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Hey dude! We are doing well. We haven't used Formspring in a long time- you should check in w us by our email or Facebook. We're headed to avl for ActionFest next week and will be there for the weekend. ActionFest will be sucking up most of our free time and as soon as its done we need to jet home so I don't miss school, but you should come out and see one of the movies w us!
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Yes it is. There were severe delays due to my publishers signing w/ Random House as their distributor in 2009. Their workload doubled from the deal, but their staff remained the same size, they were overloaded with work and it hurt a number of titles that were being worked on as the deal happened.
This came from the horses mouth last February:
"Your book has fell into that unfortunate limbo, which is a very real staple of the publishing industry. To be frank -- yours (and two others, in case you were feeling special...) have been put on the backburner so that [Mark Batty Publisher] could turn focus to the onslaught of Random House "new titles" that "needed" to make their release dates (or be damn close). It was a business move -- based on preorders and sales -- that had to happen the way it did. Had your book been any less important we would've wrapped it up, sent you the "we're done brahh, need to get it out!" email and that would've been that. However, we do care about your book on a personal level so [MBP] allowed it to remain in limbo until it could reenter into the production schedule."
My book has been available for presale for so long that they have recently decided to kill the current ISBN and give it a new title so that it doesn't fall under the radar. The new title is as of yet undecided. I met with MBP in NYC a couple of weeks ago to look at the book, there are only a few details to wrap up as far as the design goes. I was told that Jan 2012 is the new date, which is nearly 3.5 years since I first took submissions for the book. I'm a bit embarrassed that all those who are in the book have had to wait so long to see the fruits of our collective effort - the release date has changed so many times it almost seems like a running gag every time someone has asked me for an update on it's release. But the good news is that the book is back on their production schedule, they have made all the changes I requested last November when I saw the last proof, and I'm really happy with its current state.
The ball is now in my court for some missing details but I have been preoccupied by the move of our shop from Asheville to Wilmington NC-- I hope to be able to give them everything they need to wrap up the book's layout/design elements by the end of the month. -
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Village Invites, Greenwich Letterpress, Cursive, Arthur's, Bowne & Co, Powerhouse Arena, Papel, Oblong Books, Word Books, Skaredy Kat, McNally Jackson Books, Rebel Katz, Shoefly, House of Cards and Curiosities, Green Cottage, Paper Trail, or you can just visit us in June at Renegade Brooklyn.
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We don't print catalogs-- our line is so huge and new stuff is added so often that we opt not doing a catalog. Our entire line is in our webstore, and we just hand out business cards with our info along with a sample. Catalogs at the moment seem a waste of money and paper and postage if we're going to the shows-- though at some point we may stop doing shows and only do catalogs--because they ARE useful, but all depends on where you want to spend your money.
Sorry for the late reply- the notification on this thing doesn't seem to be working right.
Good luck at the show! -
I think the biggest mistakes made by newbies at NSS is to not have enough product to look at, and to have a booth that doesn't look like much effort or creativity was put into it. It is a sad thing indeed to see someone with their 10 cards and a folding table with a computer printed banner-- nobody is going to visit that booth. You want enough stuff that will keep an interested customer in there for more than five minutes.
Here are a couple of other things I've learned myself:
1) Have several sample decks on hand so that more than one person can look through your stuff at a time (we have 3 decks plus wall samples)
2) Ask for a business card from anyone who shows interest, write on the back of the card any extra details you want to remember and follow up with them at a show.
3) have a give-away of some kind so that they will remember you better. having your booth number with your information may mean a return visit.
4) Do not get disheartened if you don't break even your first time at a show, it will be a bit depressing, but you should take into account that this is a long term investment, it is about maintaining visibility and eventually the money will be there. Some things to take into account:
a) Some people wait to order after the show, sometimes waiting as long as 6 months to a year.
b) if you pick up sales reps, if you are interviewed by the media, then that means dollars down the road.
c) orders you fill are just first time orders and are likely to repeat from the same customers several times a year.
If you have the opportunity to go to these shows as a visitor first I highly recommend it, it is a huge investment and researching your gameplan as much as possible beforehand is going to help make your first show run smoothly. -
1) We started wholesale manufacturing in the summer of 2005, we needed products to sell for a street fair -- they did so well we decided to send samples to stores all over the U.S. and immediately picked up a rep group in Southern California, which created a snowball effect. The rest is history.
2)Most styles start out with a run between 300-800 on its first try-- 300 is a safe number for designs that we're not 100% sure will sell well (i.e. we find them amusing but we're not sure if they'd sell as a greeting card.) It allows us enough for samples for our reps and show plus at least a few months supply for orders if the card should do well. If I am certain a card will sell well we go ahead and bump that number between the 500-800 range. If the card is a 2 or 3 color card I try and keep the runs in the higher range as well- they require more intensive setup and I want to make sure that my labor costs are well spent.
As for reprints, we do much larger runs. If a card sells out within a few months we'll bump the reprints up between 800-1200 cards. If it doesn't sell out within a year then we usually discontinue it. We're trying a new formula for reprint runs for our older cards-- I look at Quickbooks to see how many cards were sold in the last 2 years, and then bump up that number by about 25%-- two years worth of stock is right where I like it-- we have so many styles that I'm trying to avoid getting crippled by reprints when a big show goes down- after our first gift show we were in reprint mode for nearly 3 months as style after style ran out--you'd think we'd be excited about that but it got old and expensive rather quickly.
Our largest client, Paper Source, skews the numbers quite a bit-- stuff we do for them we reprint between 2000 and 3000 per style.
3. We haven't printed other people's cards lines but that's only because we haven't been asked to. -
I've never missed either in the theater, but star wars wins because it's way more fun to watch.
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we soap it twice daily. smells like dr. bonner's peppermint soap down there.
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Loading...Blue Barnhouse’s Bio
A letterpress company that is primarily known for their raunchy line of greeting cards. Est 2002.
