Saving the hype

Pralinarium, edition 2. Published: August 2019, 412 pages, 20.7×28.8×2.6 cm. 1530 photos inside. Full-colour printing. Hardcover. English. ISBN 978-8-3954578-0-7. Price: 99 EUR. Amazon

After selling out the first book in 20 minutes I faced three main problems:

• logistic difficulties,
• the question of how to save the hype on the product,
• lack of desire from distributors to be involved in the Drop model.

Logistic difficulties

As you can read in the first part we send the first 310 books by hand from our apartment and I call it "logistic difficulties".

So I found a logistic partner, a warehouse. The process was automated. It took about 3 months and sending 600 more books to make the process work "smooth". I was working on synchronization and automatisation of workflow. The e-commerce was synchronized with logistic software systems. The packaging was synchronized with the warehouse.

I had a few wild issues:

• one time I needed to rent a truck and deliver some needed materials in 24H to the warehouse myself,

• one time ~200 books were stuck in between the warehouse and DHL Express without the right papers and customers were telephoning me as we have no client support desk,
• one time I needed to go to Cargo Airport and pick up some parcels which contained "too much" (it exceeds the customs limits for China), etc.

Saving the hype

To save the hype the most important thing was to produce not too much. The goal was to stay "sold out" all the time.

Other things were mostly about designing the hype. I redesigned the packaging, I redesigned the book, I changed all the materials used in production, I made the book two times bigger, I added different covers, and I added different shipping options to make shipping cheaper.

Involving the distributors

I also remember how everyone was looking at me when I was describing my goals and tasks. Like when I said that I need to send 600 books in one day and I CAN'T GET PRE-ORDERS because it is a DROP MODEL. Eyes were telling me: "What? What are you talking about? Are you crazy or what?"

It took some time before others started to believe that the drop model could work. In about 6 months I even saw in some business publics that it became an "official" way to sell and promote the products.

The same thing was with distributors. I had requests from big distributors for selling the book using a regular distributing model: I share distributor (publishing houses, manufacturers, stores) discount and the distributor sell the book at the same price I do. I proposed another way: I proposed to get the needed amount of books before the drop and resell it later using higher prices. Like buyers do. Like sneaker lovers do. I was pushing this idea and I even had some successes in it: some distributors were fighting for books using very small distributor discounts just to get these books in their stock.

But in the end, I can say that I failed it. I accepted the regular model of distributing.

When I published the third edition, I imagined another big thing: what if the book will have augmented reality and video content inside, like in Harry Potter Movies?

This article was originally published on CV -> Link to the full version of the article

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This project is a part of the bigger story of how I became an independent publisher, you can read it here ????

Becoming an Independent Publisher