How to sell thousands of children’s books without a publisher.

I recently read Choose Yourself, by James Altucher, and was inspired by his stories of people in various industries doing things differently and absolutely smashing it. In the book he transcribes an interview conducted with Alex Day, British singer/songwriter whose successful music career has stemmed from his own YouTube channel, without a record label in sight.

Altucher’s overriding point is that times are changing, and its up to the individual to choose how they respond and shape their life accordingly. There are many stories of people who have approached things in a novel way and won big. I’m not going to list them all here but for further reading see Originals: how non-conformists change the world, by Adam Grant and David & Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.

After reading Choose Yourself I felt inspired to write about the journey I’ve been on with the Clever Tykes children’s storybooks, along with my co-founder, illustrator and various awesome colleagues who have helped it progress the brand to where it is today.

A few months ago I wrote a blog called ‘How to promote your children’s storybook’ because every few days I’m cc’d in to an email with someone who has just written or is planning to write their own children’s storybooks. Writing and promoting your own children’s book is primarily thinking of ideas, carrying out the best ones and keeping on going with them, sometimes even when it feels like you’re not getting anywhere. More recently, I’ve been asked for more of a step-by-step guide, so here it is.

Disclaimer: you have to be prepared to make zero money from your books. That has to be ok. If you’re doing this for the money rather than a love of writing or a compelling need to put your idea into storybooks then stop right now. Some children’s authors make a lot of money, sure, but there are thousands of new titles on Amazon every year and those making money are a tiny proportion of that. Of course, there are exceptions. So you have to be just that — exceptional.

If you’ve already written, illustrated and produced your books, and are completely happy with the finished product, skip to point 3 for the selling part.

Put very simply, we followed these steps to create and sell thousands of books:

1. Get writing your stories.

The biggest failure of any aspiring author is in just not writing the book, or not writing it to a good enough standard. I recently read Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday, who puts this perfectly by referring to people who want to be the noun without doing the verb. If you want to be a singer, sing. If you want to be a writer, write. Just write the book.

When we had the idea of giving every kid an entrepreneurial role model, by writing about them in storybooks, we didn’t look for longer than 10 minutes to see if any similar books existed — we actually thought it would be a good thing if they did. We didn’t research how to get a book off the ground, how long they take to write, how we would sell them, how schools would find out about them, how parents would find out about them. Anything. All of the answers that might put people off writing a book, we didn’t seek them. All we cared about was getting this idea into some storybooks as fast as we could, so that was the focus. During this time we didn’t tell anyone what we were doing, or do any promotion of any kind. Nothing at all. We locked ourselves in rooms to come up with ideas, storylines and characters and them wrote them until we (and 6–9 year old kids) were happy with them.

So when do you start telling people what you’re doing? I’ve always been a big fan of not sharing the journey until there’s something tangible to show for it. I want to tell people news when it’s actually news, and “I’m writing a children’s book” isn’t news until you’ve actually written it. I’m not a fan of creating hype and drama without any substance, plus I’ve read about how sharing your goals actually makes you less likely to achieve them, because in telling people you feel like you’ve already done it!

Setting goals; yes. Being an “I’m going to…” person; no thanks.

2. Find a great editor and illustrator

One of the most important tasks is to get an editor. There are freelance children’s storybook editors around and they don’t miss anything. A good editor works big-picture AND small detail. They will understand the story and the message and make sure every single word in your manuscript progresses it. They will make sure your writing is suitable for your target age group. Our editor Jayne Howarth removed 15% of the word count of our first book and asked for re-writes on many points. After taking her comments on board we were much clearer when writing books two, three and four. Good editors are worth their weight in gold and this part should not be skipped.

Unless you yourself are the illustrator, finding an illustrator is your next important task. The quality of your illustrations will make or break your storybooks. This is especially true if they’re aimed at younger kids and your book is full of colour illustrations.

The illustrator we hired, Sam Moore, was a friend of a friend, found by recommendation. Someone you know will know an illustrator — ask around. We were super lucky with Sam because he had just started out in graphic design and did illustration for fun, so he was looking for projects to take on. From the first phone call he was really excited about the books and turning the characters we could only imagine into ones we could see.

Advice? Get recommendations. Look over all their previous work. Get the opinions of other grown-ups and children. Don’t underestimate the importance of the illustrations. Get feedback on the initial designs from friends and colleagues and anyone else whose opinion you value. Now is also a good time to get feedback on your manuscript.

To this point, your main cost has been time and effort in writing great stories. This is about to change.

3. Make a website and register your brand as a trademark

To set yourself up for making sales you need to have somewhere your customers can buy your books. Yes, you could just release your books on Amazon, but hosting your own website will help you build your own brand and get to know your own customers. Registering the trademark for your brand name will mean that you can set up an Amazon store, which has been awesome for Clever Tykes (more about that later).

Registering a trademark is an expense but it protects your brand and looks after you if anyone tries to claim they had the name first or tries to create a similar brand. If someone else trademarks your brand before you do it will cause you problems in the future.

We then set up a simple Wordpress site containing an image of all the characters, a simple ‘about’ page, a blog, contact page and pre-order section. We used WooCommerce for this. You could use Shopify. It doesn’t really matter. If you just want a one-pager, to then direct people elsewhere to purchase, use Instapage or SquareSpace.

4. Sort distribution

We started by enlisting the help of a local printer, who looked after formatting the covers and the manuscripts and turning them into books you could actually hold and feel. Having a physical product to hold is a big moment.

The benefit of using a local printer you can meet is that they will help you with the quality including formatting and adjusting how colours turn out in print — just make sure they’ve printed books before. They’ll also give you discounts for large print quantities. They may be able to hold your stock for you if they have a warehouse. They should provide other services like shrink-wrapping books and organising shipping to Amazon so you can do Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA). For us, at first we were selling in person at fairs and conferences as well as online, so being able to grab a pile of books was important.

There’s a debate to be had between printing and then shipping orders yourself, printing and using Amazon FBA, or setting up print-on-demand. We started off with the former two and now we do the latter, with the benefit being that we no longer hold stock, we trust the fulfilment process, the print quality is really good and we can reach wider audiences without our international customers incurring international shipping costs. It also means if we want to make any changes at all to the books, we just correct something and upload a new file, rather than having to wait until the current stock is sold.

The look and feel of the books in someone’s hand is important. Get more feedback. We printed 50 copies of our first book, Walk-it Willow (which you can do with Amazon ‘author copies’ or ‘proof copies’) and gave them to trusted partners, parents with kids and several schools, with the sole aim of getting feedback.

Note: here’s where you can set your actual launch date for some time in the future, a few months maybe, to give you chance to do the remaining actions in this list. It’s probably difficult to stay patient here, but a carefully planned launch is far more valuable to you than a rush release.

5. Tell everyone you know, but stop asking for feedback

So you’ve got the book written, edited, illustrated, produced and you’re ready to distribute it across the world, for all to read and love. When we were ready to launch, the first thing we did was tell everyone who had a proof copy that the real thing was now available. Those proof copy carriers helped tell their friends and networks for us.

The second thing I recommend, which we did, is to tell your network via your own social media platforms and emails. Don’t allude to how much hard work it was to get to here. Everyone works hard, they don’t care if you did. Besides, it focuses on the wrong thing. Genuine customers care how good the book is, not how long it took you to create it. Make it look easy and focus on the value you’re excited to be adding.

It’s important that you have received enough feedback by this point. When you’re launching properly — you are not looking for feedback. You must make sure that your language reflects this. This isn’t to say that you don’t listen to feedback, but you have a finished product now — this is the real thing. Stop using phrases like “let me know what you think”.

6. Work out how else you can add value

In order to support your launch, think of your children’s storybook as more than a children’s storybook. Think of it as a brand and even a movement. Whatever topic it represents is a whole subject area that you need to own.

Because our books were created to inspire enterprising behaviour, our area is enterprise education. We created complimentary products and put together information for parents and teachers. The result was: a teacher’s guide on how to incorporate enterprise education into the curriculum, along with lesson plans and chapter walkthroughs, desktop backgrounds, certificates, activity packs and colouring packs that could be printed from our website. We wrote a blog about the 38 ways parents could inspire enterprising behaviour and we interviewed successful business leaders and entrepreneurs for a podcast.

I recommend getting onto Mailchimp and creating an automation series of emails, then add the signup form to your website. This is how we gave out free resources, information, worksheets, fun activities and character introductions to those who joined our mailing list. You can see them here.

My friend Carrie Green launched her book She Means Business (albeit for grown ups, not kids!) in 2018. She ran a launch campaign whereby anyone who sent their proof of purchase in to her website received a ‘bundle’ of accompanying goodies, including a digital course, marketing advice and downloads from 24 other successful female entrepreneurs and access to a Facebook group of like-minded people. If you can do something similar it’s a great reason for someone to purchase.

We also thought our readers might like to hear about other books and resources in the enterprise education arena, so we wrote about them. There are no competitors here. Anyone else doing what you’re doing is validating the space and that’s a good thing, so reach out and introduce yourself.

7. Get some PR and press coverage

The following is by no means an exhaustive list of the things you can do to raise awareness of your children’s book, but it’s some of the things that we did. There are some more ideas in this blog with the title ‘how do I promote my children’s book?’

When trying to secure coverage for the books in newspapers and online publications, we were aware that “two people self-publish a book” wasn’t newsworthy. So our strategy was (1) to go hyperlocal and (2) go niche. By going hyperlocal we were able to secure coverage in business publications from our hometown, leading to local sales and awareness. The angle was simply good news stories from the area the publication covered. By going niche we were able to secure coverage with specialist publications related to our topic of enterprise education. TES, Teachwire, Enterprise Nation, Young Enterprise, New Entrepreneurs Foundation, Forbes. The angle was that we were trying to achieve the same objective as the publication itself.

Your book might not aim to achieve a specific objective, or tie in with wider topics. It might just be a great book, and that’s fine too! In this case you could try to secure readers who have a large audience or are known for their children’s storybook recommendations. If they like your book you can use their review on your website too.

Other things you could do: apply to speak at a TEDx event, send your book to celebrities with kids of the right age, run a Bloggers Required campaign, get on GoodReads, introduce yourself on Mumsnet.

Soon after launching we managed to have three of the Clever Tykes books stocked in Harrods and Selfridges in London. We had been calling and following up book buyers and they agreed to buy a small run of them. Buyers are inundated with products and samples, but if you find one who likes your books they might just give you a chance. Seeing them on the shelves in Harrods and Selfridges was pretty surreal. In reality, although we got some great pictures out of it, our brand wasn’t where it needed to be in order to capitalise on being stocked there. When I saw our books, Walk-it Willow, Code-it Cody, Change-it Cho on the shelves, they were next to Peppa Pig and Fireman Sam. Household names, which we weren’t yet! So the books sold, which was great, but actually the biggest benefit came from a series of Facebook ads promoting the picture and directing people to our website to purchase. If you want to go down the stockist route, start with LinkedIn and Twitter and make a spreadsheet, then just start calling people and introducing yourself. Don’t expect to hear back from anyone, do the following up yourself.

I mentioned earlier that having your brand trademarked enables you to create an Amazon store page. Ours is here for the UK and here for the USA. Many bloggers make a living from Amazon’s affiliate programme, and they are always looking for great products to direct people to. Start searching for bloggers who review children’s books or who write about the topic your book addresses. Reach out, introduce yourself, ask if you can send them a book. You can mention that you sell via an Amazon store page too. Some bloggers will have a media pack where they charge for posts and promotion, some are happy to receive products to review — you’ll find out more by asking them, and then you can decide from there.

Find a national days calendar like this one and make a note of every day that relates to your book, then post something on your social media on each of these days. For us there is: World Book Day, World Hearing Impaired Day, World Healthy Eating Day, World Dog Day, World Writer’s Day, and so on! We also include an email address in the back of each book, for readers to email the characters, and we share some of the responses we get over our social media and website. It’s always great to have pictures of kids enjoying your books and reassures parents that their own kids will like them.

Do anything you can to get your name out there. Even if something just gives you one Facebook post and one blog post, it’s probably worth it. Awareness is cumulative. You will be reminding people of your storybooks all the time.

8. Work out how you can give them away for free

The Clever Tykes storybooks have a social agenda: social mobility. Because of this, we are aware that the kids who will benefit the most from the storybooks aren’t the ones whose parents shop at Harrods or Selfridges. Our web sales were steady (as a result of word of mouth, Amazon advertising and Bloggers Required), so we decided to embark upon a slightly different business plan to sell our books: sponsorship.

As I write this we are looking for a USA sponsor, to sponsor the storybooks into all 95,000 elementary schools in the USA. If you can assist with this in any way, get in touch!

The long version of this story is long, so we drew it into a snakes & ladders board here, but in short: we started approaching potential sponsors and then we secured one who agreed to gift the storybooks into all 24,000 primary schools in the United Kingdom, as well as commissioning a digital enterprise portal for teachers to access and sending volunteers into primary schools to run enterprise sessions with students. This was in 2017 and it was great. The children benefitted, the schools benefitted, the sponsor (Lloyds Banking Group) benefitted. It was a win-win-win situation that just doesn’t stop. Every week we hear from a school or a student who has discovered the storybooks through this sponsorship.

We also broke the storybooks down by topic and approached companies within that sector. The second book in the series is called Code-it Cody and is about a boy with a love of computers who begins creating his own computer game. The purpose of the book is to inspire 6–9 year olds to want to learn to code. We spoke to Packt Publishing, a technology books publisher and a socially responsible company, who sponsored 300 copies of Code-it Cody and together we gave them out to coders with kids. This helped Packt build relationships with local developers and tech enthusiasts and it helped us reach 300 parents, who told their friends about Code-it Cody.

The other ways you can give your book away for free cross over with some of the points in the PR section, but finding bloggers, giving books to your friends with kids, generally spreading good vibes and taking every opportunity to get your book in someone’s hands will lead to benefits down the road in terms of sales. I’m convinced of that. You need to find your champions — those parents and teachers who will tell others about you and your books and be proud to do so. There’s a concept called 1000 true fans that I always think about. Books are recommended between kids and parents so often, the best way to get yours to spread is to make it part of the conversation. If kids love it, the rest will take care of itself.

9. Keep going

Something else mentioned in Perennial Seller is a gem from The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz. This is that there are no silver bullets when it comes to growing your business: just a bunch of lead bullets. The point is, there will almost never be one thing that changes everything for you, or one thing that suddenly means you’re selling thousands of books in one go. Most likely it will be a steady, cumulative journey that builds and builds. You might not even notice the traction you have until you compare it month on month or even year on year.

A great thing about children’s books is that your audience renews each year. The 8 year olds of today are last year’s 7 year olds. Kids have siblings. Parents talk to each other. Nurseries, schools and kids clubs regularly replenish their stocks of children’s books.

For a while we were selling the odd set of books every now and again. Then it became a few sets per month, then a few per week, then a few each day, but it took time. My cofounder and I were both focused on other things, including running a social media agency, and I’m sure everyone reading this will also have other endeavours. This should heighten your perseverance. The big sponsorship we secured was huge for the business, but it took three years of banging down doors to get there. We were persistent because we never doubted that it would happen in the end. The USA sponsorship will likely be a similar story.

Overall it’s consistent, daily actions in the right direction that will get you to where you want to be. I’d love to hear from you with any additions to the above or any comments!