I am so busy expanding into new areas that I forget to come and make a record of it here!
SOAP - I added a wonderful new line of hand-made personal care products called HEAVEN SCENT. The neat thing about this is, the soap-maker is one of our long term Seminary subscribers, Linda Mitchell. Once we worked out the details of selling her soap on the site, my husband and I started using the soap and shampoo. We love it! Jerry has been highly allergic all his life - and his skin is very sensitive. The itches from commercial soaps have now disappeared, and our bathroom smells wonderful. Linda and I have been developing some new products exclusive for Latter-day Village. Our Restoration Collection is a set of soaps to remind us of key events in the history of the church. Maple Sugar, Honey & Oatmeal and old fashioned Castille. Tim wanted a sage scent to remind us of the pioneer trek into the desert - but there are so many sage scents, and I don’t like all of them, and it takes six weeks for a batch of 38 soaps to be ready to ship from Georgia to Utah - so I wanted to go directly to the source to sample the scents before deciding on one. A soap supply manufacturer here in Salt Lake City reluctantly allowed me to sample his desert sage scent. I loved it! So we will be adding that to our next batch of soaps.
SCRAPBOOKING - I don’t know how I missed the whole scrapbooking craze - but until recently I have managed to avoid it completely. I love arts and crafts and now, it is impossible to go into a craft store without finding a major section of the store devoted to scrapbook materials. The whole phenomenon started in Utah with the LDS interest in preserving family history - and the do-it-yourself mindset of latter-day saints - but to my utter amazement, right here in the heart of lds-culture, I can’t find any lds scrapbook products in a major craft store chain. That tipped the scales - it was time to start an LDS Scrapbooking Resource at LDV. So we have! Visit our LDV Scrapbooking homepage. The fun has begun! We have a scrapbook expert or two helping since I am woefully inexperienced - Elaine Wright - another Seminary Teacher, in Tennessee, and Tim’s daughter Heidi Allan in Santaquin, Utah. Elaine contacted many scrapbook manufacturers during a trip to Utah and started the ball rolling. We have our first product line - Carolee’s Creations - in our shopping cart, and are putting together the product info for the Holey Sole line. I toured Holey Sole, a division of Rusty Pickle, Inc. in Murray, Utah, and got loaded down with wonderful samples of all their LDS products - well, most of them, they are getting in new stickers and some papers they have added recently. The thing about LDS products is the market is much smaller, now that scrapbooking has moved into the general public sector - and many companies have phased out their lds products. They are hard to find - and LDV is dedicated to offering a complete line of wonderful LDS products - we will either find it, or create it ourselves!
Two new things for us are the capacity to manufacture vinyl lettering and die-cut papers ourselves, AND - we are now able to sell downloadable digital products from our online store! Heidi is developing new print and cut-on-demand die cuts and vinyl lettering products, and I am designing original scrapbook collections for downloading. I am so psyched about doing this - I can hardly sleep at night. I keep getting new ideas! I’ve done a YW Values Collection and a Pink Baby Girl Collection that are so much fun I can hardly stand it. I use Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks for designing. I didn’t know how to achieve the look of handpainted art till recently, and as I develop my skills with these programs, the designs get better and better.
Serious crafters already know that there are many websites where you can download designs either free or for a fee - and some of them are so so darling they are irresistable. But there aren’t a lot of LDS collections out there, and it takes hunting to find them the few that are. We are contacting LDS artists to get new LDS design collections in our store. It is very exciting!
This is a blog, right? So I can say whatever I want, right? I am just going to tell you a little about what is involved in getting a creative project from an artist/author to a store. There are more ways than one to do it, but, typically, an author with years of experience and expertise, writes a book and tries to find a publisher who will publish it. Who knows how many hours, weeks and months have gone into the manuscript - it is like their baby - and off they send it to heartless publishers hoping and praying one of them will decide they like it well enough to invest in it. So, they finally find a publisher willing to get it in print. The publisher will have a process involved in approving it, editing it, formatting it for print, adding illustrations, a cover etc etc etc. They pay, up front, for all that, PLUS they find a printing company to print and bind it. To get a good price, they must print in large volume. Now they have their printed books - boxes and boxes of them. To get from the warehouse to the store takes distribution. Publishers may be distributors, but not necessarily. Distributors contact retail stores so the store owners will buy lots of the books. Then the books must be shipped to the stores. The stores must store and display and advertise the books. Then Connie Customer reads an ad she got in the mail, and drives to the store walks in and browses around and sees the book and thinks it looks like just what she needs, and she stands in line as the clerk rings up her purchase for $15.95 plus tax. Each of those people, the author, publisher, printer, distributor, shipper, retail store owner, advertising company and store clerk must be paid a part of Connie’s $15.95. How much do you think the author gets? It turns out to be about 12%. And if there is an illustrator and editor, they divide up that 12% with them. That is at best, $1.91 per book, probably less. The publisher pays the author as the book sells - royalties - and they trickle in over time (btw - the other method for getting books in print is to self-publish - which means the author does and pays for the printing and distributing and warehousing and shipping etc).
I have written five books that have been published and printed and sold in retail stores. I was pretty shocked at first when I heard the percentage I would earn. The first book came out in 1997, and it is sold out. The others, I am still getting the trickle of royalties from, and will for years to come. I had tight deadlines to meet. I got so I was writing a book start to finish - ready to go to the printer for printing, within three weeks. I hated it. It was creatively and physically exhausting to work within such narrow parameters.
I tell you all this so you can appreciate how excited I am that now we can publish new works and sell them as digital downloads right from the website. It is hard to calculate exactly how many middlemen have been cut out of the process and what that means to authors/artists and customers. Customers will pay less without ever leaving their home, and authors and artists will make more. WHAT A CONCEPT! And since we as publishers do not have to pay for printing and warehousing up front, we do not have to limit the projects we will publish and distribute online. We don’t have to choose between black and white printing and color printing. We don’t have to limit the size of the project - there are no minimums or maximums. We do pay to store the files on our server and have enough bandwidth so customers can download them whenever and where ever they may be. We do have to edit and upload and use special software to protect them and make them available for sale - and then do all the accounting and payments, process customer payments etc etc etc - then advertise to our worldwide audience that we have been developing for ten years. That’s how we earn our part, but by going from printed hard copy books and CDs etc to purely digital data files - we eliminate so much cost, it is truly exciting! Some books will never be printed - they will just reside on customers’ computers - music will never be burned onto a CD - but be downloaded onto iPods etc - trucks will not be driving products to and fro - so we are additionally saving natural resources. I think it is majorly cool. Contact us if you have a project you would like us to consider publishing or distributing on our site.
I attended the LDS Bookseller’s Association Convention in Sandy, Utah in August. It is an annual event and tons of fun. All the publishers and manufacturers with LDS products set up displays of their new products in the big convention center - and then all the retail stores that sell LDS products send representatives to see what’s new. Authors and artists are there to talk about their creations and there are lots of book signings and concerts and give aways for the stores. I’ve been going to these conventions since 1998. It is always fun to see the new products and the people involved in getting them to latter-day saints around the world. My publisher was being honored at the banquet for being the original LDS distributor, and his kids wanted me to be there - it was really a wonderful evening. But I was there this year with a special mission for LDV as well. I went around to all the booths looking for products we could sell in our online store. I met lots of wonderful people with great products. It is going to take awhile to get it all set up, but you will be seeing many new products added all the time. We are trying to have the publishers/manufacturers ship directly to our customers. This is not something that many big companies will do, but the little companies are more willing to try it. The reason this is nice for us, we do not have to pre-pay up front and maintain a large warehouse. Things get shipped once, rather than twice. All this allows us to offer more products in our store. So you may find things at Latter-day Village that you won’t find at your local LDS bookstore - IF there even IS an LDS bookstore near you.
Latter Day Creations manufactures LDS figurines out of several materials. I have always loved their products. They are in Cincinnati, Ohio - where I first joined the church and are really nice people. We are now featuring their church history products - Vinyl Handcart Pioneer figures, and white resin statuettes of Joseph receiving the plates from Moroni, and Joseph and Emma Smith. Come see!
I have to admit, when Tim and my husband Jerry named me marketing director at LDV - I cringed. Everyone has a primal need that motivates them - mine is to be loved. I have it in my head that people will love me if I give them things and do things for them that they value. I am not saying that is right, but I have learned after much research, that really is a fundamental aspect of who I am, or, how I function. So the idea of trying to sell stuff to people is just revolting to me. Expecting someone to PAY removes the whole love element in relationships. Honestly, it makes me want to run and hide just thinking about it. But, after a year, and surviving some complaints from ldv subscribers about how commercial we are getting, I have to also admit that I really enjoy finding and developing new products and making them available to our visitors. It’s FUN! Because I am also fundamentally creative - I cannot be happy unless I am creating - and this is affording me a huge opportunity to be creative.
Now I know Tim didn’t set up this BLOG as an emotional release for me, we want people to know what is new, and this is a good way to do it, but, blogs are blogs, and I am telling you what is really on my mind. And that feels good too. Not that anyone will read this, but I’ve had a chance to write what is inside, and it feels good!
Well, today is my husband’s birthday - so I better go make him some breakfast. ALSO - my son Max gets home from his mission in Russia on November 15 - YIPEE!
That’s it for now!
Debra
