This post was sponsored by Sagebooks. All opinions are mine and mine alone.

We’re back this month with another quick peak into the inner workings of Sagebooks as well as some spoilers on their new products. Read on to see what Lucia Lau, author and creator of Sagebooks, has to say.

1) Now that you have come out with all five sets and treasure boxes for all 5 sets, what do you have planned next? 

We have just launched the Treasure Box Game Cards, alongside a series of videos, posts, and PDFs loaded with tips and ideas. And great news to all those parents who have been asking: Basic Chinese 500 Study Cards are coming in September 2018!

The Study Cards will be color coded and contain all the essential information at a glance: Level, Book Number, Lesson Number, Pinyin, and of course, the character on the other side. Similar to our Game Cards, we will be launching videos and posts with tips to make the most out of these cards.

We are also working on some other exciting new ideas, especially for overseas parents, which will roll out in 2019.

2) Will there ever be sets for characters 501-1000? (pretty please???) Why or why not?

By the time a child graduates from Basic Chinese 500, it is most likely they will have passed the 6-year-old benchmark. From that age onwards, children learn in a different way and benefit a lot more by reading extensively, in various styles and genres.

Of course, a guided program is always helpful. While I do not rule out the possibility of creating a course for a further set of 500 characters, the format and course structure would be very different.

By the way, Treasure Box is a sort of extension to the 500 words as it introduces a further 100+ characters.

3) What does a typical day look like at SB headquarters?

Work starts before we even hit office. At 7:30am we send out a daily “poke” to our (mostly HK-based) FB Group members. We officially start our day at 9am.

We liaise with our main distributor to make sure retail bookstores are well replenished. We conduct research on local and regional events, expositions and news… which we then compile into useful information for our readers. We set up meetings with schools and teachers.

After a brief tea break, we attend to the enquiries from our readers and answer the urgent ones. For more general enquiries, we compile them into a database and then write up specific posts to address these questions. At lunch hour we often are busy putting up announcement posts on social media.

After lunch, we take a quiet moment to do some planning. We reflect upon and compile reports on field visits, observations and recommendations. We make sure that our showroom is well stocked and our reading room is always welcoming.

Once a week we have internal meetings where various teams touch base to make sure we all work cohesively.

We officially close at 6pm, but our creative team carries on working around the clock. They create presentations (digital and printed), new videos and improve product design. They are always looking for innovative ways to make our material child friendly and fun, while keeping up with the newest technology. We all become their guinea pigs which is a lot of fun!

Thanks again for the sneak peak. I’m very excited about the cards (I’ll be posting a review soon) and the upcoming parent activities for 2019. If you can read Chinese, I highly recommend following their blog and reading all their educational posts. It’s totally above my level, but I still manage to glean good stuff every time.