We were on TV! Well our book was......

Mornings with Kerri Anne Kennerley had a segment on getting ready for school yesterday which featured many cool products including "My School Days". The producer of the segment saw it in Shop 4 Kids magazine, so it was extra exciting to be approached, rather than send out another press release! It was the first time any of our products have been on TV and it was great to be in cool company like Fruity Faces and Eco-friendly lunch wraps. Think I will have to do some shopping.....

Editorial like this, or Shop 4 Kids can be extra powerful for a two-person business like us. We don't have the budget that the big publishing companies do, so an editorial is like gold for Milestone Press and our books. At last count we have 150 stockists around Australia, and we like to support them by doing as much promotion as we can. Fortunately Annabel is blonde and attractive - so she scores extra photos! See http://www.milestonepress.com.au/news.html if you don't believe me. I hate posing for family photos let alone stuff that strangers will see so am much more reticent. I think I will have to overcome my self-conciousness "for the good of the company" as Annabel tells me. We'll see.

The format, design and internals were very important to us. Our idea was to have a baby book that was very comprehensive and allowed people to remove pages without altering the overall look of the book. We were so proud that we managed to publish a book that included adoption and assisted conception. (When we did our research we found that other books did not include these.) We also loved the fact that if you were too busy and missed a month, you could remove the page and your child would never know.....

A Book About Me was born in late 2005. Shortly after the art work arrived at the printers we both realised that we were pregnant, due two weeks apart in March 2006. (Fiona with her third and me with my second) Monica arrived in late Feb and Georgia arrived in mid March.

It was going to be a challenge distributing the books ourselves while tending to the new babies. It all went very well as we sold 4,000 books before the girls turned 1.

We've finally started!

Milestone Press started because Annabel had experience in publishing and printing, and I had the start up capital and the time. Thanks to my employer offshoring to Manila I was suddenly asset rich and time rich! (not so much anymore...!)

Annabel had given my sister a lovely baby record book, which is no longer printed. The best she could find for me back in 2001 was one with Winnie The Pooh pictures and quotations. No offence Winnie, but it wasn't my style. So Annabel and I began this mini obsession with finding the perfect baby book, and joking that we should make one ourselves. At this time, my fantastic two day a week job at Citibank was being wound up. I couldn't imagine where I would find another part time job in my skill set that was a five minute drive from my home in suburbia - so decided to work for the best known employer in the world - ME (and Annabel but she lives 1600km away).

We purchased or borrowed every baby record book we could. To this day, Amazon still sends me those "Amazon recommends " emails. We analysed what we liked and disliked, we asked focus groups about their preferences. So the final result is A Book About Me. We have such amazing feedback ever since. It makes our day when someone sends a random email to say how much they love using it. My son turns 6 next month, and he loves looking through his Winnie the Pooh book (I promise to have transferred to A Book About Me before he is 12) and laughing at photos and asking questions. So many happy memories!