The Business of Picture Books

Service Description

An editor’s interested in your book and is running a Profit & Loss Analysis? Hooray! Wait! What does that mean? What kind of publishing alchemy is being performed to decide if your book is the right investment? How do they know how many copies it will sell? How do they figure out how much it will cost to produce or what to charge? And, maybe, most importantly, what they can offer? Or maybe you're considering self-publishing. You have your book, but what about all those other costs you might not have considered? Marketing, distribution, generating sales? Yikes! The idea of figuring out how to translate art into financials that can be plugged into a spreadsheet is a mystifying and quite frankly terrifying notion for a lot of creatives, but it doesn’t have to be. In this webinar, we’ll dive into the factors publishers look at when running the numbers—from price points to material costs, comp titles to scheduling, advances to royalties—examining the acquisitions process from a business perspective to give you a window into what’s really going on in those acquisitions meetings. Time will be reserved for questions Alison S. Weiss has been in publishing for more than fifteen years. She most recently was acquisitions editor at Pixel+Ink, a publisher focused exclusively on series publishing with transmedia potential. Her series include The Curious League of Detectives and Thieves by Tom Phillips; Plotting the Stars by Michelle A. Barry; The Winterton Deception by Janet Sumner Johnson; Clara Poole by Taylor Tyng; National Archive Hunters by Matthew Landis; Drag and Rex by Susan Lubner, illustrated by Blythe Russo, Shiver-by-the-Sea by Erin Dionne, illustrated by Jenn Harney; and Sky & Ty by Steve Breen among many others. Alison runs her own editorial consultancy, and has worked with publishers including Simon & Schuster, Audible, Holiday House, and Arctis, as well as private clients, and was editorial director at Sky Pony Press. Her books have been nominated for and received many awards and honors, among them a William C. Morris finalist and Edgars nominations, starred reviews, and have appeared on numerous end-of-year and state lists. You can follow her on Bluesky and Twitter at @alioop7 or at www.alisonweisseditorial.com.