I've been browsing through many many beautiful photos of other book boxes recently (probably a bad idea, I know, not least for my wallet!) and as the very first Ninja Book Box goes out I wanted to write a bit about what you can expect from your box. Many of the other boxes have tons and tons of extra items and several include more than one book. I have to admit, sometimes seeing all the amazing stuff in these boxes makes me a little bit panicky. Ninja Book Box is different in many ways, but particularly in the volume of stuff you'll receive. Let me explain why that is.
The box was set up with the primary aim of supporting independent publishers and small businesses, and for us this will always be the most important thing. As many of these businesses have very small profit margins there is much less scope for big discounts we might get if we were working with bigger businesses, and the cost to us of the book for each box varies greatly. This will be reflected in the contents of each box, so although what's below is a fairly standard idea of what to expect, in some boxes there will be more or less additional stuff.
Things You Will Find:
An excellent, independently published book read and recommended by me or a member of our team. Each box will feature a title from a different genre, and we'll never include the same genre more than once in a year.
At least two (usually more) high quality, useful gift items, sometimes exclusive to Ninja Book Box.
Extras in the form of author interviews, exclusive discounts, previews, occasional items related to the book, and other fun stuff.
The book is the main focus - where other book boxes base the gifts solely on the theme and they don't necessarily have much to do with the book included in the box, our gifts are very much themed around the book. Our focus is on discovery - of new titles, new aspects of the world, new hobbies etc. So while they may not be inherently bookish they will relate to aspects of the book included and hopefully inspire you and deepen your reading experience.
Mystery! The contents of each box will be wrapped and we won't reveal anything besides the theme and a general description of the book until the boxes arrive!
Book Club. We have an online book club which people will be invited to join when they order their first box and participate in thereafter. We'll have a monthly chat about the book for those interested, as well as lots of other bookish stuff.
Things You Won't Find:
Swag. There will occasionally be promotional items relating to the book but I would expect this to be less than 50% of the time. We haven't come across a lot of indies who do promotional material and swag in the same way as big publishers so there's not always going to be much for us to include along these lines.
More than one book - in some future boxes you may receive more than one book but this will be rare. As previously mentioned, cost is a big factor here, and our own profit from the boxes is minimal.
Stuff that will sit around your house gathering dust. Personally I'd rather have two or three excellent, useful things than lots of smaller items I'm unlikely to use. We try very hard to only give you things we'd like to receive, and we're not really big fans of stuff for the sake of it, so if there's a choice between a little less in the box or things we don't really love, it'll always be less.
Basically Ninja Book Box is about supporting small publishers and businesses and the beautiful things they make above everything else. We hope you love the books we pick and use and get a lot of joy from the gifts we choose! We know we're just one of many excellent book boxes and we really appreciate you choosing us. In return we promise to always be very clear about what we're doing and why we're doing it.
In the first box there will be additional Kickstarter rewards. So that you get an idea of what a typical box will look like we have very clearly labelled the additional items as rewards.