Designing the printed book has slowed down lately as I’ve wrestled with practical issues. How many pages? How many cartoons per page? How big should the pages be? Soft cover or hard? Full color or black and white? But I think I made progress today.
After exploring a bunch of possibilities, I think it makes sense to work backward from cost. From my experience, language learning books tend to be rather pricey. $50-100 books are pretty common in the field, but that feels way too expensive for a book of cartoons - even if it does help you pile on the vocabulary. So I’m going to aim south of$50, but how far south?
It has occurred to me that there’s a second audience here; one that might offer tighter guidance on pricing. In addition to students buying the book for themselves, I think the fun nature of cartoons will make these attractive as gifts as well. So after a bit of research, I’ve settled on a nominal price of $20-25, which seems like the sweet spot between the gift giving and language learning budgets.
Armed with a target price point, I can now use that to make some other decisions. For example, there’s no way I can realistically offer a hard cover book at that price. Printing costs alone would limit me to about 100 pages, and that would force me to print the cartoons smaller, and wouldn’t leave any room on the page for any of the workbook features I’ve been considering. So soft cover wins the battle.
If I print in black and white, I have to convert the images to halftone (newspaper-style images made up of little black dots) and I just don’t like how much richness they lose in the process, so I’m also greenlighting the full color format.
With those decisions made, I can now determine that there will be between 200 and 250 cartoons in each volume. (The final decision will be based on other factors that come up during the layout and editing processes.) Furthermore, if there have to be two volumes, it only makes sense to divide them between beginner and advanced vocabularies.
So now I know the answers to all those questions I started with: how big, how many, what color, what price. It feels like the wheels are finally free to start rolling again.