When NAU MAI KI TE AO was created, there wasn't an intent to write a pukapuka. I had been writing a few rotarota that had matching illustrations for a personal instagram page of mine, and after a couple of months, I noticed a compilation of these tuhinga starting to form with a common theme - they were all informed by my personal experience in hapūtanga, and a lot of the rangahau I had been doing into traditional Māori birthing practices. For me, I had realised that creating a tiny human brought out the most creative version of myself.
During our hapūtanga, Aotearoa was also going through the motions of kōwheori-19, which meant that I had been working from home for a while. At home, I found more opportunities to be creative about my work in Health, and wound up sharing these tuhinga and illustrations with 180 of my colleagues over zoom for Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori. The feedback from this session was extremely moving, and was one of the drivers that pushed me into sharing it as a rauemi reo for whānau welcoming new pēpi into their worlds, too. To my old colleagues of that time, thank you for allowing me to share my creations with you too.
Once I had started researching the process to produce the pukapuka, I learnt on the fly and completed small tasks in a chaotic and un-organised kind of way. The best part about this approach, is I didn't know what I didn't know, and I wouldn't have learnt any other way.
This post shares 5 key learnings from this experience:
1. Accessing Licensed Translators of Te Reo Māori
When I had written it, I wasn't confident in my reo at all, even after having circulated it around whānau. Sure enough, I was able to have a lot of my hapa corrected along with a bunch of other suggestions to enable the pukapuka to read better. This is a part of the process I never factored in earlier, one that I would never skip in the production of any new rauemi reo, and also a MUST for all whānau wanting to do the same. At the time of production, I was lucky enough to have had a friend offer to do the work in exchange for some of our rawa (as we were moving house), so I took that up!
Prior to having been that lucky, I did however have the opportunity to seek out options for accessing a licensed translator of Te Reo Māori. My two main considerations were through:
- Translators and Interpreters Register: Te Taura Whiri i Te Reo Māori. This website is awesome as it also allows for filtering by area of specialty and rohe - this is perfect when wanting to get specific about dialect!
- Ōkupu: This is an app-based translation service that prides themselves on being "NZ's #1 Online Māori Translation Service"
2. Aotearoa is very limited for small scale print runs
After inquiring at a number of local printing companies for the amount of books that we could afford when starting up our pakihi, we found that we would need to charge over $50 per boardbook just to make a small amount of profit. For that reason, we enquired with overseas printers in China, and that is where the book wound up being produced. This was a decision we had to weigh up in terms of production numbers, which is why we haven't printed a large amount.
We could have gone with the "if you make more for less, you can charge less" approach, even a pre-order basis, though this would have meant the timeline of delivery would be uncertain. In the end, we only ended up getting 200 printed for the first run, which sold out. We were happy that we hadn't over-produced, and were to only order more based on the demand. This is an approach we still adopt today.
However, it hasn't lost us that printing locally is a lot better, in fact, that's the direction we went for our Katikatia cards as it was a lot more feasible. We just learnt that the production process and location would greatly impact the affordability of our products. This decision-making process taught us that printing locally is a lot more limited when balancing up both cost and capability.
3. Registering for an ISBN
Who knew that registering for an ISBN was a thing? It stands for International Standard Book Number and applies to one-off items like a book, with one or more formats, like PDF or Kindle. An ISBN is not a mandatory inclusion when creating a pukapuka, though it is used as a world-wide identifier to help publishers, suppliers, and libraries locate, order, and track published materials.
For those who're interested in going through this process, you can request an ISBN number here. You are usually supplied a number within 3 working days! There is both a process, set of clear instructions and a small fee involved, though it is very much worth it when you get to see your pukapuka on the national library website!
4. You don't need to go through a publisher
That's right! You don't need to submit your writing to a bunch of publishers hoping someone will pick it up. For us, it was more important to create a rauemi reo for our pēpi hou than it was to attain recognition or a writing career out of it, so we were more than happy to navigate and fund this project ourselves. As we did more rangahau into the production process, we noticed that a lot of the pukapuka being put out through generic publishing companies were being done so in large numbers too - this helped us realise that we weren't down with the mass produced approach too. This point was just put here for those that identify as writers or kaituhi that want to put their work out to the world - know that you don't need to rely on anyone else to make that happen for you!
5. Pricing your creation
Being amongst the first lot of products we created, pricing was (and still is) a difficult craft for us! As two pakihi owners with absolutely no background in small business studies or ownership, this has been a re-occuring hurdle for us on both the product and service sides of our pakihi. Nothing that a lot of trial and error can't fix, though some of the things to factor when pricing a pukapuka pēpi like this included:
- Manufacturer costs
- Freight
- GST: 15% (whether or not you charge for it is dependant on if you're registered for GST)
- Website and Payment Processing Fees
- Packaging (mailer bags, labels, tissue paper, stickers and/or other branding material)
- Administration
- Production costs (time to write, illustrate, design, pull in experts if/when needed) - for this one, we didn't include this in our pricing as we felt it would have shot the price per item up by quite a lot, and it had started as a passion project anyway.
- Shipping costs are added on separately with us.
Apart from the shipping costs, these are a bunch of the things we factored in to get to a price of $29.99 per pukapuka pēpi. They are available to purchase here.
These 5 key learnings are just an insight into what it was like to learn on the fly and to give things a go. A lot of our other learnings occured in the design, illustration and decision-making spaces, though sharing them can wait for another time. So, for those that have been keen to give the production of a pukapuka a shot, we hope these learnings can help and allow for a much more organised approached than what we had!