11 questions for the indie publisher, featuring Gary Allen VanRiper
Posted By Sue Collier on January 31, 2011
Website: www.adirondackkids.com;
follow Gary on Twitter at @adirondackkids
Books: The Adirondack Kids® volumes 1 – 10
1. What is your background? I am a former community newspaper owner and today the senior pastor of a rural church and author/publisher of children’s books.
2. What led you to self-publishing? When our youngest son, Justin, was in third grade, we wrote a short piece about adventures at our family camp in the Adirondack Park of New York state. I owned a community newspaper at the time and was asked to read at a Parents as Reading Partners (PARP) program at a local elementary school. We decided to share what we had written and people came up to us following the reading and asked when our book was coming out. A light bulb went on and we worked in earnest for a year and produced our first manuscript, The Adirondack Kids. We knew breaking into traditional publishing would be very difficult and when even a regional publisher said it would take several years before they could even consider a look at our work – we decided to learn the publishing process.
3. What have you found to be the biggest challenge in self-publishing? Maybe our backgrounds and temperaments were designed for self-publishing, but from the time we launched our first book, sales took off, and, a small family dream has developed into a small company. This is still a part-time endeavor for us, so if there is a challenge now it would simply be having enough time to keep up with the steady growth and serious potential.
4. What has been the biggest surprise about self-publishing? From the very beginning, it would have to be the reader response to the work. We sold out the first printing of our first book (some 2,000 copies) within the first several months. Now moving through our tenth year, we have exceeded 100,000 copies sold in the series. We were also pleasantly surprised to learn that when well done, a self-published work would be so enthusiastically embraced for curriculum by public schools.
5. Describe your writing process. We publish one book a year and have a routine. Mid – summer is the time to brainstorm a storyline and do the live research – conducting interviews and visiting and taking photographs of the location(s) we will be writing about. Autumn is the time to develop the outline and early winter the time to write and edit and proof scene-by-scene and then get the book ready for press. The books are published in late winter/early spring.
6. How do you stay disciplined? It has much to do with my background in journalism. Relentless deadlines for stories and columns and publishing a weekly newspaper on time has a way of disciplining you – if you want to remain in business.
7. How are you financing your publishing project? For our first book, we risked the $2,000 I made coaching high school basketball that year. For each year following we have had enough orders waiting so that our new annual title is nearly entirely paid for the day the shipment arrives. Because our retail price is properly in line, there is also plenty for other business expenses, reprints and to make a profit.
8. What is your favorite self-marketing idea? There are so many! One idea that took a while to hit me was to ask the printer if there was any waste being cut off our book covers as they came off the press. We learned there was enough wasted stock on each cover to fit two bookmarks. So when we run 2, 3 or 5,000 covers, we get twice as many bookmarks. At first we got them for free. Now we are charged a tiny amount on each run. The result has been tens of thousands of full color advertisements for a fraction of a penny each that people want to keep – and some actually collect – which features a detail from our latest cover and our website address. We give hundreds away at libraries, book signings, Thruway rest stops in our region and when we do a school visit to every student in the school. That way even children who cannot afford to order a book still receive something. The bookmarks also double as our business cards – and we do sell them on our website in lots of 100.
9. What advice do you have for burgeoning self-publishers? To treat their writing and publishing as a business! Don’t romanticize. Count the cost – every cost – so you go into a project with eyes wide open. And we recommend in seminars (or to the many who now contact us) to those getting started to secure a copy of, The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing, Fifth Edition, for the most up-to-date information in the industry currently in print and with its comprehensive checklist of vital “do’s and don’ts.”
10. When you are not writing what do you do for fun? Hike and photograph in the Adirondacks of New York state. And I do still coach high school basketball.
11. What project are you currently working on? There are several projects in process. Among them? Just this past week finished the text for a children’s picture book, which we also plan to self-publish. It is an entirely different animal from the middle-reader paperback books we are used to producing! We are also working on releasing our Adirondack Kids titles as e-books. And the research is finished and storyline all set for the next book in our Adirondack Kids series.
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