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Children’s book publishing company gets presses rolling
By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer
For the Boehm siblings, children’s book publishing is all in the family. Sister Kate Boehm Jerome writes the books, brother Jim Boehm prints them and brother Gary Boehm provides some illustrations.
By combining these talents, they formed Vertical Connect Press LLC in February.
Jerome, a former executive at Chicago-based educational publisher Pearson Scott Foresman, and Jim Boehm, president of Printing Associates of Summerville Inc., a commercial printing company that has been in the Boehm family for 30 years, got together and tossed around the idea they realized was tailored to their talents—a family-owned children’s book publishing company.
The components were already there. Printing Associates, which annually makes $2 million a year in sales, would print the books. Jerome and her nationwide contacts in the children’s book industry would write and illustrate them.
In November, with an investment of less than $100,000 of Boehm family money, Vertical Connect printed its first books,The Chef Down at the Zoo, for children ages 3 and up, and “Miniature Golf Madness,” for 5-years-olds and up. Both books, written by Jerome, had print runs of 5,000 copies and are available at Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks.
“The children’s book market is not for the timid,” said Jerome, pointing out that roughly 50,000 children’s books enter the market each year in the United States.
What makes Vertical Connect fearless among the competition is that its books encourage conversation and interaction between children and adults—rare among most children’s books, Jerome said.
At the back of Vertical Connect’s books are story-related activities children can engage in with their elders. For example, one of the activities in “The Chef Down at the Zoo” asks grown-ups to discuss their favorite childhood foods and whether they can create those treats with their kids and grandkids.
Another encourages children and grownups to walk through their neighborhood and note the different animals they spot.
Miniature Golf Madness, illustrated by Gary Boehm, a principal with Charleston-based architect firm Glick/Boehm & Associates Inc., includes golf-based riddles kids and grownups can solve, word games and encourages family excursions to miniature golf courses and driving ranges.
Such joint activities between children and adults are the basis of Vertical Connect’s name, explained Jerome.
“We’re trying to get generations to connect,” she said, adding that the publishing company’s books are geared to “get kids talking” to their parents and grandparents.
It is an effort not only to educate children, but to also bring families closer together, Jerome said.
Before going to press, Jerome and Boehm tested their products among first-graders at Pinewood Preparatory School in Summerville and showed The Chef Down at the Zoo to educators at Columbia’s Riverbank Zoo.
The products were big hits, Jerome claimed.
Vertical Connect recently launched its Web site, verticalconnectpress.com, through which books can be ordered. The books are distributed from Printing Associates, which has a 3,000-square-foot production area and a 10-person staff.
Jerome and Jim Boehm hope to eventually place their products on Amazon.com.
The company has more than children’s books in mind. Cards with activities babysitters and their young charges can do together and “double diaries”—a diary for a child, one for a grownup and then grownup and child compare diary entries from a trip taken together—are also in the works.
However, Jim Boehm and Jerome are making sure not to overextend Vertical Connect.
“We don’t want to grow too fast,” said Jim Boehm.
“We want to grow slowly to meet the demand and need.”
Dennis Quick is senior staff writer at the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.
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