Yoke Har Lee: Leap of faith for publisher

Jill Mitchell confesses she is more of a dreamer and creator than a hard-nosed business woman. Picture / Natalie Slade

Jill Mitchell will never forget the day her credit card broke in half while she was overseas. She had no money for food for three days, and had to get a credit off the taxi driver to reach the airport.

Nor will she forget the first tactical error she made early in her business life - showcasing her books at a book fair when she didn't have an agent or a distribution pipeline for the market she wanted to tackle.

"Looking back, I think I jumped too far too early," she says. "I didn't know how to get a distribution network going. When they saw my books at the fair, they loved it, and asked where they could get them."

Today, after more than a decade in business, and a few training courses, Mitchell is much wiser about how Wild Daisies Publications can make it in the wider world.

She is exploring the chances of getting her books distributed by an agent in the US, and looking at the possibility of tackling Australia again in a more meaningful way.

Her reading books - aimed at early readers - have sold more than 400,000 copies and some of the characters she dreamed up have been made into an animated series shown on TVNZ6.

Wild Daisies came into being because no publisher wanted to publish the full series of books that Mitchell proposed.

"I never intended to become a publisher," she says. "When I took my books to publishers they were all very interested but no one would do the number of books I have for the emergent levels. The companies that were interested would say, 'I like this and this and that', and they would tear it [the series] to pieces."

Mitchell, who was taking time out from her school teaching job to deal with health problems, had come up with early literacy books for children featuring a medley of genderless frogs (Zip, Zeek, Zak, Zo, Zoosh) whose goggly eyes, colourful limbs and smiley faces, quickly endeared them to children.

By the time Mitchell had her books ready, she had created 73 titles, as well as some manuals. That was too much for anyone else to commit to publishing, so she started her own company with the help of a silent business partner.

One early problem was losing her Australian market after problems with a distributor.

Mitchell regrets not having a proper business mentor who could have held her hand when she needed to deal with the Australian distributor and the subsequent loss of that market.

She also wishes she had roped in a professional person earlier on - someone who could be the voice of reason as she manages the dual role of creator and entrepreneur.

As well as publishing, she also started a reading tuition centre in Pukekohe which at one stage had almost 100 students a week, but let that go while she focused her energies on the chance to develop an animation series out of characters from her books.

She says she was lucky to have met producer Belinda Simpson who knew how to pursue the national television deal, and is very happy with the animation work done by Huhu Studios.

Mitchell is selling her books online, and will retackle the journey to Australia but her attention is now focused on a new model, where Wild Daisies will appoint and train tutors to deliver the company's reading programme.

She hopes to have a chain of tutors around the country delivering her reading programme using the manuals she has developed. She is confident the books will do their job as they have been time tested and case studies have been built around the successes.

Mitchell still finds business intimidating at times, and confesses she is more of a dreamer, creator, and artist than a hard-nosed businesswoman.

Her advice to others aspiring to go down the same track is: "Do your groundwork thoroughly, test your product, then really, you have to have a leap of faith and go for it. It feels amazing that it has to take that long just to get to where we are."

Mitchell hopes to promote her books at an early childhood education conference next month. She is keen to try the Frankfurt Book Fair but wants to wait a year to see how the US market turns out.

She confesses she has made "thousands of mistakes" which have led her around in many circles but "I have never beaten myself up about that".

She also has bigger adventures planned for her frog characters, taking them round the world in a magical hot air balloon, and travelling back in time to the age of the dinosaurs.