Team of First-Time Authors Create Successful Board Book
Project Background
As it turns out, just about every culture in the world has its take on the dumpling. That’s exactly what the children’s board book Little Dumplings is about.
The Little Dumplings team is made up of Jekka, Krissy, and Haley, a group of friends that came together to celebrate culture, diversity, and food in Little Dumplings. They all felt that shared food traditions can be a great way to celebrate our similarities, despite cultural and geographic differences.
The first time the Little Dumplings team connected with PufferPrint, we provided insights to help them understand requirements around using ISBNs, as well as some tips and tricks for a successful Kickstarter campaign. In addition, we sent them a preliminary quote to create 500 boardbooks.
The Little Dumplings team was impressed with our prices — which are often 2-300% below that of our competitors — plus our ability to assist them through the self-publishing process (we love helping customers with this!)
The Execution
Each Little Dumpling team member brought a different skill to the book, including writing, illustrating, formatting, and marketing. The team was able to create enough pre-demand for their book that their original order of 500 copies needed to be doubled to an order of 1,000 copies!
With PufferPrint, the more you order, the lower the per-book price. So the additional demand helped the team increase their book sales margins by over $2.00 per book.
While we do offer book formatting services for many of our customers starting at $199.00, this team had the graphic design skills to supply us with near-fully formatted files based on the dieline measurements that we supplied them, showing them the exact dimensions of their interior and cover files for formatting.
PufferPrint returned a digital proof to the team, which was quickly approved. Within 3 weeks, they had an actual proof-copy of their book delivered to their door for $100.00.
Based on this proof, the team made use of PufferPrint’s ability to customize by increasing the thickness of the board book paper from two 300 GSM papers glued together to two 350GSM papers glued together, creating a substantially thicker board stock. Each page is over 1mm thick!
PufferPrint has since updated its default board book production settings to this newer, thicker production setting. While all of our print settings and paper stocks can be customized, our default board book paper stock is now 1mm thick.
Book Construction:
Book Dimensions
- Little Dumplings measures 6 inches x 6 inches, which is a perfect size for a board book of all ages. It’s small enough for little hands to hold, yet the pages are not so small that they restrict the content that can be included (the smaller size also helps the book maintain its rigidity and durability).
- Additionally, all our board books feature rounded corners, which adds a friendlier feel to the book and avoids sharp corners for little ones.
Interior Pages
- The book has 28 interior pages (at PufferPrint, we measure a “page” as one side of one piece of paper).
- The 28 interior pages translates to 14 interior pages, plus a front cover and a back cover.
- The interior pages are created with a glossy lamination finish (same as the covers) for a shiny and vibrant color rendering.
Cover Design
- Like most board books, the cover page thickness and interior pages are all the same thickness of nearly 1mm.
Binding
- Board books pages are cut, assembled, and glued together by hand during the book binding process.
- The spine “drops” from the pages, allowing the book to open and close easily and even lay flat on a surface.
Shipping
The team opted to ship their books via 2-week air shipping. It took just about 1 month from the day they placed their order until the day their books — all 617 pounds of them — arrived at one of the team members’ doorsteps.
The Result
As of the time of this writing, the Little Dumplings team has placed 3 separate orders for their books, so 3,000 books total (almost a full ton of books by weight)!
Finally, by printing her books with PufferPrint, The Little Dumplings team is also able to produce their books using our FSC-certified paper and 100% Climate Neutral Certified process.
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