In an attempt to publicize the progression of my growing self-publishing company, I have created this blog. My hope is to allow others who may have the desire to try their hand at the process, to gather some information from my experiences. Almost everyone I talk to has a children's book they want to get published, what are you waiting for?
Since publishing my first book “Lucky the Rubber Ducky”, I have wanted to learn more about the publishing process. I decided to go out completely on my own and become and independent publisher and publish my own work. I put together this blog to document each step I took along the way.
Sometime in mid August of 2009 I received a strange e-mail from someone I did not know. Aaron Watene, who had been given my name and information from an aunt of mine. He was contacting me to see if I would be willing to provide some sketch samples for a manuscript of a children’s book he wanted to get illustrated. After discussing with him for a bit on the type of illustrations I did, and what he had in mind, I put together the first few sketches ...
After seeing the sketches, he and I came to an agreement, that we would proceed. I continued to create sketches for each page of the book. Since my previous experience publishing hadn’t really prepared me for anything but illustrating, I soon learned that the sketches needed to be in proportion to the finished pages, and that the page count needed to be 32, total pages. I used Adobe’s inDesign to layout the proposed pages and using these tools allowed me to visualize which parts of the story would be most dynamic as illustrated pages. Soon after creating the sketches, I began rendering the first few full color pages...
The full color rendering was met with great enthusiasm from Aaron and his “critics”. So I proceeded to sketch the remaining pages, rendering a few here and there. In the meantime, I had never printed a children’s book before, I had only ever supplied the illustrations. I had no idea who or where to get the printing done, high quality-lowest cost. While watching TV one evening I saw a commercial for Alibaba.com. I immediately went online and researched what they offer. Within a few minutes I had created an inquiry and sent it through that service to 20+ book printers in Asia, some in India, most in China and Hong Kong. I received some very favorable quotes and sort of committed to one of the vendors in Shenzhen, China. Since the book wasn’t completely finished, I couldn’t fully commit. Then I went to work with zeal to finish the sketches and final renderings before October 1st, 2009.
Once the sketches and complete renderings were done, I began contacting the printer again and preparing the final print files for him. Part of the final print files included purchasing an ISBN number with barcode. The reason I needed this on the book, was for future sales. Retail book sellers like Amazon, or Barnes and Noble will not sell a book without one. Having one also makes the book available to anyone with access to the system. Only publishers can get one, and having published my previous book, set me up already as a publisher. All the while I was arranging and researching the ocean freight shipper, TopOcean. The printer was hard at work printing the books. The whole printing of all 2,000 books only took him about a week to be completely done. The printer kept me updated on the status of the book by sending me photos periodically to show the progress.
We were in early December by this time, and had our hopes up that we might be able to get the books by Christmas. Once I arranged the shipment with the shipper the estimate of delivery was Dec 29th, close! As it turns out however, just because the ship with the books on it reached port on the 29th, does not mean the books will be available. There is much that goes on once a shipment from a foreign company is imported, it must clear customs, after being off-loaded or “devanned” from the ship. So, today is the day that we are expecting the books. It has been a lot of hassle and inconvenience, more that I anticipated dealing with the shipper, and the trucking company delivering the shipment. That is really the only disappointment.
