Fall was a long, blustery term for the Three Sides Water team. It’s a traditionally busy time for publishers, as it’s one of the big acquisition seasons—but for us, it was the season of sales kits, final copyeditng, and interior design. But mostly sales kits.

You may have heard of sales kits in the past; several Ooligan blog posts mention them, and a few, such as this post about our title The Ninth Day, discuss sales kits in-depth. Nearly five years have passed since that blog post, however, and the sales kit process has changed a bit, too. The general idea behind them remains the same: a sales kit is a package of information about a book that is sent to your sales representatives, or the people who convince bookstores to stock your book. Every Ooligan sales kit contains an info sheet about the press, a two-page tip sheet about the book in question, a press release for the book, an excerpt or chapbook, and some fun collateral to brighten your sales reps’ days. That said, assembling a sales kit from start to finish is a bit more complicated than it sounds.

Where the Ninth Day team finished their sales kits in eight hours or so, we took longer. Much longer. These days, our sales kit materials are fully designed with Adobe Creative Suite. The chapbook alone easily took four hours to design, proof, print, and assemble. On top of that, we designed the press release, a postcard, and a double-sided bookmark (mostly to show off our lovely yet still unfinished cover design, above). One of the biggest challenges with so many designed pieces was sticking to a unified style that could be used across all our artifacts. We stuck to the same color palette, but some of the fonts had to be swapped out on occasion.

Including writing, proofing, designing, researching, and printing our collateral, we spent anywhere from eighteen to twenty hours working on the sales kits. In the end, we have 114 tidy packages ready to be opened by our sales reps. The representatives will use the included materials to talk about Three Sides Water and convince booksellers to stock it in their stores. We can’t wait to see where Three Sides Water ends up. Perhaps it’ll be in your hometown? Look for it in stores on May 1, 2018!