2024 Sale and Price Increase
by Rebecca Spooner on April 02, 2024
We are excited to announce that we are doing a Back to School Sale July 17-21, 2024! This will coincide with our Gathered in His Name event and we thought it would be fun to do them both at once. This means that you can come to the event and shop the sale, where we hope to have physical books available that you can take home on the spot to save the shipping. That being said, I also want to make sure you are aware that we will are looking at a price increase this year. Let's talk about why, when, and how much. As I'm sure you are well aware, inflation has caused prices to skyrocket in every industry—and we are not immune to its effects in the publishing world. Paper, cardboard, packing materials, even ink and printer servicing have gone up significantly—in some cases over 250%. Our overall production prices have gone up as labor prices have increased, our team has expanded, and we have started doing our own custom illustrations and art. Our only price increase was on our digital full bundle products and was many years ago. On top of this, we are also continuing to see misuse of our files with file sharing, copying, and even reselling. I have been committed to keeping our consumer costs down for the sake of our customers, but we are officially arriving at a point where an increase is unavoidable in order to continue to make things sustainable long term. As we have been praying about this, Jonathan and I wanted to do it in a way that would be honoring to our loyal customers. We have decided to give a lot of advance warning of this change so that you have time to plan or adjust as needed. As you know, we are in the process of building a new warehouse here in the United States. This of course takes a lot of money, but we are hoping that we will be able to make some positive changes that will help us keep our print costs down and hopefully make shipping more reasonable both in how long it takes and the cost. Many of you also know (or can quickly see) that our digital products were underpriced from the beginning—as most companies keep digital just a small amount under print. In an effort to bring these more into an alignment, our digital products will be going up by 20% and our print products by 5% as of July 22nd, 2024. Please note that we will be working toward equalizing our prices for digital and print moving forward as the cost of production is so high for each of them regardless of their distribution methods. If inflation continues at it's current rate, we may be looking at another significant jump in digital down the road to help us line up with industry standards and perhaps add more value to our digital to prevent misuse in the future. We appreciate your understanding in this matter and hope that giving this advance warning (and waiting until after the sale) will be a blessing to your families and give you an opportunity to prepare. Blessings! Rebecca and Jonathan
UPDATE 04/04/2024:
After posting this, we have noticed that a common question seems to be about why we would increase the product cost when production of the product is done. I want to address this concern.
After a unit is completed and released, it’s a common misconception that it costs us nothing beyond production. The reality is that the digital version of our units are very popular and make up a large source of our revenue. The rising cost of doing business along with an ever-growing company means that the products that we sell, be it digital or print, have to match up with the cost of doing business. Each of our digital files has to be hosted on platforms that cost money, and we do regular upkeep and edits on these files—requiring an entire team of individuals both behind the scenes in our design and proofing team as well as those you are more familiar with in customer service.
As previously stated, our original pricing model for digital products worked initially as a much smaller company with much lower overhead, but with increasing business costs—and a large portion of that being labor—it’s time for a change.
