We Made a Childrens Book!

Hey there! Easter’s come and gone, and now that the rush to get Easter Egg Delivery Service out on time is over (you can get it here for next year!) I want to talk about the hows of it all. How the concept came together. How we decided to self-publish a children’s picture book. And how the process of putting it all together went.

Here’s a sneak peek of the answer to that third one:

But we’ll get there. First:

THE ORIGIN

So there I am in my then-girlfriend’s kitchen, sitting at the dining room table. It’s 7am and I’m struggling to stay awake. I just got off my graveyard shift at one of the local gyms. I usually try to stay up until noon, but that day I was struggling. It’s mid-September of 2022. Holiday season is fast approaching. I vaguely recall Poldaran talking about what he wanted to get his new baby niece. He’d also mentioned how maybe we could make our own kids book using Amazon. So, more to keep myself awake than anything, I started doodling.

As sleep deprived as I was then, my voice of reason and, most importantly, pragmatism spoke up. Because of the way I create art there was NO way I was going to be able to put a book together in time for Halloween or Christmas. Let me explain: I cannot draw competently directly onto my tablet. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a sizable, dependable tablet, but my brain just refuses to cooperate. After a lifetime of drawing directly on paper, that’s the only method that works for me. I know that I could maybe brute force my brain into playing ball if I sat down and practiced enough, but for right now these are the steps to the cycle:

1. Doodle on basic white paper.
2. Get home (most of these doodles happen during a slow period at work) and scan the doodle with my printer.
3. Use the art program Clip Studios to trace over the lines with black. Save an uncolored copy just in case.
4. Start coloring it in.
5. Clean up edges, fix colors, add detail.

A normal piece of art takes me maybe three to four hours, with cleanup taking up the majority of that time. Is it efficient? F$%K NO! But it gives me something to do while I’m trying to catch up on podcasts and audiobooks, so there’s that. So with my capabilities in mind, I started drawing rabbits.

Why rabbits?

Because Easter was half a year away (sigh…), and a thought had popped into my head. Or really, the image of a chocolate rabbit giving an elephant an egg. I looked up from my doodle and asked my then-girlfriend, “Hey, can you just name me some animals? Like seven or eight of them?” She did and a few of them ended up in the book. By now I had the prototype of the first half of Easter Egg Delivery Service mapped out.

A day or two later I showed it to Poldaran. He liked them and thought the concept was cute, but there was a problem. Amazon requires a book to be a certain amount of pages before they sign off on it. Even if I came up with more animals, and put the text on separate pages, not on the images themselves (which is what ended up happening) it still probably wouldn’t be long enough.

It took me nearly a week to find the answer. One that I’d already accidentally created. At the end of the boy bunny’s journey, a girl bunny appears to give him an egg. I could focus the second half of the book on her…but I didn’t want her to just go visit more animals. I wracked my brain a little bit more before deciding to have her travel the world. She’d visit different places like Egypt, Hawaii, Transylvania, etc.

I was already halfway through coloring and refining boy bunny’s pages, so I drafted up girl bunny’s, thinking, “Yeah, this could work. This is…actually pretty easy. I can do this!”

WHAT A FOOL.

THE KDP PROCESS

Before we delve into this next bit, I want to make clear that this isn’t me trying to insult Amazon or KDP. Most of my struggles are down to my own inexperience and ignorance. And I should briefly delve into what KDP actually is. KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is a service provided by Amazon for creatives. For a portion of the profit, Amazon physically creates and distributes your creation (novel, coloring book, journal, etc.) to the world. If you have on online platform to promote the product on, it’s a dream come true.

And an existential nightmare.

I didn’t take graphic design in high school. Wanted to, but my family couldn’t afford the program the school required you to get. I’d still draw on and off over the years, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I scraped together enough money to purchase a tablet. I also have the heart and soul of an old man who thinks that flip phones should make a comeback. All this to say that to even an amateur graphic designer, the KDP process will be a piece of cake. But me? Well…

You’ll then ask, “Barnaby, have thee no common sense, ye fool?! Does thee not knoweth howeth toeth readeth thee instruction manual-eth?!”

Answer: Jokes on you! I don’t read instructions! I watch YouTube videos where smarter people than me explain things to me!

Designing the book within KDP’s strict parameters was the real struggle. There has to be a set number of inches of “blank space” between the edge of the covers and interior pages and the content. If you’re even an inch off, KDP will send it back into Draft. The review process (where they check your product for violations) can take between a few hours to three whole days at the longest. THAT’S where the stress comes from. The limbo hell that is being stuck in review. But for me it wasn’t just once. Oh no. This was a repeat experience.

What follows is a rough but scarily accurate recreation of my mental state once the book was ready to be submitted to KDP:

“Okay. Fixed all the typos, cleaned up the art. The book’s as ready as it’s every gonna get. Plus Easter’s in a two weeks. Time to pull the trigger. And heeeeere weeeee goooood! Submit!”

48ish hours later:

“Oh. It’s back in draft…Says here it’s because there’s stuff bleeding over onto the margins…Wish they’d tell me which pages are bleeding over. But alright. I’ll modify them all, plus the cover. Oh, actually, this is a good thing! Barnaby you idiot, you misspelled “Tortoise” and “Translavania’! Just need to redo those pages. Thank you, KDP!

“Okay. Typos fixed, art readjusted. Can’t think of anything else. Lost a couple days, but we’ve still got a week and some before Easter. Aaaaaaaand submit!”

24ish hours later:

“…Cover’s good, but the pages are still bleeding over…Sigh. Okay. Y’know what? Maybe it’s only just a little bit off. Let’s try again.”

24ish hours later:

“COME ON! That’s nowhere near the edge!”

24ish h-:

“Please!”

24ish-:

God?! Are you there?! Please!”

24-:

“You know what?! Fine. I’ll just add a boarder to EVERYTHING! Screw artistic integrity! You win! Happy? HAPPY?!”

24ish hours later:

“…Easter Egg Delivery Service now available for preorder….So much relief…But the rage lingers…Both directed towards myself and KDP….Never doing that again…”

Two-ish days later:

“…Maybe I could make one for Halloween.”

Sounds fun, right?

In all seriousness, I blame most of my troubles on my own stubbornness. I really am that old dad who refuses to read the instructions when putting furniture together, repeatedly reassuring his wife, “I got this, don’t worry!” But now that the book is up, and I’ve months of distance between now and its release, how do I feel? The book fills me with triumph, and I target bemusement towards my younger self. It was definitely a learning experience. One I can carry over into future projects.

Like another kid’s book…Maybe…

One day…

Soon?