Book Launch Preparations
A few days ago 300kg of books arrived on the Isle of Skye. I’m now finding out how complicated it is to produce, launch and distribute a new book. Maybe this is why publishers and distributors exist!
Having done what I thought was the hard work, that being five years of photography all around the island, I’ve now morphed into “guy who sells books”. Given that the profits from each book sale are donated to the Skye Mountain Rescue Team, I’m highly motivated to get every copy sold.
I’m really pleased that the team at Armadale Castle just up the road from me on Skye are going to host the launch event at their Stables building. This is an excellent space which will work really well for the launch, especially as it has a bar for beers, a kitchen for making tasty treats, and space for some musicians to play. This means that there’s food to organise (and pay for), presentations to write, musicians to arrange, and generally hope that someone turns up.
Part of the job leading up to the launch is a publicity blitz across social media, and adding in physical banners and flyers. This means creating the content, a significant job in itself.
Among the extremely talented people on the island is my friend Paddy McKay. Paddy and his wife Mairi run Skyelark, a craft and gift shop just next to Armadale Pier. Paddy is also a keen photographer, and he does commercial printing as well. He had the idea of creating a pull-up banner to advertise the launch. I knocked up a massive Photoshop file to fit on the banner template, with the main photo being the same one as the book cover. At the bottom is a collage of images of the book itself and images that are inside it to give people an idea of what the book contains.
Paddy printed the banner out on his huge printer, and it looks fantastic. The white “sash” reading “BOOK LAUNCH” is clipped on (Mairi’s idea), so I can replace it with something else like "BOOK SIGNING” or “BOOK TALK” etc. So the banner is now a multi-use asset - brilliant. It’s now installed at The Stables so anyone visiting will see it.
Another important aspect has been setting up and processing pre-orders before the launch. The reason I chose to do pre-orders is to ensure that people who can’t get to the launch have an opportunity to get the book as early as possible. It also helps to generate interest in the book, with more PR opportunities.
On my website, which is powered by Squarespace, I have an online shop with an ordering facility. I’m quite impressed by how it all works. Learning the intricacies of online ordering, inventory management, and payment processing has been quite a task. Sorting out postage costs has also been really tricky, so I elected to just do UK orders initially. Because each book is quite heavy at 1.2kg (the high quality, thick paper is the cause of that), it’s not cheap to post. When someone orders multiple copies there’s a chance that all profit (and therefore the donation to SMRT) is lost if the postage doesn’t get calculated properly.
Then, there’s the packaging to sort out. Each book needs to be well packed and protected. This requires things called “book wraps”, which are cardboard constructions that can take books of varying thicknesses. And once, wrapped, they need to be posted which means labels, barcodes and Royal Mail collections.
This is all particularly difficult when I’m often not on the island for work or whatever.
Happily Paddy comes to the rescue again. Skyelark are handling all the packing and despatching logistics for me. Paddy’s now a dab hand at securely wrapping the books, and has amazingly linked up Squarespace’s fulfilment system with Royal Mail’s postage purchasing system so it’s much simpler to print the postage labels in batches. Brilliant.
Add in to all of the above is general anxiety and nervousness about whether anyone will turn up. And that’s countered by the worry that many people will turn up and I’ll run out of books. Or my card payments reader will stop working. So many things to think about.
In any event, I’ll have about 150 books with me on the night to sell, and I’m sure people will want some to be signed as well. It’s going to be fun, hectic and no doubt slightly panic stricken!