My Book

I’m sitting at the computer, staring blankly at the white screen, while my mind is running frantically around my memory banks looking for something different in my life that I can blog about. My memory banks appear to be empty.

My husband is doing well. The house has the usual amount of clutter. Ditto my files. I still don’t go out as often as I did pre-pandemic, so I’m not running into as much strange behavior. It seems to me that unless you have to go somewhere to work, fewer people are out as much. I go to work nearly every day, but that involves walking to my desk in the corner of the guest room.

I’m scoring zip in the idea search.

What is taking up nearly all the room in my brain is the publication of my first book. Yippee! Fun! Fun! Fun? Actually, work, work, work! So that’s what I’m going to share with you today.

Standard publishing is a great option, but it’s very slow and I’m getting older by the minute. It also doesn’t allow an author much say in the printing of their book. Happily, there are other options available.

My husband had been encouraging me to self-publish for years, but the work involved is massive and mostly online. I didn’t see anyway that I could manage it. My computer skills are limited to emails, the occasional search, and ordering stuff from Amazon. And the most basic Microsoft Word.

When he retired, he offered to do all the heavy lifting, so to speak.

I said, “You’re on, Bunky!” And we were off.

The first job was finding an illustrator--it’s a picture book for kids. I had read about a website where artists looking for work posted samples and their prices. Excited at what I might find, I put “picture book illustrator” in the search bar. I got 3,462 hits.

I spent two days looking at all of them. Some were easy to eliminate. Many of the styles didn’t appeal to me. Others were drawings that had no business in a kid’s book. At the end of the second day, I had whittled it down to a list of 340. I’d eliminated 90% of them and felt a huge sense of accomplishment.

I gave myself a day off to recover, then went back to narrow down my choices further. Now my search gave me over 3,800 hits. I decided not to worry about the new additions and started looking for my original choices. They were all scrambled. Fortunately, I had written down everything available about each one and started searching for each name. Very few showed up. Mostly I got a notice saying that whoever wasn’t there.

Day 5 and I was ready to give up. Then my husband started sending me illustrators he found just by googling. I only had to read through a handful before I hit gold. She’s my age (we have similar life references), a Christian (no inappropriate material), and best of all, I loved her portfolio.

The man is definitely earning his salary.

I contacted her and she was willing to work with me, but she had eight months’ worth of work ahead of me. I was so convinced that she was the illustrator I wanted, that I told her to put me on her list. Just as well, it turned out that there was more preparation I needed to do.

She's working on it now and it’s exciting to see my words come to life in her illustrations.

But I can’t just sit around waiting for the next set of drawings to show up. So I do what all writers do. I’m working on the next book.