Ok, so whose idea was it for me to write a book again? Oh yea, me so I have no one to blame but myself. Having an idea is one thing, but when your idea needs to be backed up with real knowledge, there is no one or nothing to turn to but… GOOGLE. Yup, I turned right to Google when I got to the point that I needed to know what steps to take. I had so many questions like, how many pages should a children’s book be? How many words per page is standard? What age group am I trying to appeal to? Are the words I’m using to tell the story words that kids will understand or connect to? I realized that I needed more input!! I felt like Johnny 5 in Short Circuit! This is when I decided to focus on the age I wanted to appeal to. Since I’m a mom of a 6-year-old, I read books on a daily basis to my child, and I have been for years. Children’s picture books for ages 2 to 6 were more my speed for now. I say for now because, hey I’m an artist, I always have an idea up my sleeve. We’ll get to those ideas down the line.
Back to my story. Now that I was clear on my age range, I wanted to see what steps I needed to take to get my book published. Now this is when the real googling took place. Do I send it to a publisher? To be honest, I really didn’t know that there were other options besides sending it to a publisher to be approved. Or better yet, having a literary agent submit your story to a publisher for you. Well, let me tell you that I learned a lot. I found that most publishers only accept submissions that come directly from literary agents. There are independent publishers that don’t require an agent, but it can still take months to be approved for publication. Not only that but if you go through a publisher, you give up not only a percentage of your income for the book, but you also give up some of your creativity. They hire an editor and an illustrator for you and there go your fancy ideas of what you want your characters to look like.
After all that information, I decided to explore the world of self-publishing. Now let me tell you, the articles I read made this sound really good. So, here’s how I heard it… I can get all the profit that my book makes, have a say so on the editing, the illustrator used and even on the book’s development. Shoot!! Sign me up for that! This is when I read about Amazon KDP. Do you know people have been making residual income self-publishing through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for years?! Amazon will even print your books and send them to customers for you when they order. You can even order in bulk yourself if you decide to sell your books on consignment in stores. There are also many other companies that print books in bulk as well. Ingram Spark is also a great way to self-publish a book! With the help of all of this info, I finally decided that self-publishing was the route for me, and my next step was getting my story to a final edit. If you want to know more about how my editing went, pop back in to check out my next post. See you soon!