About This Town Press
This Town Press is Alexandra Koumoundouros & Valerie Aiello; a female-fronted, creative duo that presses books, t-shirts & art. Our goal is to make This Town Press into a successful, trusted & glamorous brand that creates & sells quality products. The This Town Press customer is a shopper that loves to learn new things, die laughing, play the records they feel like at a party, & prefers to take matters into their own hands.
Take a Listen to This Radio Interview:
http://writingontheair.com/genres/non-fiction/this-town-press/
TAKING THE HARD ROAD
Two Indie Writers Stay True to Their Message
By Nick A. Zaino III
August 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews
Many indie authors dream of turning their small businesses into lucrative cottage industries. In that respect, Alexandra Koumoundouros and Valerie Aiello are no different. They’d like for their music-minded self-help workbook, No One Gives a Shit About Your Band, to make the New York Times best-seller list, to be on everyone’s coffee table and to launch a successful series of No One Gives a Shit About… books. And they are taking a uniquely challenging road to get there.
Koumoundouros and Aiello published the book themselves, under their This Town Press imprint, and never thought about hiring an agent or a publicist. And they take an extreme hands-on approach to distribution, reaching out to individual stores by email and often in person. “We want to do it all ourselves, and we want to walk into stores, the stores that we want the book in, and we want to show them the book and talk to them,” says Koumoundouros. “Every store we’ve walked into, first they see the cover, they start laughing, they flip through the pages, they think it’s hilarious, they read a couple of pages, and the next thing you know, they’re taking the book in.”
The book takes musicians through a series of worksheets and informational sections to help them treat the project as a small business. It asks them to set goals large and small—release an album this year, use Twitter and Facebook five times a week, and play a gig a week, for example. It’s a fitting place to start for the authors, who met in 2004 when they both started work at a small record company in Los Angeles, Aiello as a graphic designer and Koumoundouros as a bookkeeper. They clicked immediately, eventually working on projects for the label and thinking they would create their own venture someday. They thought that might be a record label, but instead, they wound up creating This Town Press, which sells their books and line of T-shirts, and yes, their website includes a submission form for bands to be on their label.
At press time, the book was in four stores in Los Angeles and six in Austin (where the pair live), with plans to spread to Seattle, Portland, Chicago and New York. The authors have been reaching out to friends in other cities to find the best nonbookstore locations at which to sell the book. “You can be like, ‘Hey, help me out, you know this city, how could I get into this city?’ Being smart with what you have,” says Koumoundouros. The pair decided to byline the book as “anonymous” rather than with their own names because “that was part of the comedy, part of the bigger scheme of the joke” of writing “190 pages of comedy self-help.” If no one is going to give a shit about your band, why should they give a shit who wrote the book about it?
At a time when the industry has already adapted to e-books, Koumoundouros and Aiello are focusing on hard copies. The book is available digitally, but it is a workbook, after all. And to its creators, the book felt like it had to be something that could be picked up and seen and also given to others. “We kind of know that this is probably more a gift from a girlfriend or a mom, and bands might secretly go and buy it, but they’ll never admit that they need it,” says Aiello. “It kind of felt like more of a physical copy than a download.”
There are things the authors could have done to make it easier on themselves, established methods of hawking a book. But none of that sat well with what they wanted to accomplish. “We don’t want to hire the book marketing agency that knows how to sell a best-seller,” says Aiello. “We don’t care about being in bookstores, necessarily. That’s great and really supercool, but we want to be in record stores and instrument-selling stores, just different places like a Hot Topic or an Urban Outfitters. We want to reach a different audience than somebody who’s going in the ‘self-help’ section.” “We think we can still be successful and kind of reinvent a new way,” adds Koumoundouros. “Not necessarily change the wheel, just make it cooler.” They don’t want to be in huge retailers that might make them change their book title or their dark sense of humor, so they are working on smaller, hipper places. That might limit how quickly they can grow, but it preserves the spirit of their product and its mission. “It may not be the fast track to millions, and that’s OK, but what it does is it keeps the concept intact,” says Koumoundouros. “It keeps the brand intact and what we’re trying to accomplish intact. We want to maintain some integrity in what we’re doing. Not only do we stand behind the advice we’re giving, but we’re standing behind the comedy, too. And we’re standing behind the title, No One Gives a Shit About Your Band. It means something, and we don’t want to sacrifice that just to be on the shelves at Wal-Mart.”
That should help when it comes time to sell the other books in the series. They expect to release their next title, No One Gives a Shit About Your Small Business, sometime in August and have six more ideas in the pipeline. And they are working on all of this while learning how to sell the first book. “We’re trying to do things that are going to happen in sequence with the book,” says Koumoundouros. “There’s going to be offshoot projects, so we’re trying to work on all of them at the same time while we’re trying to get this book to be a New York Times best-seller.”
WHY WE EXIST
My name is Valerie Aiello and when I was thirteen, I knew I was going to make millions creating things.
My name is Alexandra Koumoundouros and my two obsessions since the beginning of me have always been music and stories.We are This Town Press.
We started This Town Press in June 2013 but in reality, this collaboration started some 20 years ago.
When I was thirteen I knew I would make my first million for someone else and then I would know how to make my own millions.
I moved to L.A. in 2004 and where I found myself interning at a small, independent record label in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. If I had to have a "normal" job while I dreamed of big ideas, then being an album designer like the guy in Xanadu was the only thing I wanted to do.
I moved to L.A. in 1998 and my life sort of fell into me. I found myself at a set production company learning the skill of finance. In 2004, I applied for a job at a small record label two blocks from my apartment as a bookkeeper. I got the job!
We both started at the Silver Lake record label around the same time, a week or two apart from one another.
A few weeks after my internship started at the label, I was hired on as a part-time designer in the art department making $10.00 an hour, and one week after that, I was hired on as a full-time employee. My destiny of record label producer was set in motion.
The record label was a wonderful magicial place to work and develop as a professional. Being an independent record company, new ideas are key to survival. Luckily, our boss was very open to employees introducing ideas, executing the good ones, and making them a reality in the marketplace.
I don’t remember when we first started collaborating on ideas with each other, but what I do remember is that what we were creating at that time was really good. Within a year after starting at the record label, Valerie and I had refined and redefined our jobs and roles at the record label and were producing grand, new ideas of our own.
Where Alexandra’s brain ends, mine begins and vice versa. Our minds just match and, so we started to work together to make our ideas come to fruition.
In 2006, I developed a lullaby series for the label. My idea was to transform songs that we all know and love and turn them into lullabies. Gnomes in a tree playing covers from the album Kid A on wood blocks, bells and xylophones was all I was seeing. I art directed the packaging of the series. Then for the sound, I explained the "gnomes" concept to a musician named Michael, who brilliantly transformed, performed, and recorded the music on the initial dozen or so albums in the series.
During the creation of the lullaby series, Alexandra had re-invented her job, and taken control of the operations concerning the manufacture, sale, and distribution of the product.
And as it turns out, the thirteen year old version of Valerie was right: She does have it in her to develop a million dollar idea. So here we are, a few years later, still collaborating and bringing our ideas to reality. In June 2013, Valerie and I started This Town Press.
This Town Press is a creative brand based in Austin, TX. We press books, decor, art and clothing.
We are This Town Press.
This Town Press is Alexandra Koumoundouros & Valerie Aiello; a female-fronted, creative duo that presses books, t-shirts & art. Our goal is to make This Town Press into a successful, trusted & glamorous brand that creates & sells quality products. The This Town Press customer is a shopper that loves to learn new things, die laughing, play the records they feel like at a party, & prefers to take matters into their own hands.
Take a Listen to This Radio Interview:
http://writingontheair.com/genres/non-fiction/this-town-press/
TAKING THE HARD ROAD
Two Indie Writers Stay True to Their Message
By Nick A. Zaino III
August 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews
Many indie authors dream of turning their small businesses into lucrative cottage industries. In that respect, Alexandra Koumoundouros and Valerie Aiello are no different. They’d like for their music-minded self-help workbook, No One Gives a Shit About Your Band, to make the New York Times best-seller list, to be on everyone’s coffee table and to launch a successful series of No One Gives a Shit About… books. And they are taking a uniquely challenging road to get there.
Koumoundouros and Aiello published the book themselves, under their This Town Press imprint, and never thought about hiring an agent or a publicist. And they take an extreme hands-on approach to distribution, reaching out to individual stores by email and often in person. “We want to do it all ourselves, and we want to walk into stores, the stores that we want the book in, and we want to show them the book and talk to them,” says Koumoundouros. “Every store we’ve walked into, first they see the cover, they start laughing, they flip through the pages, they think it’s hilarious, they read a couple of pages, and the next thing you know, they’re taking the book in.”
The book takes musicians through a series of worksheets and informational sections to help them treat the project as a small business. It asks them to set goals large and small—release an album this year, use Twitter and Facebook five times a week, and play a gig a week, for example. It’s a fitting place to start for the authors, who met in 2004 when they both started work at a small record company in Los Angeles, Aiello as a graphic designer and Koumoundouros as a bookkeeper. They clicked immediately, eventually working on projects for the label and thinking they would create their own venture someday. They thought that might be a record label, but instead, they wound up creating This Town Press, which sells their books and line of T-shirts, and yes, their website includes a submission form for bands to be on their label.
At press time, the book was in four stores in Los Angeles and six in Austin (where the pair live), with plans to spread to Seattle, Portland, Chicago and New York. The authors have been reaching out to friends in other cities to find the best nonbookstore locations at which to sell the book. “You can be like, ‘Hey, help me out, you know this city, how could I get into this city?’ Being smart with what you have,” says Koumoundouros. The pair decided to byline the book as “anonymous” rather than with their own names because “that was part of the comedy, part of the bigger scheme of the joke” of writing “190 pages of comedy self-help.” If no one is going to give a shit about your band, why should they give a shit who wrote the book about it?
At a time when the industry has already adapted to e-books, Koumoundouros and Aiello are focusing on hard copies. The book is available digitally, but it is a workbook, after all. And to its creators, the book felt like it had to be something that could be picked up and seen and also given to others. “We kind of know that this is probably more a gift from a girlfriend or a mom, and bands might secretly go and buy it, but they’ll never admit that they need it,” says Aiello. “It kind of felt like more of a physical copy than a download.”
There are things the authors could have done to make it easier on themselves, established methods of hawking a book. But none of that sat well with what they wanted to accomplish. “We don’t want to hire the book marketing agency that knows how to sell a best-seller,” says Aiello. “We don’t care about being in bookstores, necessarily. That’s great and really supercool, but we want to be in record stores and instrument-selling stores, just different places like a Hot Topic or an Urban Outfitters. We want to reach a different audience than somebody who’s going in the ‘self-help’ section.” “We think we can still be successful and kind of reinvent a new way,” adds Koumoundouros. “Not necessarily change the wheel, just make it cooler.” They don’t want to be in huge retailers that might make them change their book title or their dark sense of humor, so they are working on smaller, hipper places. That might limit how quickly they can grow, but it preserves the spirit of their product and its mission. “It may not be the fast track to millions, and that’s OK, but what it does is it keeps the concept intact,” says Koumoundouros. “It keeps the brand intact and what we’re trying to accomplish intact. We want to maintain some integrity in what we’re doing. Not only do we stand behind the advice we’re giving, but we’re standing behind the comedy, too. And we’re standing behind the title, No One Gives a Shit About Your Band. It means something, and we don’t want to sacrifice that just to be on the shelves at Wal-Mart.”
That should help when it comes time to sell the other books in the series. They expect to release their next title, No One Gives a Shit About Your Small Business, sometime in August and have six more ideas in the pipeline. And they are working on all of this while learning how to sell the first book. “We’re trying to do things that are going to happen in sequence with the book,” says Koumoundouros. “There’s going to be offshoot projects, so we’re trying to work on all of them at the same time while we’re trying to get this book to be a New York Times best-seller.”
WHY WE EXIST
My name is Valerie Aiello and when I was thirteen, I knew I was going to make millions creating things.
My name is Alexandra Koumoundouros and my two obsessions since the beginning of me have always been music and stories.We are This Town Press.
We started This Town Press in June 2013 but in reality, this collaboration started some 20 years ago.
When I was thirteen I knew I would make my first million for someone else and then I would know how to make my own millions.
I moved to L.A. in 2004 and where I found myself interning at a small, independent record label in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake. If I had to have a "normal" job while I dreamed of big ideas, then being an album designer like the guy in Xanadu was the only thing I wanted to do.
I moved to L.A. in 1998 and my life sort of fell into me. I found myself at a set production company learning the skill of finance. In 2004, I applied for a job at a small record label two blocks from my apartment as a bookkeeper. I got the job!
We both started at the Silver Lake record label around the same time, a week or two apart from one another.
A few weeks after my internship started at the label, I was hired on as a part-time designer in the art department making $10.00 an hour, and one week after that, I was hired on as a full-time employee. My destiny of record label producer was set in motion.
The record label was a wonderful magicial place to work and develop as a professional. Being an independent record company, new ideas are key to survival. Luckily, our boss was very open to employees introducing ideas, executing the good ones, and making them a reality in the marketplace.
I don’t remember when we first started collaborating on ideas with each other, but what I do remember is that what we were creating at that time was really good. Within a year after starting at the record label, Valerie and I had refined and redefined our jobs and roles at the record label and were producing grand, new ideas of our own.
Where Alexandra’s brain ends, mine begins and vice versa. Our minds just match and, so we started to work together to make our ideas come to fruition.
In 2006, I developed a lullaby series for the label. My idea was to transform songs that we all know and love and turn them into lullabies. Gnomes in a tree playing covers from the album Kid A on wood blocks, bells and xylophones was all I was seeing. I art directed the packaging of the series. Then for the sound, I explained the "gnomes" concept to a musician named Michael, who brilliantly transformed, performed, and recorded the music on the initial dozen or so albums in the series.
During the creation of the lullaby series, Alexandra had re-invented her job, and taken control of the operations concerning the manufacture, sale, and distribution of the product.
And as it turns out, the thirteen year old version of Valerie was right: She does have it in her to develop a million dollar idea. So here we are, a few years later, still collaborating and bringing our ideas to reality. In June 2013, Valerie and I started This Town Press.
This Town Press is a creative brand based in Austin, TX. We press books, decor, art and clothing.
We are This Town Press.