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Before there was a shopping cart...
We had these books...
...and needed a way to get them out to the public.
I self-published The Beginning Teacher’s Resource Handbook (left) and wanted to tell the world. I decided to advertise this book in Instructor magazine and took a big leap of faith buying a 1/6-page ad.
I had this flash for a tag line for this book: “At the start of your career or the end of your rope...” (which I’ve since used elsewhere on this site) and perhaps that, or the simplicity of the ad, brought in a bunch of orders. Going to our Post Office Box and getting envelopes with a cut-out copy of the ad and a check—we didn’t take credit cards at that time—was an incredible thril for me.
So I thought I’d do a mailing to colleges, places that were training teachers and could maybe use this book as a resource. I didn’t know you could buy lists back then (and doubt I’d have had the money), but what I ended up doing was going to the library and copying lists the reference person had directed me to.
Then, back on my little 256k beige Mac, I created this simple data base (in a program called Omnis 3, if anybody’s interested) and personally entered something like 1100 addresses into the computer. I printed out the address labels and affixed them to a one-page brochure I had run off on dark green paper.
Back in the day before laser printers and page layout programs, there was an art resource in the form of rub-off alphabets, sheets of them in all different fonts and sizes. This is what I used to lay out this flyer. This was also before I knew not to mix a dozen different type faces, so the flyer looked a bit like a ransom note. (I’ll see if I can dig one up and scan it.)
Nonetheless, I got a 13% response to this very-expensive-for-me-at-the-time marketing effort. This outcome is unheard of. I later learned that 2-3% response is considered quite good in the industry, but in the meantime, I was terribly disappointed that I hadn’t heard from the other 87% of the people on my list! I may gave nown nothing about marketing, but I did know this market.
Becoming a Distributor
I never set out to stock and distribute books by other authors, but this venture started at a couple of conferences where I was meeting other self-published authors, educators, nearly all of them women, who offered to sell me their books at a discount if I would take them to conferences where I was speaking.
Within a couple of years, I was carrying more than 350 items and representing over 50 publishers. Initially, we got most of them on consignment, which meant I didn’t have to pay until we sold them, which really helped with the cash flow.
Once I had about a dozen items in my collection, I hired someone to typeset a large flyer—my first catalog, as it were. (Again this is all before desktop publishing was available, or at least mainstream.)
As the collection grew, so did the catalog. Eventually (and I need to check when I started doing this), I started to lay these things out myself on my later-version Macs (Quadra, then G3; software: Quark, then InDesign) and had increasingly large quantities printed each time.
I.S.S. Publications Catalogs, 1991-1999
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| Above: Catalog covers from 1991, 1993, and 1997. |  |
Left: 1999 catalog. This one had over 350 items. |
No More Catalogs
A number of factors contributed to our somewhat painful decision to drop the catalog and the distribution end of our business. By 2000, online enterprises were well on the scene and sales at conferences was starting to drop. It was getting more and more expensive to ship books, and even if the booth was free, which it wasn’t always, exhibiting and selling books on site was getting extremely expensive. Books were getting damaged in transit and we had increasingly large amounts to ship back, even when we stocked the booth very conservatively. It wasn’t always practical to have someone on hand to man the booth, and when it was, the expense was getting harder to justify.
Although I still write for other publishers (Corwin has published my last four books as of fall 2012), there are certain products that we will continue to produce in-house. To see what’s new on this site, click here. For more information about what’s coming soon, click here.
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