spared some trouble but not necessarily expense since, by standard contractual terms, these are made available to the author and/or illustrator “at the cost of manufacture” so that whether you buy films from your former publisher or have them created at the printer’s firm from the existing book or (better, yet) the original artwork, the cost will be the same: around $2,500 for each picture book.

If your are publishing a new book, complete your editing so that the illustrator has the best possible draft. Being your own publisher allows for text modification, even after art comes in.
Whether you are hiring an outside designer or doing the work in house, now is the time to discuss trim size and other design aspects with the artist. Get the artwork started.

Create blurbs for your projects. Gather bio materials, take promo photos etc.

As you go through the process of creating the book:

Study Literary Marketplace to get an idea of the scope of the field, and to get impetus for each step of the way. Make a list of possible distributors. The largest independent is PGW (Publishers Group West http://www.pgw.com/). We decided to go with IPG (Independent Publishers Group. www.ipg.com) Be aware that you will be going through a submissions process not unlike the one you went through for mss. In a speculative submissions process, you will get an outcome based on subjective criteria.

Choose a printer. Send RFQ (Requests for Quotations) to at least a dozen printers so that you have an idea of what your project will cost. We wanted to go with an Asian firm, but were shy of the complexities involved, so we get American quotes, too. The range will surprise you: for a soft cover we were quoted anywhere from under a dollar to over $4.00 per copy! The rule of thumb is this: you MUST be able to price your book at 8-10 times its printing cost. Do the math. If the market provides for a $8.50 list price on a 32-page full color, soft cover picture book, and you have to give bookstores a 50% discount, you will be left with $4.25 with which to pay the printing, shipping, storing, royalties, promotion, distribution, etc. If you pay $4.00 to have a book printed you will certainly be working in the red before you even start. If you are lucky enough to be selected by a distributor, there will be many costs to bear, but its’ not worse than fulfilling orders alone: the wholesalers like Baker & Taylor, Ingram, Amazon.com, etc require, moreover, that you pay shipping! Many of their beginning orders will be for one or two books, until your promotional efforts start paying off. If it costs $3.20 to ship one copy, you will be in deep trouble unless you can get a good printing price.

Get a competent computer system with a scanner and a versatile printer that can later handle promotional print work for signs, boards, etc. ($3000) We bought a PC, but had I known then what I know now, I would have chosen a Mac.

Connect to the best online services available (we choose cable. $100 to set up; $30-40 per month, the lower figure if you buy the $100 modem instead of paying monthly costs.) If you haven’t surfed the children’s books sites, do it now and bookmark possible links. Look for possible niche sites and bookmark them, too. Find out about trade shows and contact the ones in which you are interested in participating. As applications arrive, sign your books up. (Each show can run anywhere from $30 to $125 per title.)

Set up Limited Liability Company or Corporation (LLC.) Little over $1,000.

Open a business checking account so that you may process checks and take charge cards.

Join marketing organizations such as PMA (Publishers Marketing Association), $90 yearly, and SPAN Small Publishers Association of North America, $75. These memberships will save you money with discount programs with freighter, office supplies, and much more.

Write to RRBowker about getting necessary I.D. numbers, or go to Bowkerlink.com for:
ISBN International Standard Book Number (Check with Bowker for current pricing. When we set up it cost $195 for 100 numbers, but I understand the price has increased considerably and that there are fewer blocks of 10 numbers available.)
Bar Code. Consists of ISBN with Bookland Extension: $10-30, depending upon whether you have it produced on film or discs, etc
SAN (Standard Address Number) $100 (This gives everyone in the industry a “place” in the book world.)

Have stationery designed and printed (about $700)

Design a web site and keep it ever current. We use FrontPage 2000. (Kick-off designer fee: $600)

Order preliminary office supplies (about $500)

Submit applications for:
ABI (Advance Book Information) Free.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number LC
Cataloging in Publication (CIP) $30 each title
Copyright $20 each title
IRS SS-4 Employer Identification Number They also offer a free disc about small business’ relationship to the IRS.

Rent mailing lists from ABC (American Booksellers for Children) and other sources. Prices range from $35 to several hundred.

Order shipping supplies (about $600)

Prepare a pre-pub offer, a press kit, various print aids about your books, your authors and your illustrators. Buy appropriate stamps for your books. If you can do your own design on your computer, you will save, but if you hire the design work out, be sure to proofread everything over and over. These items can cost anywhere from $500 to several thousand. Have postcards printed to announce the book. (As little as $390 for 5,000, if you have the films) Have flyers ($1,000) printed to send to trade shows with the books.

Prepare lists of reviewers in all professional venues, trade journals, niche markets, etc. Use a comprehensive resource like Susan Raab’s An Author’s Guide to Book Promotion at http://www.raabassociates.com/authors.htm.

Prepare storage facilities. Beware: while books aren’t exactly orchids, paper and plastic laminate do need some climate control. Most basements are inappropriate places for storing books. Garages in many parts of the US are poor choices, too, unless you provide them with dehumidifiers
Print your project. We choose to print three titles, in both hard and soft cover, 3,000 units of each edition, for a total of 18,000 books that arrived on seven pallets and cost, with shipping and freight to us and to Chicago later, and with launch costs, about $30,000.

You will have ordered f&g’s to be shipped in advance, express. About $300.

Send f&g’s to major review venues

Submit f&g’s to the distributors of your choice, for possible representation of your work to the trade (bookstores, online and off, libraries, chains, some special markets).

Apply for or double-check listings in all major directories:
Books in Print.
Publishers Directory
Small Press Books in Print
Literary Market Place
(ABA) American Booksellers Association Book Buyers Handbook
Until you get a distributor, create affiliate relationships with on-line booksellers and set up accounts with the major wholesalers.

When books come in,
File copyright forms

Send copies to all agencies with which you’ve registered, as file copies.

Pursue every promotional possibility you can think of.

When Books Come In:

Send review copies to every journal, magazine, news service, online site, etc. that seems appropriate. This is an on-going process and expense for us. We have spent many thousands doing promotion.
Install a secure shopping cart feature on your site. We use CCNow.com.
If you have no distributor, consider obtaining merchant status to accept credit cards.
Submit to any prize programs for which your title is eligible. The CBC (Children’s Book Council) put out a very useful guide, Children’s Books: Awards and Prizes.

CBI: Do you think your years of experience as an author helped you devise a
strong business plan? In other words, is this something people who have no
experience in the publishing industry should attempt?

JN: My answer to the first part of your question is an unequivocal “YES!” in recent years, and for a duration of eighteen months, I had a very intense and interesting experience: I was the only person who knew about children’s book publishing when I helped someone else set up a press. Before that experience, I had taken the extent of my knowledge for granted, but the advantage of expertise in the field soon became absolutely plain.

To the second question I give a qualified “no.” Anyone who knows something about anything once knew nothing about it, and it is important in any endeavor to bring fresh and creative ideas to enliven it. You can always learn what you don’t know. However, many conventions of an industry are established precisely because they do work, and someone who has no knowledge of children’s books will have to be able to afford to make many, many blunders before she learns enough to make a success of it. Someone new to it might ask herself what her press will do to distinguish itself from being just another pretty book company.

Of course, a newcomer has the option of hiring others to do the work, and that will be fine for certain of the jobs, but the driving force behind the house, the publisher, should know everything she can know, and be willing always to learn more. There is only so far that a house can progress without a passionate interest from its operator.

A casual lover of children’s books likes “story” and art and sees only the time of day when she glances at the timepiece of children’s books. Someone who works critically with books on a professional level appreciates the face design, and the material of the watchband and may even know something about the designer. The back room people in publishing know how to set the hands so that they mean something, and how to get the thing ticking. The publisher of a small press is the watchmaker himself who built the watch and who knows all the hidden gears and the secrets that keep them in motion.

CBI: Are you finding time to write? If so, how has your role as publisher
affected your role as writer?

JN: Amazingly, over the past year, besides editing existing stories and being in the process of fulfilling an obligation to another publisher for a non-fiction YA, I have worked on several children’s stories and am putting into book form my innovative method for teaching writing, “The Nobisso Recommendations: Guiding Students to Write in Their Authentic Voices”, the program I have been bringing to schools for ten years now. However, as is often the case with writers, I still feel I don’t get enough time to write! I’ve always been an early riser and a very focused worker. My time is definitely more divided, and this is one of the sacrifices I’ve been forced to make for the publishing company, but I can clearly see that the work load will lighten as we lay more of the foundational tasks down.

Maria, too, is working on her own book, called, so far, Author Daughter, a deliberately ambiguous title. She works on it when I’m hogging the new computer. (When she’s sitting at the computer, I revert to work on files I have on the clunking old “Barbie” computer that would squeal at the sight of a mouse, and has never washed a Window.)

With Gingerbread House at its launch stage in which it is necessary to establish a presence in the field, so much time and effort blurs one workday into the other, shoulder to the boulder uphill. This period of intensity will pass, however, and, too, I expect to be hiring more office help. Then the blur will take on different hues- those of the stories nibbling at my dreams and niggling my consciousness.

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