I just want to say a big THANK YOU to the folks who asked whether the children’s planners would be sticking around once this website changes from a shop into a blog. The answer is yes! I loved designing them, and I love that people are finding them useful, so they’re definitely going to stay.
I currently order them in small batches, to try and keep the printing costs at a sensible price. I can’t have them printed on demand as they’re ordered, as having them printed one at a time makes the books around £45 each! And that’s just silly. But the difficulty with having to wait until I have enough pre-orders to get a small batch printed is that I have no way of telling people how long that might take. So I tend to do a couple of pre-orders a year, one before the start of the school term, and again before Christmas. BUT! One of the main points of the planner is that it’s undated, so you can buy one at any time of the year and start filling it in whenever you like. And that’s impossible if there isn’t a pre-order taking place when you want to start your planner.
So… I’m looking at ways of making them more easily available.
(But don’t worry – I will keep the current pre-order system running for the forseeable future.)
To get the ball rolling, this week I did a little experiment. I re-formatted the Moon Journal, and uploaded it to Amazon. Now Amazon don’t offer spiral binding or landscape format, so if I were to do this with the children’s planners, they would have to change a little bit. I’m still thinking about that, as I’m really very fond of the whole landscape format and spiral bound design. We’ll see.
But, I’ve made the Moon Journal available, and ordered a copy for myself so that I can see what the quality is like. When it arrives I’m going to write in it with as many different pens as I can lay my hands on, to make sure that the paper is thick enough to withstand felt tips and little kids. I’m also going to lay the pages out as flat as possible, and just generally try to trash the binding, to see what kind of punishment it will live up to! If I think it’s going to be suitable, I might just have a couple of experimental planners printed, let some children loose with them, and see what happens. Then I can decide whether to switch them over to print on demand via Amazon, or stick with doing these small batch print runs myself.
If you’d like to be kept posted about how it’s all going, you might want to join the mailing list (in the right side bar, or down at the bottom of the page if you’re on mobile), which is where I send out monthly updates about what’s going on.