We love the early stages of making the book, as it’s when our creative juices are able to be unleashed. We like to put all our ideas down and then tweak-or-delete later on. It’s going to be fun to look back on these rough sketches once the book is finished and see how they grew into a professional product! Here are some of our ideas so far…
Production Diary
Here you’ll find an archive of updates we made when we were producing our books. It’s a little old now but we decided to keep it for posterity. If you’re interested in self-publishing then hopefully there’s a nugget or two in here for you. If you have any questions just leave a comment.
Early Sketches & Concepts
Andrew and I have had two evening meetings when the children are in bed. After the second meeting (last Monday), my item to do was: make the book spreads clearer. The reason for this, was the first draft spreads I was editing were 3cm x 7cm (approx), so getting quite hard to read. I have 8cm x 16cm (approx) spreads made from creating cells in a Pages file (Mac) and enlarging it to a big size.
Very First iPad Screenshot
I have been working on the iPad app today and am starting to get a feel for the overall look and flow. The app will consist of three sections, one for each of the books: Letters, Numbers, Shapes. Each section will have a full copy of the book and four mini-games using scenes from the game. These games all focus on different skills: reflexes, creative thinking, memory and discovery.
Pre-Release Promotion
My wife and I are self-publishing our own children’s book at the moment and we get a lot of questions about how we pull it all together. There are a million pieces of the puzzle that we’d like to share but today I’ll start with our pre-release signup site – just a single page website that gets us in touch with potential customers and rewards them to spread the word for us.