We haven't received our activity books yet, but the anticipated release date is June 6, 2008. You can order the activity books on our
Wrestling The ABCs website, or on our
Davids Gold Medal Sports store website. Our store website is the best place to order, as you can place bulk orders for discounted prices, as well as receiving the shipping and handling costs at checkout.
We just got in from Pittsburgh (family related-not book stuff), and we decided to take a little breather from book stuff, at least until time to head out to Vegas). We already have enough venues in mind (some scheduled, some not), to take up the rest of the summer, and then we have school visits that we will do from September-November (Tom's too busy with his business after that to take time for school visits).
Our Ilustrator Robert Lence, is going to Vendor's Village with us, so I'm pretty excited about that. He's bringing some of the book illustrations with him for a sneak preview!
So from this point on, we shouldn't really be too busy. We are grateful that this activity book and our picture book will sell themselves. We just have to be in the right place at the right time. I know several writers, and it seems they have to spend so much time promoting themselves and their book. And I know (since they are all published through houses, not self published like us), I know that they really get very little regarding royalties, and even less for my friends who are agented.
That is something we won't have to deal with. We do of course have to recoup our publishing costs (about 900 picture books sold will do it, and about 800 activity), but after that, we are in the clear, and each book sold is 100% our profit. If we sell all 3,000 of our activity books, we will make a $10,000 profit! Haven't done the math on our picture book yet. But it will be a higher profit margin.
So...buy our books!
Tom and I worked a bit on the 1,2,3 Wrestle! book. Basically, we just talked about it some more. He wants to continue with it, but doesn't want to get it published until the Wrestling the ABCs has been out for about a year.
I know it has been absolutely AGES since my last post here, but that's what happens when you have a child that just graduated from college. You have parties to throw, college to prepare for, driving lessons, etc. So....anyway. Our head shots have been sent in to the publisher for the back of the book, the rest of the rough drawings have been sent to us by Robert (we have to pick the ones we like-yikes!, they're all so good!) Let's see...all of our book reviews and endorsements have been submitted for the book, and Robert is working like mad to get the cover art done for some posters that our publisher want to take to an upcoming book conference! So, that's about it for now. Next post will hopefully include a sneak preview of one of the final illustrations, or possibly even the new and final book cover!
WOW! Tom and I just found out that included in our Vendor's Village fee is a full color 1/2 page ad in the official program for the Olympic Wrestling Trials. I can't even believe it. And their fee is already extremely reasonable and includes tickets to the event for two people for all three days. They also put us on their website and the e-newsletter update that they send out to all their members and other folks. We've been getting hundreds of visitors to our site every day, from everywhere! So...now we have to design an ad. We have until the 30th of this month, so we're good.
