As we head steadily into the middle of the spring term, the Seven Stitches team is hard at work preparing for pre-sales. In the early summer, we’ll hold a pre-sales call with Ingram, where we’ll pitch the book for distribution. To get ready for that call, we’re nailing down our marketing materials, including the advance information tipsheet, the marketing plan, and the sales kits. The finalized marketing plan will be a long form version of the tipsheet, detailing all the basic specs for the book as well as the intended audience and markets, the key selling points, and an outline of our plan for traditional and online promotion of the final product.

As we start to think about creating the sales kits, which won’t be finished until the end of this term, we’re brainstorming fun ways to sell the book quickly while at the same time grabbing people’s interest to explore the novel in more depth. The recurring appearances of textiles and ceramic art in the novel and the graphic elements of Oregon’s earthquake preparedness campaigns are providing us with the inspiration we’ll need to create some fun collateral in the coming months.

In addition to building these documents, our team is also finalizing the copyedits on the manuscript. We broke the manuscript into four parts, so each team member working on the project has a manageable amount to focus on. We’ll copyedit each piece separately and then combine it back into a cohesive document that will be double-checked and returned to Ruth Tenzer Feldman to review our suggested edits. Our edits include grammar, syntax, and spelling corrections as well as minor line-level adjustments for tense and clarification, and when we’ve received the finished manuscript back from Feldman, we’ll move into interior design, and plans to turn a manuscript into a finished book will be officially underway.