The Cover of Shoebert by Sarah Hastings
When my brother and I decided to purchase The Book Shop of Beverly Farms from retiring owners Pam Price and Lee Brown Simonds, we created an LLC that we called Industry Books. Industry is the town in Maine our family has been visiting every summer for our entire lives (Sam was born there), but we also liked how the name connoted hard work, business, the making of things.
From the beginning we also talked about the possibility of publishing our own books under the Industry Books name — we knew at least one bookstore that would sell them! With our backgrounds in publishing, writing, editing, marketing, and publicity, we thought we had the tools between us to produce quality products. But the question remained: What kind of publisher did we want to be?
When Sarah Hastings called us with her idea about a children’s picture book about Shoebert, to be honest we were kicking ourselves for not having thought of it sooner. After we got over that, we jumped at the chance to work with her. A writer in our own backyard with a passion for her project and a background in early education was a perfect fit to tell Shoebert’s story. The fact that she could also meet our demanding deadlines in order to produce the book on an extremely tight schedule for a pre-holiday arrival was icing on the cake. And so Shoebert the Traveling Seal entered the world on November 26, 2022.
We sold out of our 450-copy printing almost before the book was in print; as of this writing we are close to selling out of our 500-copy second printing days before it releases. Holy smokes.
What explains it? Local stories affirm who we are. They affirm for ourselves why we live here and they are a chance for us to share these stories with others so they, too, can understand who we are and why we’ve chosen to live where we do. These stories celebrate us. We delighted in Shoebert’s presence because the seal seemed to be saying, of course I want to live here, too, look how great this place is! We were proud of the rescue workers’ responses, of our own community response to leave Shoebert be, to help when needed, to be his ally and his friend.
With publishing consolidated to only a few massive publishers, a handful of midsize publishers, and then a whole lot of micropublishers like ourselves, it can be difficult for worthy stories to find a home. The Shoebert story would be hard pressed to be picked up by one of the big five publishers, much less rushed to press in two weeks (try closer to two years). And yet in my previous job at a midsize publisher, I worked on novels with national distribution that ultimately sold fewer copies than we’ve already sold of Shoebert the Traveling Seal. Being a micropublisher means we can move quickly and nimbly and having boots on the ground means we understand the stories that will resonate within our own community.
What kind of publisher do we want to be? Well, we’re on pace to publish about one book per year, so world domination seems unlikely. Someday, maybe we’ll be able to do more. But Shoebert seems to have some good ideas on where the future lies.
