Profiting from Print — Thinking Outside the Box: Self-Publishing Conference Highlight

Join historical fiction author Margaret Skea, children's historical fiction author Kate Cunningham, and crossover author Matt Beighton—who writes both chapter books for children and gaming books for all ages—as they explore innovative strategies for selling print beyond traditional outlets like bookshops and online platforms. This panel offers creative, genre-specific approaches to reaching new audiences, providing actionable ideas for minimizing competition and maximizing profits.

This is a post from SelfPubCon (The Self-Publishing Advice Conference), an online author event run free twice yearly in association with the Alliance of Independent Authors.

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Read the Transcripts

Margaret Skea: Welcome to Profiting from Print: Thinking Outside the Box. I'm Margaret Skea, and I write primarily historical fiction set in real history. With me are two other indie authors, Kate Cunningham and Matt Beighton. Although we write in different genres, we have a common marketing focus, concentrating on selling print copies in a variety of physical outlets.

In this session, we will share insights from our experience and highlight both the pitfalls and the possibilities which are out there for indie authors to profit from print. We hope these will generate ideas and inspire you to think outside the eBook box.

First, Kate, can you tell us a little bit about the books that you write?

Kate Cunningham: Hi, we write and publish picture book stories, history-based picture book stories, highly illustrated and with lots of history detail in them. They're aimed at primary age school children, and they're narrated by a cheeky narrator called Vlad Flea who keeps the pace going, makes the stories exciting, and along the way the children have learned lots of facts and information. We like to call it stealth learning.

Excellent. Matt?

Matt Beighton: I write chapter books for younger children and then game books for older children to adults, or kids that never grew up, as I like to say, and they're in the vein of the old choose your own adventure fighting fantasy style monster game books.

Margaret Skea: Thank you. While we all do online sales, our focus being on print is on bricks and mortar outlet, but it's not on physical bookshops. If you think about a physical bookshop, your books there will be on the shelf, spying out, and therefore it's hard for people to find them unless they actually know what they're looking for. So, we have all aimed on niche marketing.

So, our marketing is not about advertising, per se, but about looking for finding your audience and then looking to see where you can sell books where your audience will find them easily.

Kate, you work with direct partnerships with some visitor attractions. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kate Cunningham: Yes, we found quite early on that as part of our research, that the place to be was in museums that were very specifically about the topic that we were doing the book about.

So, we worked with the Florence Nightingale Museum and the Mary Rose Museum, for example, and it had the benefit of both having the knowledge and the artifacts and the information are there, but it also gave us a long-term partnership, which ended up being something that benefited both of us. It gave the museum exciting things they could do at the museum, and it also gave us an outlet where we found the people that were passionate about a particular topic.

Margaret Skea: I also work with visitor attractions, but in a slightly different way. When I started thinking about where are the readers of historical fiction, my immediate thought was stately homes, because the people who go there are bound to be already interested in history and therefore likely to be interested in my books.

So, I started looking around for independent houses that I could perhaps get my books into their gift shops.

Part of it is just about confidence really, because I was driving past the entrance to Dumfries House in Ayrshire on a particular day, and I thought, aha, that is a private trust, this might be a good outlet for me, and I just drove up to the front door, to the reception, asked to speak to the person who ran the gift shop, produced my books and said, would you be willing to stock these? And the lady said, we've never had fiction before, but we can give it a try.

So, I gave her the books, I gave her a poster to go with it, and that has been three years now, I think, and it has been one of my biggest outlets.

Other stately homes don't necessarily have such good or wide-ranging gift shops, but often they have craft marquees in the gardens. So, I have done quite a lot of selling within those craft marquees, and we'll maybe come back to that a little bit later.

Matt, where's your best outlet?

Matt Beighton: I tend to sell at places like conventions, so gaming conventions, board game conventions like Games Expo in Birmingham, Tabletop Scotland, because people going there are looking to play games, and my books are games, game books.

Again, it's finding your way into that circuit, finding where people are, finding who the contacts are. Everybody within that world talks to each other. So, I see people that I've seen at other conventions, which is always nice, and you get repeat customers as well. So, I will get customers come up to Scotland for tabletop Scotland who have brought other books from me in Birmingham at UK Games Expo, and they're looking for the next book. So, that's always nice. People will travel, especially people in the gaming, kind of, nerd community, as I call it. I'm a fully paid-up member of that community, so I can say that.

Margaret Skea: One of the other things that's obviously important is speaking events.

And again, we do different kinds of speaking events, but all of them valuable in terms of selling books. Kate, you go into schools, can you just mention briefly how that works for you?

Kate Cunningham: Yes, I've got a good relationship with a lot of schools that very fortunately come back year after year. I go in and give them a lot of the background to the stories. I tell the story with Vlad Flea, of course, and I give them details of the information, we reenact little bits of the story and have a lot of fun doing that. But although I was teacher and I had some contacts before that, a lot of that came about because I create a lot of free resources that I give out around the book.

So, the visits aren't free. They pay me to come into the school, but I give them little bits and pieces using the illustrations from the stories that I know they'll then be able to use in the classroom and be able to boost vocabulary and pick out bits of the story and go back into it and get the most from it.

From the very beginning, I was trying to think how much I could add value to the story with my teacher hat on it and see how I could make it really convincing that the teachers would find it easy and useful to use my books in the classroom, and have me in to visit as well, of course.

Margaret Skea: The kind of speaking events I do are quite wide ranging.

I have been speaking at book festivals. I also do smaller scale speaking events such as Probus Clubs or Rotaries or Women's Rural.

One of the things I would say to folk about events is, if you're invited to speak at an event, yes, you want to be paid, or at the very least get your traveling expenses if it's a very small event, but the size of the event doesn't actually matter as much, that doesn't equate to the benefits you get from it.

For example, last week I was speaking at a very small probus club, and they had warned me beforehand that their membership had dropped to about ten, and was I still willing to come? I said yes, and I went, and I didn't take very many books, because I thought, ten people, I'm not going to sell very much, and I didn't have enough books with me, because they were all lining up, and all of them were wanting multiple books.

Do not gauge the value of selling books by the size or scale of the event. A lot of it is about the level of interest of the people who are there, and part of that level of interest is how much you can generate while you're talking.

That neatly, I think, takes us on to Matt. When you're at your gaming conventions, what is important about getting engagement out of the people who come up to your table?

Matt Beighton: It's trying to tie in what you are selling with what they want. You found the place where they are, but you have to now convince them that actually what they want is what you've got.

One of the beauties of doing gaming conventions for me is that my books need dice, and everybody at these places play Dungeons and Dragons. They've got a lot of dice. So, you can always tie them in with that.

I rely a lot on nostalgia. A lot of the parents that come up to my stand read Fighting Fantasy as children, so they want to buy my books for themselves, or they want to buy my books for their children to get them into the same kind of thing.

So, don't be afraid to lean on that, but you have to speak to people. You can't stand behind a table at any event, whether it's at a gaming convention, whether it's at a {inaudible} or a house. You've got to get out, I think, and talk to people, and I know that's hard. It can be quite scary. But the more you talk to people, whether that's the customers, or whether it's the other stallholders as well. There will be a point where you need to nip to the loo, and if you've not spoken to any of your stallholders next to you, that's an awkward conversation. But if you've been chatting to them all day, you can just say, oh, do you mind just keeping an eye on this while I nip to the loo? And everyone's really friendly and happy to.

So, even at the bigger events like Games Expo, where there's 30,000 people coming through the door, having somebody that you can just have a chat with, otherwise it gets boring.

But talking to people around you, talking to the customers, and trying to convince them, yeah, this is why you're here, is to buy my thing.

Kate Cunningham: Yeah, if I may add to that. I find that at the museums as well. We often go in and do book signings at the museums, and then if you're talking to the children and going, if you look in this book, if you are about to go into the museum or just come out, see if you can find the things that you were looking at in the museum in the book, see how they were brought to life and see if you can find this particular object, and it is that connection that you're forming.

The tricky bit with children's books is making the connection with the people who have the money to buy the book, but if the parents can see that there's a benefit to buying this book, that it'll go back over round and round again, you're more likely to connect and sell it than if they think it's just a quick one-off read.

Margaret Skea: One of the things that I have found is that, for me, it's not so much about telling people what is in the book. Obviously, you give them a very brief background to it, but generally it works better to interest them in perhaps the history that surrounds the book or the research that has gone into it, and particularly if you can bring in something personal to it, where they feel they're making a connection with you as an author.

So, I generally come at it sideways and talk around the book, and that is usually a better way of encouraging people to buy.

Matt Beighton: Yeah, I think finding a way to connect them with my game books, I've started taking a tablet with the game book plan on it, because I always get asked, how do you write books like this where they go off in all these different directions?

So, like you say, being able to show them, oh, this is how it's made and have that conversation. I do think like you said, Margaret, you've one of the skills is being very brief with your pitch, and I think that is something to practice before you go.

All being well at these events, you'll be talking to thousands of people or hundreds of people. You'll be talking all day. You don't want to be giving the same 20-minute pitch. So, if you can get your pitch for your books down to less than 30 seconds, that's a good position to be in, I think.

Margaret Skea: The other thing about repeated pitches and having, this doesn't obviously apply to you, Kate, because you're there in the museum without loads of other people surrounding you, but for both Matt and myself, and you mentioned the other stallholders, Matt. You say your pitch so many times, and you hear other people's pitches so many times, that actually you could sell each other's stuff quite easily. And sometimes I have done and sometimes I've come back from a toilet break and found somebody jumping up and down next to me and said, oh, I sold a set of your books.

That's really great and it's really collegiate.

But one thing I wanted us to talk about briefly is that some people might think if you're selling books, the place to go is book fairs. Now, I certainly have found that is not the place to go and I know, Matt, you have as well. So, perhaps you could mention why book fairs are not so appropriate for authors selling their books, or productive?

Matt Beighton: Yeah, I think it comes down to the odds. It's statistically not the best place. I've been to book fairs where there are maybe a hundred other authors. Everybody there wants to buy books and everybody there is selling books. So, your sales pitch then is just one of a hundred sales pitches about books, and it is much harder to convince people, yeah, my book is the one to buy when they've got another hundred choices.

If you're the only person there selling books at a game convention or at a museum or at a stately home, then that's a much easier sell. You've only got to get them interested in you and your book. You've not got to convince them that you're better than every other book in the room.

But it goes back to what you said at the beginning, Margaret, about bookshops. A book fair is effectively just another bookshop, with hundreds of options and hundreds of books laid out. How do you stand out amongst that any more than you would stand out amongst that in a physical brick and mortar bookshop?

Margaret Skea: Sorry, Matt. One of the other things that I find is that having targeted craft fairs in stately homes or at stately homes, the quality of the other merchandise is usually very high, and therefore the price is usually very high.

So, it may be cashmere, or it may be hand blown glass, or it may be hand-tooled leatherwork. Books at 8.99 or 10.99 compare very favorably price wise with everything else that's on sale. So, if people are on a little bit of a budget and want to bring something home with them, then my books compare very favorably, and as you've said, I'm generally the only author there. So, that definitely plays both in economic terms and in terms of what I'm offering, in my favor.

Matt Beighton: Yeah, I agree. It's the same at the game conventions. People are spending £60-100 on board games, or you can spend £70 on a set of dice. They are good dice. But £10 for a book compared to that, is nothing.

Margaret Skea: Yeah. What about the importance of multiple books? Kate, would you like to kick off on that one?

Kate Cunningham: I think with schools, I definitely see that you quite often get parents who want to buy the set or buy more than one book. Even in the museums, it's a process of working out, quite often you will have a family come in, grandparents with several different parts of their family, and they will, as you mentioned with your fairs earlier on, they might buy more than one of the same book, but you do quite often get asked for other books as well.

So yeah, obviously, more different ones you've got for them to buy, the more you're spreading your chances of getting multiple sales.

Matt Beighton: Yeah, I was at an event recently, and as I said, I was talking to the stallholder next to me, and she'd got a children's series, but she'd only got the first book out. I think over the weekend, we compared at the end, she made the same number of transactions as I did over the weekend, same number of sales. But actually, because she'd only got one book, whereas I've got four game books, five-chapter books, each of my sales was worth a lot more than hers, because people were buying multiple books.

If she'd have had the second book out in the series, she would have sold two books to a lot of people. They were very interested in her series. It looks a really cool series, and they were interested in buying more books, but because she hadn't got any out yet, she was restricted to selling just that one.

I think, especially when you do these kinds of events, it is an event for people, it is a day out. They're not going just to, oh, I'm just going to buy one thing. People walk around these conventions with bulging bags of stuff that they've just, you know, oh yeah, I'll buy that, I'll buy that, I'll buy that.

So, being able to offer them more than one book is important. I know we'll talk about other stuff later, but being able to offer them more than one book is definitely important because they want the whole set. They will buy sets.

Margaret Skea: One of the things I find actually, going back to the same venues year after year, is that someone comes the first year, and obviously you're hoping they'll buy more than one book, but maybe they don't, maybe they just buy the first one, but what has been really nice is finding people coming back the following year and saying, Oh, I got the first book last year and now I want to get the second one or the third one or and so on. And it's really important that you have something new to offer them.

Matt Beighton: Yeah, completely. I know when I went to Tabletop Scotland this year, I would say I lost out on several hundred pounds worth of sales with people coming up to say, oh, can I buy the next one? I bought the other one’s last year or the other ones at Games Expo.

And for various technical reasons, the next one wasn't quite out in time for Scotland. I was hoping to have it, but it wasn't, and so I lost out on quite a bit of money there because I just hadn't got that book there for them to buy. Now, they'll buy it next time or they'll buy it at the next event, I know they'll come back for it, but having those sales there would have been a much better weekend.

So, like you say, having something new every time you go back to somewhere is also important.

Margaret Skea: Kate, when you're going to a place like Florence Nightingale or Mary Rose, you're obviously targeting particularly at the book that relates to that, but have you thought about how you might look at a new attraction and whether you will do just one book for that?

Kate Cunningham: Yes, we've been thinking about that quite a lot because we're looking at where we're going next, and actually that's been a decision we've made with the next book, is that we probably won't just do one at a time.

We're going to pick a topic that we can do three books all in one go, because they're shorter books. Sam has the longer task of illustrating them in many ways, but it seems sensible. We're going prehistory, we're going back beyond our written records, but we are planning to do three of those all in one go, for exactly the reasons that both you and Matt have been talking about, is that having those three books that link to a place, obviously it gives three times the chances of selling and possibly all three at once.

So, we're thinking about it much more strategically than we did at the outset.

Margaret Skea: I think strategy is a really important word actually to keep in mind when you're looking at marketing your books. There are different strategies for different types and genres of books, but everybody needs a strategy.

Matt, I think you are considering some special editions. What do you think, what are they and what's the value you hope that they will produce?

Matt Beighton: Yeah, so now Book Vault are offering such lovely things as sprayed edges and foiled covers, and things like that. Because of the genre I write and with the game books, there is a big collector's mentality. This is the same place where people are collecting Pokémon cards, where people are, I spend a lot of money on collector's editions of Terry Pratchett books and things like that. Far too much money. And I think having something additional to offer, it's taking the mentality I think of Kickstarters.

If you have the base level for Kickstarter and then there's always something else you can have, there's always a tier up. I think having a special edition book, whether it's hardback, whether it's got all the foiling or whatever, will just give those people that want to spend a little bit more on maybe a present for somebody or on themselves, or they just want to spend a bit more because they like that better edition of the book, if you will, it's just another revenue stream. It's another way of offering people something that they might want to buy over and above the basic paperback copies.

Margaret Skea: Yeah. Obviously, there's a little bit of a trade-off between how much it costs you to produce it and how much you can sell it for.

Therefore, you have to consider the economics of it. I have been making physical box sets of my books for two years now, with the aim of if somebody comes in who doesn't know me before, rather than encouraging them to buy the first book, if I have the set in a box, with a lid. So, if it's coming up to Christmas or it's for a present, they don't even have to do any wrapping. All they need is their label. They're good to go. Then when they take the lid off, there's a slip case that can go into the bookcase and keeps the books together. That's very labor intensive. It hasn't cost me a huge amount on card, but it is very time consuming, and I've been thinking about that quite a lot recently and I have just found a design firm that will die cut the net that I require for this box for me. And actually, if I order a hundred of them, it's economic and that will save me so much time.

But I think it's a question of constantly thinking about what you're doing and adapting what you're doing and thinking, how can I do it better, both in terms of the finished product and also the time it takes you to do it and the input that you have to put in.

So, I think constant adaptation and development is really important.

Matt, you mentioned something to me earlier about a mystery book. That sounded a fascinating idea. Could you just say what that is?

Matt Beighton: Yeah, and again, this is just an idea borrowed from talking to other stallholders at events. They were doing it with board games.

I've got four books, five books now in my game book series, wrapping them up in Christmas paper when I do the Christmas markets, and if people can't decide which book they want or they want to buy one for somebody else and they're not sure what they would be into, because they don't have to be read in order, they're independent of each other within the series, they can just pick one that's pre-wrapped and they don't know what they're getting until they open it.

I think there's something in the psychology of humans that loves this idea of the unknown. When you go to these things, people, like I say, do it with board games, but they do it with dice. You can buy blind dice bags. So you go, you're paying your money, you don't know which dice you're going to get. And people flock to these kinds of things because they just like that unknown. It's a bit like an advent calendar. So, thinking about something like that.

I think one of the reasons we got into indie publishing was because we wanted the flexibility to pivot and to do what we want, and it's daft if we're only doing that for the actual content and covers of our books. If we've got that flexibility to pivot, let's use it, like you were saying, Margaret, for everything surrounding the books as well.

Margaret Skea: Yeah. Kate, I think you mentioned a little bit about working with visitor attractions. At what stage do you think is ideal to start working with the visitor attraction?

Kate Cunningham: Early as possible. In the beginning, we did it later. We tended to go there after we had done most of the book and try to join forces with them and that worked fine, that's great. But with the Mary Rose Museum, we actually did it. We've gradually realized that the earlier you can form that relationship, the better.

It works both ways, but with a book like ours, which has got such a high level of detail in it, it's quite important to get that input earlier rather than later. So, we were getting really detailed feedback about every little illustration, because we've got the person who dived and looked at the Mary Rose when it was on the seabed. It's that kind of thing that you get, that then adds to the whole conversation that you can have with people later down the road to get them excited about the book as well.

Margaret Skea: Yeah, and you didn't mention earlier, or maybe I didn't give you the opportunity to mention earlier, but you also have a special item that you have for sale alongside your books.

Kate Cunningham: Not quite there yet, it's arriving any day soon. But yes, we made a decision this year that we would create some finger puppets through a company that creates puppets professionally.

This isn't something I could have done on my own because it takes a lot of paperwork and a skill and all sorts of different things, but it's a bit of a passion project. I wanted to add value to the books and to the people using the book, give something extra for the people using the books, and being able to use a finger puppet is quite useful and key when you are doing stories with children.

So, we branched out, we took a little bit of a risk, and it's a bit of a passion project of mine, but it was something that would be a really useful addition to the books.

And going back a little bit to what we've already discussed, it gives people something to buy if they bought the books that you've got already, they can buy the narrator to tell the story, and so it's this rather nice loop where it feeds into the books and it assists the sales of the books, but it also gives a little added extra that people can buy and use connected with them as well.

Margaret Skea: One of the points that brings out very clearly is the appropriateness of anything that you're trying to sell which has added value to the books.

What kind of items, Matt, are appropriate for the books that you are selling?

Matt Beighton: So, I sell 3D-printed miniatures that go along with the characters and the monsters in my books. A lot of people that go to these places play things like Warhammer or Dungeons Dragons, so they're painting figures. So, I've taken one of the monsters so far, I'm going to do a series of them, and turn them into figures that they can paint and then have Dungeons Dragons sheets to go alongside, stat blocks they're called. So, things like that.

I do pin badges, key rings. I think part of it is not being afraid to fail, and that's hard when there's a huge risk, like when there's a huge financial investment, and it's easy for me to say. I brought key rings for one of them, and the initial outlay wasn't huge. I think it was about £60, something like that, it's huge to some people, but in terms of the marketing of a book, it's not massive, and they just haven't sold really very well. They will eventually sell, they're kind of trickling through, but that's a lesson I need to learn, and I think being okay with that, whatever it is that you're trying to sell in your sphere, is really important because not everything will be a hit.

I've got pin badges, custom made enamel pin badges, and they sell brilliantly. The key rings don't. Who knew?

Until you start doing these kinds of things, I think you won't really know. But like you said, being confident at the beginning, trying them is important.

Margaret Skea: Yes, and I think sometimes it's also important to try and find something that is a little bit unusual to go with your books.

So, for example, I mean I'm selling to adults and it's a little bit hard to think what can I do for adults. Everybody does bookmarks but that's not terribly exciting really except it helps them find their place. But I've been thinking about mugs and coasters to go along with the books that will have the cover of the book on the mug and on the coaster. Because I think in terms of a present, that kind of trio might be something that works quite well. But one of my problems at craft fairs is that families are coming in, it's the adults I'm targeting. What do I do to engage the children while I want the adults to stand at the table for five minutes talking to me?

If they've got a child tugging at their sleeve and saying, come on mum, I'm not going to achieve anything. So, Kate, I think you had a good idea for children.

Kate Cunningham: Yeah, my problem's the opposite. I've got parents who perhaps are trying to encourage children to move through and I'm trying to stop them. Because we have such highly illustrated books, we found that taking copies of Sam's inked pictures, the outline pictures before he paints them was really useful, because we give those now as free colouring sheets.

We give a sheet out as a free colouring sheet, and I try not to look too much like a child catcher, like, come in little children, grab a free colouring in sheet. But they're very highly detailed and everyone likes an occasional freebie and they're not hard to do for us because we already have the actual drawings and the material to hand, and obviously brand it and put the website. So, if that doesn't turn into a sale at the exact moment, that child takes that colouring in page and I encourage them to go to the website. There's lots of exciting games and ideas and things to do on the website, and that kind of draws them into Vlad Flea's world, hopefully.

Margaret Skea: I was thinking about the idea of colouring sheets when you first mentioned it to me. I'm thinking when you go to a Toby Carvery or something, they provide colouring pencils and colouring sheets to keep the kids occupied while they're waiting for their meal. So, I've been thinking about maybe getting some colouring sheets that relate to the castles or something to do with the story, and having them physically there with colouring pencils, have a little space at my table perhaps with a chair for a child to climb up on and busily color in while I'm trying to talk to the parents.

I think, as you said, Matt, it's all about trying things and not being afraid to try them and if they work, develop them and if they don't work, discard them and try something else.

Matt Beighton: Yeah, I agree. It's all about balance. Like you say, you want them there for long enough to sell to parents, but you don't want them there for an hour clogging up your stall so that no one else can get in and buy anything.

I do think, going back to what Kate was saying about illustrations, really quickly, I think your book appearance is very important at these kinds of things because people will walk past, see your cover, and think, oh, I want to stop and look at that. It's not like Amazon where they're looking at a tiny little thumbnail and that's all they've got. They've got your full book; they can flick through it. So, that kind of presentation of your stand, of your books, of your artwork, it becomes more important.

Like you say, and having colouring sheets ties in really nicely with that as a way of extending it.

Margaret Skea: I do think it's important, actually, when you mention people can flick through books, sometimes people are very reluctant to lift a book in case you don't allow them, and I think it's important to be really welcoming and encourage people to say, please do lift the book, please do flick through.

In my case, I'm maybe saying, see if the print size is good for you, and if somebody looks at it and says the print size is a bit tricky, then you can say, actually they're also in eBooks, so you can get it on your Kindle and here's the bookmark with the cover and so on.

But one of the things I've done recently, which I didn't do at the beginning, is I produced or had produced one of these eight foot pull up banners with the book covers and some review quotes, like Geoffrey Archer and so on, ones that will draw people's attention. Because I find that people can read an eight-foot banner from about six feet away and therefore they can look at what's on your stall without the embarrassment of having to come right up to you, and if they do come right up to you, then that's because they've already made a decision that they're interested. And I have found that actually made a huge difference to the number of sales.

Kate, you were wanting to.

Kate Cunningham: I was just going to say with the encouraging them to look through the books. Obviously, if I have books on the stand that the children can be sometimes a little rough with the books, and I literally have a set of books that are entirely for children to look through and I put at the front of, if I do events like that, I put them right to the front with things saying have a look through, because they do, that set of books does get fair wear and tear, because small children are not always as respectful of books, but just having some. Encouraging saying, you're welcome to look through that, is really important, and don't panic if the parents go, don't touch it, don't touch it. No, it's good to go, you can look at those.

Matt Beighton: I've got a set of four, one of each book that has now been the thumbed copies at probably seven or eight different conventions. They're all tatty and corner turned and everything, and I just put those at the front and then people assume, oh yeah, I can look at those because they're a bit battered.

So, I can pick those up and then the pristine copies to sell are on display behind them.

Kate Cunningham: You could go even more explicit than that. We've got stickers on there that say, Read me!

Margaret Skea: One of the joys of indie authorship, which was briefly touched on earlier, was that we are in control. We're in control of the product. We are also in control of our marketing, which often doesn't help if you're traditionally published.

Matt, I know you've got some adapted editions, which you may or may not have been able to get if you were with a traditional publisher. Can you briefly mention those?

Matt Beighton: Yeah, so my Monster Academy chapter books are in dyslexia adapted and standard editions.

The Pick Your Path ones are just entirely dyslexia adapted. By the time I got to those, I had a lot more confidence going with that and working with advice from the British Dyslexia Association to format them.

Like you said, Margaret, with showing people the font within, that's a big selling point to be able to say to people, have a look through the book, they are adapted for people with dyslexia, but they make it easier for everybody to read. This isn't something that you're going to struggle with if you don't have dyslexia, and being able to show them and they can look at it and say, oh yeah, actually, that is something I like, is important. So yeah, and it's something that I found really useful for accessibility and as a conversation starter as well, which kind of draws people in. If I've got a sticker saying dyslexia friendly or dyslexia adapted, people will come over and say, what does that mean? How does that work? And then you've got a conversation that you can have with them.

Margaret Skea: Kate, I think you were mentioning that you had the flexibility to make a book whatever length you wanted to make it and have it as highly illustrated as you wanted.

Kate Cunningham: Traditionally picture books, traditional publishers tend to want picture books to have a short number of words, have 300 words or so, certainly under 500, and the Vlad Flea books are about a thousand words because there are lots of extra bits in them, fact files and maps sometimes, and glossaries explaining words.

So, I really mix up fact and fiction book styles with them, mainly because I knew it's what I wanted when I was teaching, and I believed in it. I couldn't get anyone else interested in taking that kind of length of picture book, we're calling them short, illustrated stories now.

Margaret Skea: Some of the takeaways I think that we want people to have from this is first of all the importance of niche. Profiting from print is about niche marketing. It requires you to be flexible. It requires you to be open to change. It requires you to learn from others, and where you can find partnerships, exploit those partnerships because they're really important.

But being proactive and being willing to trial new ideas and new options, and as Matt said, if something fails, you just discard it and you move on and you try something different. If something works, then you look at how you can develop it further and perhaps expand your reach that way.

Above all, it's about not being constrained by what you feel are the kind of the norms, what everybody else does. On one hand, you look at what other people do, but you decide for yourself if that is something that will work for you. You need confidence to do it, and you should be constantly looking to innovate and to look for new ideas.

But it is possible to profit from print, and it is absolutely about thinking outside the box.

I'd just like to thank Kate and Matt for being with me today, and thank you to ALLi for putting this conference on, and thank you to everybody listening, either when it's first put out or on the replay. I do hope that you will all have gained something from this and will have ideas that you can take forward for whatever your niche is, because whatever style or genre of book you're writing, there will be a niche that you can target.

Thank you.