Anomia Press

I think it's probably time for a recap on how things have been going for Anomia lately. This is pressing as I just realized that there was a (gasp!) 5 month gap between my last two blog entries. For shame!  Oh well, as much as I enjoy the NYTimes' You're the Boss blog' I may have to put aside my aspirations to be a bleeding-edge business blogger for the time being.
 
In a nutshell, things have been going extremely well.  As you might know, Anomia won the Mensa Select award in April.  This led to lots of national and international interest from various people in the toy industry. As a result of this interest I took on a whole slew of new retail accounts.  In January, Anomia was available in 3 stores in the Boston area.  By the late spring, Anomia was available in about 40 stores around the USA and I think one store in Canada.  The Mensa award was also responsible for attracting Anomia's first international distributor.  I'm lucky to have signed on with Eureka Concepts to handle Anomia distribution in Australia. (See previous post).
 
As Spring 2010 came to a close my first printing of 2,500 games was rapidly dwindling. Time to reorder!  I bit the bullet and doubled the quantity. So, first printing: 2,500 games. Second printing: 5,000 games.
 
Looking back over my first year in business, I see it took me about 11 months to sell through my first 2,500 games. I sold a lot of these games directly to individuals via my website and Amazon.com.
 
I figured, with a growing base of retailers and a shift, on my part, away from selling games to individuals and toward selling whole cases of games to retailers, I should be able to sell through the 5,000 copies in the next year. Boy, was I wrong.
 
In June, I attended the American Specialty Toy Retailers Association (ASTRA) conference in Providence, RI.  I was first made aware of ASTRA by Elaine Hackney, who owns Boing! Toys in Boston, Mass.  Elaine was the first retailer to carry Anomia.  I have gone to her continually with questions about how things work in the toy industry and she always gives me great advice.
 
Elaine encouraged me to join ASTRA and to go to the conference in Providence this year.  She said it would be a great way to connect directly with independent retailers from all over the country.  She was right.  The response at the conference was amazing.  Anomia Press took on over 100 new accounts and it was very clear that the word about Anomia was spreading among retailers.
 
As a direct result of the ASTRA conference, we sold through all 5,000 units of the second printing in about 2 months!
 
Word continues to spread.  Anomia is now in approximately 250 stores, and the list is growing every day. I just received my third print run of 7500 units (I ordered 10,000, but there was a problem with this printing which caused the manufacturer to short the order by 2500 units), and have already placed another order for an additional 10,000 to be sure I have enough to get through the holidays. As of right now, I have already sold half of my 7,500 units from printing #3.
 
Also, of note, we just sold our 10,000th copy of Anomia!
 
Of course, everything is not all roses. There are a lot of late nights spent invoicing orders, stuffing envelopes, and trying to understand the subtleties of QuickBooks. In addition to Anomia Press, I have a full time job, two kids and my wife works full time as well. Suffice to say that we get a little fried at times just trying to keep up.
 
It's also hard to maintain this type of growth without an endless supply of capital. I've been lucky in getting some short term loans and am looking into some other investment options for the long term.  Ideally, I'll be able to create some expansion packs for Anomia, as well as develop a few new games that have been kicking around in my head lately. I never really fully grasped the phrase "Cash is king" until I had my own business. Actually Cash is King and Time is King as well.
 
Well, onward and upward.  I have a few more updates to make about Candian distribution, another important award (shhh), and a new book by Workman Publishing, but I will save these for subsequent posts.

Cheers
Andrew

I'm excited to announce that Anomia is expanding it's reach overseas.  I recently struck a deal with Eureka Concepts Pty. Ltd. to distribute Anomia in Australia.  This past March, Luc Marin, Eureka Concepts founder and managing director, reached out to me on LinkedIn after the Boston Globe ran a piece on Anomia. It took me & Luc a few months to work out a deal, and then it took a few more months for the first shipment of Anomia to make it's way across the world to Sydney.

It's amazing to think of Anomia nestled inside a giant container ship, chugging across thousands of miles of open ocean, until finally arriving to confound and befuddle a (hopefully) inordinate number of Australian citizens!

Luc informed me that the games finally arrived safely. What a relief! I had been worried about all sorts of things like pirates, the Bermuda Triangle and even rogue waves. (Ok, maybe not worried, per se,  but my imagination did run through a few improbable scenarios while the games were in transit.)

So, if you have friends & family in Australia, let them know that Anomia has arrived!

I spent a couple of days walking the floor at the 107th American International Toy Fair.  Toy Fair is the largest toy and game convention in the western hemisphere. It boasts about 30,000 attendees and 1,700 exhibitors which take up about 350,000 square feet in NYC's Javits Center.  In other words, it's pretty huge!  Not surprising, given that the toy/game business in the US alone is a $22 billion dollar a year industry.

Overall, I had a great time. Totally exhausting, but great.  I met a lot of really wonderful people, all of whom are at different stages with their products and businesses.

I've been using social media a lot as I've been working on Anomia and Anomia Press, so it was particularly cool to connect with FunQ Games  and Dr. Jen of Play This Way, who I had previously only encountered online.  

I also met the great people from Virtue Toys and Be Blocks, both of which were attending Toy Fair for the first time.  This was great to see, as I will very likely be in a similar position next year.

One of the most interesting things I saw was in the MakeDo booth. MakeDo is an Australian company that came up with the brilliant idea to create a set of connectors for use with recyclable materials.  Got a bunch of old boxes?  Don't recycle them(yet)!  First, make a huge robot, or an awesome fort, or a dog, or, well, anything!  With the MakeDo connectors you can build stuff with cardboard boxes, egg cartons, paper, plastic packaging. The world is your recyclable oyster!

I also got a chance to talk with a few people at both Set Enterprises and Looney Labs. This was a real treat for me as I have looked at both of these companies as models for Anomia Press.

To everyone I met in NYC, thanks so much for sharing your experiences and knowledge, I really appreciate it, and hope to be in contact with you as we all move forward with our various endeavors! And now, a few random photos from Toy Fair 2010.

I'd say Anomia Press got off to a pretty good start in the last half of 2009.

I started out in June trying to raise enough money to produce the first printing of Anomia. I hit that goal by early August and quickly switched into production mode.  By mid-November I had received the first shipment of games, and by the end of December I had sold more than 900 copies of Anomia!

I've gotten a ton of emails and Facebook posts from all sorts of people telling me how much fun they've been having shouting random things at their friends and family.  It's incredibly gratifying to get all this wonderful feedback.  Thanks again to everyone who helped me get this far!

So, what's next?

We'll for starters I'll be doing a "Meet the Inventor" night at Boing! in Jamaica Plain this Friday, January 29th at 6:30pm.  I'll be answering questions about my experience inventing and producing Anomia, and we'll be playing a few rounds as well!  Please stop by!   Boing!  667 Centre St, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 http://www.boingtoys.com/

After that I am headed to Toy Fair for a few days in February to make some connections with distributors, retailers, and manufacturers, as well as some of the great industry people I have met online.

I'm also submitting Anomia to the 2010 Mensa Mind Games competition.  Being one of the 5 games selected this year would be a great break for Anomia. Fingers crossed!

In the next week Anomia will appear on Amazon.com.  I am curious to see how this impacts my sales...once it's up there I hope you will consider sharing your play experiences in a review.

Last but not least, I'll be organizing a whole bunch more play test parties to help keep spreading the word about Anomia, AND, possibly even more exciting (?) to try out some ideas I have for expansion packs/alternate versions.  If you want to be in on this, please drop me a line!

That's all for now.   Stay tuned for more updates in the near future.

Cheers
Andrew

Hey, we made the front page of the local paper! So cool!  You can read the full article online here.

Melinda Moore, from On a Limb was kind enough to interview me for her blog. You can win a copy of Anomia by commenting on the blog post. Check it out!
Thanks Melinda!

Here are a few more notes I've received via Facebook and email, from people who played Anomia over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Note, real names have been changed to the names of muppets to protect the innocent AND guilty.


"Hey there, hope you had a great turkey day with your family. I finally played Anomia for the first time time with my mom and The Swedish Chef on Thanksgiving day. We had a lot of fun! I LOVE the game! Had my mom laughing like crazy! :) Great job!"


"Played Anomia for the first time last night with Kermit and Animal (age 10). It was a blast! We played two rounds and were laughing and having a great time. Thank You!!! Awesome game."


"Hey, Anomastro. Anomia is the best. THE BEST. Bert and I played our inaugural game with my mom, dad, Gonzo and Miss Piggy. So much fun! Miss Piggy (age 15) doesn't want to wait till Christmas for me to give them theirs, so... I think the idea of saving them for Holiday gifts has failed. Might as well gift them all early. Miss Piggy advised me to save one in the plastic wrapping so that in the future, when you are famous, I could still have a pristine copy of the first edition, sell it, and make a lot of money. Good job, Anomiandrew."


"Played Anomia with three self-declared non-game-player types on Saturday. I don't know if the whiskey had anything to do with it, but it only took about 10 -15 minutes for the hysterical laughter to begin."