Children's Features

Loud Sales for A Quiet Book
Roxane Farmanfarmaian -- 12/11/00

Carl Sams and Jean Stoick, the husband-and-wife team that created the 1999 picture book Stranger in the Woods, knew they had something special on their hands when the first printing of 20,000 sold out before it had even been distributed out of their home state of Michigan. "We set out to do something that would teach third and fourth graders about nature," said Sams, whose company, Carl R. Sams II Photography, published the book. "What happened is that we captured the adult market, too."

Today Stranger in the Woods is in its fifth printing, for a total of 200,000 copies. At BEA this year, it received the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Children's Picture Book. This holiday season it is a Book Sense 76 pick and is featured on the covers of NEBA's, NCIBA's, UMBA's and PNBA's holiday catalogues. It has also helped raise over $28,000 for children's and environmental causes, since Stoick and Sams have regularly donated a portion of the book's proceeds to charity.

Stranger in the Woods is a tale of innocence, told in both pictures and words, of deer and other forest animals discovering a snowman in their midst--a snowman outfitted with a carrot nose, nut eyes and seeds in its hat. Stoick and Sams decided to self-publish the book because "we wanted artistic control," Sams explained. "We wanted to soften the edges."

It all began in 1982 when Stoick and Sams began photographing a family of white-tailed deer that lived in the forest just 10 minutes from their home. "I taught [Jean] photography and she taught me composition," Sams said. Besides amassing a trove of over 60,000 photos of the deer, several of which appeared in a 30-page article the couple did for Audubon magazine in 1987, Sams and Stoick have had photographs in National Wildlife and National Geographic magazines and have published two other books: a new edition of Loon Magic (Northwoods Press) and Images for the Wild (Sleeping Bear Press).

"We knew we wanted to do something with our pictures of this deer family," Sams recounted, "and finally decided on a children's book." By December 1999, as the second printing of 40,000 began coming in, the couple started hiring friends and family to help with administration and marketing. Right before Christmas, the wholesaler Partners signed on and began selling the book into Borders. In the spring, the authors attended the Harbor Springs, Mich., gift show and struck a deal with Hallmark to put the book into 400 stores. After BEA, Bookman, Cohen Pacific and Baker & Taylor all picked it up. Then Scholastic tried to buy the book, but the couple turned the offer down.

"This fall we went to all the bookseller conventions, and we were selling Stranger by the case, to bookstores that I know often are able to buy just five or six copies of a title," said Sams proudly. "We regularly picked up 20 to 30 stores per show."

This Christmas, Ranger Rick, the National Wildlife Federation's children's magazine that g s out to 500,000 kids, is featuring Stranger in the Woods as its cover article, as is Birds and Blooms magazine (circulation 1.5 million). And as they did last year, Sams and Stoick are teaming up during the month of December with Borders stores in Michigan to raise funds for the Rainbow Connection, a nonprofit organization that makes wishes come true for dying children. Also available for the holiday season are gift cards and the couple's newest endeavor, a 14-minute video called The Making of Stranger in the Woods.