IMS Publishing

I started IMS Publishing as a tool to published this series of books. Little do I know how involved it would be. It's not just a matter of writing the books, which I have a dozen sitting there in various stages of completion, but it involves the whole gamit of other business relationships and processes. For some time I have been thinking through the binding of The Gnomes of New Hope. 

As you can see here I have designed these books to be stitched in this fashion.

I'm set up to do this quite well for small quantities, but the trick is to be able to produce higher quantities cost effectively. The big problem is punching the books. Stitching I'd done by hand. I don't think these much chance of automating that and even if I could come up with a way to automate that, and I tried, it takes more time tending to the machinery then it does to stitch the book using manual methods. So punching is the key here. I am in the process of designing and constructing pinch press dies to implement punching one whole book in one pass. I'm not certain what thickness I can get away with, but we'll see. I'm gathering the tooling for that, now that the printing files have reached their final stage. I am about to print the prototype run of the whole seven book collection. Once that is done, I will move into designing and fabrication the boxes for the boxed sets.

I'm getting the shop set up for the production line. I have multiple workstations partially set up to create a flow of product from assembly to shipping. 

There is no point to working on sales until production is up and running, but the first level will be a shopping cart scenario. In the meanwhile, I can conduct the business of sales on a wholesale level that is tied to a release schedule and purchase of books in quantities sufficient to fund the completion of the artwork. Anything less than that is a distraction and will draw me away from finishing the artwork. As I have said before, I can provide the books in a perfect bind edition, without the hand stitching in quantities exceeding 5k. You will find posts below that outline sales objectives. I may have posted that information on IMS Publishing, which is where that belongs. Being very occupied finishing up the printing layouts, I have not been updating that sales information, but I will tend to that when appropriate. If you wish to discuss anything contact me via email. The address is; image.of.the.mind.studios@gmail.com

AG