It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!). Still though, it's been fun putting together the website, integrating Stripe etc.
Biggest issue is book publishers. Wow their ordering systems are archaic!
We can't hold stock on hand because we don't know how many subscribers we'll have each month. The issue with not holding stock is that we can't get reliable stock levels from any publisher or distributor. Ordering is a matter of emailing asking for a stock list, waiting to receive the stock list, then sending an email placing the order as quickly as possible. Frequently we'll order only to have them tell us books we ordered are on back order and we'll receive them in a month or two. It doesn't matter how often we say we can't do this, they don't care. I just want to get in there and build real-time stock management and ordering for them!
This is made substantially harder by the fact my wife creates associated resources and activities for each book. We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books. There's already 8 different books each month.
>It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!).
Looking at your site, the first thing I noticed is that you use AusPost (I'm assuming you'd be paying MyPost Business rates).
Especially for larger packages within the same city, Sendle generally has better rates and turnaround times.
Have you looked into alternative logistics options?
>>We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books.
Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.
> Is there a reason you can't ship new customers books (and resources) from your existing back catalogue? This could solve the inventory problem too.
Sorry, I missed this.
We've discussed this and I'm keen to give it a go in some form or another. If we continue to grow I think it'll become a necessity. However, each month has a unique theme that's consistent across the 4 age brackets. So we can't necessarily send out previous month's stock as it won't match the month's theme.
What we have started doing though is selling one-off bundles in addition to our subscriptions. These are selling reasonably well considering we haven't really pushed them. So I think we may be able to offer past subscription bundles in a similar fashion. The only thing that gives us pause is that we've noticed other book subscriptions have attempted this and had issues clearing out their excess stock. Whether that's a reflection on their product, their website, or the fact people just aren't interested in "old" stock, I'm not yet sure.
We've looked into this quite a bit actually. Auspost did work out the cheapest, at least initially. However, Auspost's recent price increase was particularly painful. Children's books have fairly large dimensions, so our pricing is largely dictated by parcel size, rather than weight.
I can't remember whether this factored in, but we are ourselves reasonably remote. Technically Melbourne, but not really. So I think the typical advertised rates aren't always accessible to us.
It doesn't help that Auspost recently implemented some sort of automated parcel measuring/weighing and it's incredibly wrong. We use the exact same box for every single delivery, yet we randomly receive bills to our business account claiming we've underpaid postage due to the odd parcel supposedly fluctuating in dimensions, by over 10cm in some cases!
Needless to say, we will definitely be revisiting this again. Will for sure check-out Sendle again. Thanks!
My wife recently published such an emotional development book in Slovakia [0], and it became a bestseller there. She's now translating and expanding into other countries.
A long term goal for us would be to work directly with authors. We'd love to publicise authors writing quality books, and I imagine it'd be helpful when doing a print run to have 100% confidence X books are going sell.
Unfortunately, we don't yet have enough subscribers for this to work. Because we only use a book once, and our subscribers are split across four age brackets (with different books), we're currently only ordering a small number of each book.
Love it (as a parent)! And, wow, it sounds complicating (as a business owner)!
Wonder if there's an indie children's book writers guild you can tap into instead of having to go through publishers, which you can then print yourself from places like https://www.lulu.com/
I'm largely speculating, however I suspect the situation would be slightly improved in the US/Europe. Some of the distributors are local branches of international publishers/distributors. Hachette for example do have real-time stock management and ordering, and I think even an API. I inquired about this with the local arm of Hachette that we order through, and they didn't really know what I was talking about. I assume they use it internally, but there's nothing exposed.
With the big distributors, I think the situation may be improved elsewhere in the world. However, given we're after social emotional development themed books, we do tend to branch out and order from smaller boutique publishers. I imagine their operations would be similar worldwide.
https://mybookbag.com.au/
It's slowly growing, but to be honest the pricing needs to be increased. Profit margins are paper thin (ha!). Still though, it's been fun putting together the website, integrating Stripe etc.
Biggest issue is book publishers. Wow their ordering systems are archaic!
We can't hold stock on hand because we don't know how many subscribers we'll have each month. The issue with not holding stock is that we can't get reliable stock levels from any publisher or distributor. Ordering is a matter of emailing asking for a stock list, waiting to receive the stock list, then sending an email placing the order as quickly as possible. Frequently we'll order only to have them tell us books we ordered are on back order and we'll receive them in a month or two. It doesn't matter how often we say we can't do this, they don't care. I just want to get in there and build real-time stock management and ordering for them!
This is made substantially harder by the fact my wife creates associated resources and activities for each book. We can't deliver different books to different subscribers because she'd then need to produce additional activities & resources for each of the books. There's already 8 different books each month.