Looking forward - perhaps a slow down
Hello everyone,
While it’s the first of September in a lot of ways it feels like the year is sort of locked in. I have the book fairs we’re participating in lined up already, I have the books we’re making lined up (and in production), I have the workshops I’m teaching broadly locked in.
While there’s work to do, there’s not necessarily new stuff coming in. And I’ve started to think a bit about 2026.
In publishing it’s important to plan ahead. Many publishers have 18-36 month timelines between deciding to make something and having it published. So while part of me thinks ‘2026 is still a long way a way’ another part of me thinks ‘I need to make some decisions’.
Some of the decisions I need to make are:
1) How many books should I publish in 2026? How much money can I afford to spend in printing costs (my largest costs).
2) How do I want to organise workshops and other education work?
3) How much travel do I want to do?
4) How much substitute teaching do I want/need to do?
Looming over all of these questions is ‘how can I get a bit more money out of my labour?’.
Part of me is thinking I should have a quieter year in 2026 than I had in 2025. Perhaps a bit less travel, maybe just three books published.
The risk of publishing four or five books is that the outlay for printing could easily be $30-40,000. Which is a lot of money for a little artist kid to earn.
The risk of slowing down is that new customers, connections and sales events aren’t capitalised on.
With the tariff situations in the USA that market has completely changed. I can no longer really ship to customers in the USA for individual orders (it’s too expensive to expect any American customer to pay) and event small orders to stores are likely to get too pricey. I got a quote for shipping 10 books to a store in the USA today and the price was $150AUD. The store’s profit on the book sales is probably like $17-20 so the extra shipping cost just is too high.
So America becomes a market I can only sell at during book fairs, where shipping a lot of books over spreads the cost and keeps the per unit addition at a minimum.
America is the world’s largest economy, so that’s not an insignificant market.
Last week PHOTO Australia also closed its doors out of nowhere. That’s one less book fair here to sell at.
On the other hand, I have been invited to New Zealand already, there are further opportunities in Asia and I’ll go back to Europe as well.
So is slowing down better (it would be tricky to ONLY make 3 books) - keeping costs lower and sacrificing potential sales? Or is keeping things the same (given that this year had a lot of expenses and its been hard to make all the money work)? Or is growing better (which will be hard unless we have some pretty incredible sales this year or with our first book next year)?
There’s a tension here. New things bring new people (and old friends) to the work and often leads to new sales. But just printing like 50 new books would bankrupt any business. So that right amount is tricky dicky.
I also am probably in a position where some of the projects I take on next year I’ll have to change the money side of things and keep more of the profit myself.
At the same time, I’m having a bit of trouble keeping on top of all the publishing work while also working full time. I get home from work and just want to rest, or cook, or do whatever, but I don’t want to design, to work, to think, to have meetings. So my hope is to NOT work full time as I have been the last month or so. Really I don’t particularly want to do the substitute teaching at all.
I’m hoping to ramp up some one-on-one mentoring work in 2026, and also do some art incursions at schools as well (way more fun than substitute teaching).
I’m not sure where I’ll land yet. It’s all about finding the right amount of money to invest, the right products to invest in and the right ways to say ‘no’ or ‘that has to change’ as well.
Till next week,
Matt