Kevin muttered, “I knew this was going to be a bad day.”
Amazon publishing
Children’s Book Self-Publishing: Lessons As I Go
My illustrators (daughters, ages 13 and 14) have been busy with homework and violin concerts this week. But I hope they make a lot of progress this weekend:
In the meantime, I am shopping for translators at our school. Fortunately, I have access to a couple Spanish teachers and one Mandarin teacher. I will be asking them today if they’d be interested in doing language translations.
This means I need to create a document with just the text. Currently, I have text and illustrations (or placeholders). Lesson learned: next time, create a text only documents first.
I’m pretty excited about this stage because it adds a lot of value to the book. Adding a language component can expose children to other languages and pique their interest if they’re not already learning Mandarin, Spanish, Korean or French.
Self-Publishing: Formatting Your Pages
It’s a Saturday night. Hubby’s watching TV, girls are on their phones and I’m at my desk again.
Tonight, I’m starting the process that stopped me before: formatting my pages! I got overwhelmed in March. I’m determined to see this through! So here goes.
CreateSpace has a template you can use in Word! How easy is that? The first is the interior cover page and then a dedication:
…a blank page follows that and then the Table of Contents.
Note: I started this whole process with Udemy.com and I enrolled in the “Self Publish Your Children’s Book” course given by Tim Johnson. He has a very warm, enthusiastic manner and makes the process less intimidating. Check him out! I got 62% of the way through. I will be completing that course in tandem with the CreateSpace.com website going forward.
I’m going to upload my content and update my blog tomorrow.
And to all….a good night!
Self-Publishing: ISBNs, Trim Size
Do you have your EIN yet?
Next step on my CreateSpace Dashboard: Establishing an ISBN.
CreateSpace will create one for you, for FREE. However, this ISBN can only be used on the CreateSpace publishing platform, which is OK by me, since I want to distribute through Amazon.com.
I’m choosing the most popular trim size and full-color (it’s a children’s book, afterall) and white pages (cream is not an option anyway).
The next step (uploading book file) will have to wait until this weekend. I have not laid my book out yet. I’m preparing myself for a slow and (most likely) frustrating process as my scanner is slow.
Are you doing this with me? Let’s git ‘er done!
Kismet 