The Novel Project Is Interesting But Doing A Children's Picture Book Is Fun

I must admit it felt rewarding to have a book distributor take on my new novel that's going to be released in July. But it's a lot more fun to see Ginger's illustrations bring to life our next children's picture book (co-author Kim Messinger).

Stagger Lee Books has published two children's books. But we did that more to test the market as anything else. With this new book I think we'll have a body of picture book work that we can start promoting. The new book is called "A Song For A Giraffe'' and I think it's our best story.

I'll post more illustrations as we go along. I'm hoping to release the book in October - which is way too late for the selling season but it's probably the best we can do.

Michael LaLumiere
www.staggerleebooks.com

Where Have You Been?

Hi there.

By now the small group of people that use to read this blog have probably given up. Well, I was moving from California to Arizona and that takes a little time and effort. Sorry.

Here's an update. The work on the next children's book - "A Song for a Giraffe'' - is progressing. Ginger the artist has been doing a terrific job. I'm going to try and convince her to let me post one of her recent illustrations in this blog. I'm really looking forward to publishing the book.

The novel "Why Is Crater Lake So Blue?'' is progressing. We got a fair number of good results in the first round of pre pub reviews. You can see them at the website. The next round of reviews will hopefully come from the "Official'' pre pub review organizations like Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal. They don't review many but can be very important to the success of a book if you can manage to get one. The final round of reviews come from the media. We'll be mailing those early next month. We should have some success there.

No matter what anyone says you have to have reviews as part of your arsenal if you're going to get book sellers to sell the book. We've done OK there so far. The next step is getting a wholesaler/distributor. This is important because book sellers won't buy from small publishers unless they absolutely have to. They buy books from a wholesaler or a distributor.

I applied to Ingram. They are a giant wholesaler and would have given the book a lot of credibility. They turned it down because they saw the book as being regional and thus not doing the sales they're accustomed to. That was sad.

However, Partners West out of Renton, WA, has agreed to take on the book. They wholesale on the West Coast. That was quite a relief. Now I can concentrate on marketing.

More later.

Michael LaLumiere
www.staggerleebooks.com