Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Fern Brady. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Fern thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?
The idea for Inklings Publishing arose from a weekend writing retreat. A dear friend of mine took a group of us up to his parents lake house and hosted a retreat. It was such a productive time that when I returned home I started looking for more of such events. What I discovered is that they are incredibly expensive to attend. I’d gotten an opportunity to read a book about how to Indie publish and, with the short stories the group had written during the retreat in mind, I began to consider opening a publishing company that could make money and use it to fund opportunities like retreats for writers.
Creating a business plan was the first step I took. I researched the various kinds of publishers and the industry standards that would be needed for making a professional go of the business. I drafted a 5 year plan and a 10 year plan with the goal of having a general idea of how to expand prudently. Once I was ready, with the capital funds of my retirement as a teacher, I opened the business.
I began with a DBA and establishing a couple different bank accounts to keep the capital for daily organizational use and the capital for inventory and royalties separate. Developing a brand and establishing the business were the early steps. The first book Inklings Publishing issued was a collection of short stories from that original weekend getaway. We launched the Eclectic Writing Series of Anthologies and began an annual call for submissions to these.
Getting started involved attending a lot of book fairs, trade shows, comic cons. It was rough going with physical labor but well worth it for establishing our name in the community. We also made sales, though at first we were taking losses. But that’s how you grow businesses. Little by little we expanded our book offerings and were able to start breaking even, then actually making money.
Fern, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Fern Brady is the founder and CEO of Inklings Publishing. She holds multiple Masters degrees and several certifications. She began her professional life as a foreign correspondent, taught for 15 years in Alief ISD, and is a full-time Realtor in Houston. She has published numerous short stories, two children’s picture books, and a couple of poems. Her debut novel, United Vidden, which is book one in her Thyrein’s Galactic Wall Series, was given a glowing review by Dr. Who Online, the official site of the fandom. She also has volume one of her graphic novel/novella hybrid project, New Beginning. She has returned to the leadership of the Houston Writers Guild, with whom she served as CEO for four years previously. She serves as co-host for two podcasts – Author Talk and The Hot Mess Express. Besides being Municipal Liaison for Nanowrimo Houston, she is also a member of Blood Over Texas, Romance Writers of America, and American Booksellers Association. Follow Fern’s writing at: www.fernbrady.com
You can contact her at:
[email protected]
Inklings Publishing is a traditional style small press publishing house. We focus on fiction books and are expanding the genre offerings each year. We offer books in a wide array of genres and for all ages. We have children’s picture books, anthology collections for children, young adult novels as well as novels for general audiences and short story collections and anthologies. Our motto is Birthing a Legacy in Words. We publish works that make readers thing, question the world around them, and expand their minds while being entertained with engaging and diverse stories.
Words have power. We hope to help bring to the world the power of words to build bridges and expand minds. Come explore our world through story, and imagine all that could be!
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
By 2019, Inklings Publishing was making good money and beginning to transition to a new spurt of growth. Having started with contracted independent workers, we were finally seeing the opportunity to offer salaried positions. Then COVID-19 struck. The well of revenue sources dried up.
This made us have to pivot how we market books. Up to this point in our journey, we had relied heavily on in person sales at all kinds of fun live events. We had not done as much with online marketing of ebooks. With all in person events canceled, we had to switch gears and move toward a more aggressive online campaign for selling books.
While we took a heavy loss in 2020, we were only $8,000 in the red, which loss we cut by more than half in 2021, with a loss of only $3,658 that year.
During 2021, we took time to reassess our initial business plan. We went back tot he drawing board to balance out the in person and online marketing avenues, and in 2022, we’ve taken on a publicist for our authors. This is usually something that publishers do not offer authors, but we decided to hire one in order to help build our authors individual brands and visibility. We’ve also begun a series of training sessions for our authors and staff to help them brand and host a strong online presence. As our publicist is able to increase our visibility through various interviews and podcasts, each author, as well as the company, needs to have a way to capture those readers who are interested in their works and engage with them on an ongoing basis in order to hopefully turn them into super fans.
While COVID-19 struck us hard, we are in a position now to move forward from 2022 with a strong refreshed plan of action that we hope will lead to a quick recovery and stronger growth.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Inklings Publishing has a strong reputation as one of the top 20 publishers in Texas and has been listed as number 5 in Houston. A key to the success of the company is our focus on quality over quantity. Many publishers take on a lot of projects to get a plethora of books out quickly to build revenue. Our approach is different.
We focus on honoring the writing process. We take the time to work with our authors on developing strong and well-crafted stories. All our works go through a rigorous process of developmental editing, often undergoing three or more work-throughs. The goal is to create a story that is so good, so intense, that the reader can not put it down. Overwhelmingly, the one thing readers are consistently impressed with about our books, is that the story engaged them from the beginning and held them to the end. It is a rare thing for a reader to drop our books.
By offering high-quality books, in content as well as production (the interiors, the covers, all the elements are put together to the highest level of quality in the industry), we have created a brand that elicits confidence in our readers. You can trust that the book you purchase from Inklings Publishing will have engaging characters, strong and interesting storylines, and well-formatted and edited content. That’s not to say we don’t have typos and errors that slide past us, because all books, even those produced by the big New York publishers do. But we work hard to ensure that in the area of the quality of the reading itself, you get your money’s worth.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.inklingspublishing.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/inklings_publishing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inklingspublishing
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Inklings7
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnN_-bHa2VDakaShtZm8Pxw
Image Credits
Fern Brady Photo by Corey Brandon Photography