As of this past week, our PTO is offically a publisher! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
We now have the equipment to do in house publishing! We even have a distribution channel! And our first work should be ready to deliver to the distributers by the end of March! (It better be cause we have to run the annuals right afterwards).
Amazing how one of those silly ideas can lead to all sorts of things. At the begining of the year one of our member in general board members had this wacky idea of self printing our school annual to get away from the high cost and low profit and also getting stuck with a lot of left overs. He spent a month researching self publishing ideas, then got authorization to form an exploritory committee which had done an amazing job! Imagine that! People working together that were not convienced this was doable figuring out how to do it!
Now I will admit we are a little short in direct publishing experience but we have a staff (volunteers) that are learning. My chief concern was long term, ok what happens when most of us move on to other schools as our kids do? I am pleased with the solution to this but wont relate it here, not until I can see it in operation [img]smile.gif[/img]
BTW I am really happy with the leases on the equipment, we had several meetings with a number of vendors and the winner was the one that agreed to not charge us an early withdraw fee if the concept becomes to un manageable and we have to opt out! They are also providing a lot of expertise on accomplishing our goal. So much for going with the low bid to save a buck concept [img]smile.gif[/img] Dont get the wrong idea they arent that much over the lowest bid!
So by this summer you all will have to get out to your book stores to buy a copy of our first pubication - a cook book [img]smile.gif[/img] (We dont yet have a title and since it goes to print in two weeks - yikes talk about publishing whoos). Yes it will have cookies in it too! (inside joke to a few here). I will keep you all posted on how this out of the box idea works.
