What Would Emily Say

I published my first children's book

Who would have thought writing and publishing a children’s picture book would be such a daunting task? Not me, that’s for sure. There was much more to it than I imagined.

Tea with Emily

I wrote the book Tea with Emily in an afternoon. Looking at a blank screen while sipping a cup of hot tea, the idea just came to me.

My mother’s family is full of tea drinkers and has kept us in the trend. Many of us drink coffee too. We switch back and forth as needed for comfort or fuel. A cup of java in the morning gets the juices flowing. A cup of tea slows me down and allows me time to contemplate.

Writing the story of a little girl being given a tea set and playing dress-up, it was a stretch for a middle-aged man. Learning how to brew tea and bake cookies wasn’t hard to imagine. I looked back upon my childhood and reminisced about baking with my mother and sister and brewing pots of tea.

Beginnings

The book is a throwback to a time when I went to a teahouse with my family. We are grownups and my mother had moved to the eastern part of North Carolina for her job. She found a quaint tea house, and when visiting her she brought me to let me experience it. It was fun, even if I felt like I should have been a little girl or older woman to fully appreciate it.

In an email, my mother asked if I told anyone about it. I retold the story in dramatic overtones to thrill her… she said I should write a book. Here you go. I did it.

Getting started

The story should have been a children’s book, but I couldn’t seem to stretch it out past 18 pages. Then I learned there were introductions, forwards, copyright pages, and notes of thanks. These would add enough padding to make it an actual picture book required by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) at Amazon.com.

I broke down the text and added the trivial pages. Now it came down to the artwork. I searched the internet for suitable images with no luck. My mother is an amateur artist, so I asked her to do some watercolor drawings for me — providing a rough draft of the text.

She provided adequate drawings, but the characters weren’t consistent enough between frames and some items were awkward. I tried scanning them to use them anyway, but the scanners were not the problem. The drawings just weren’t good enough with high resolution to use.

Artwork

I’d read online that Fiverr was a good place to find inexpensive work online. Freelance artists and writers often linger there, hoping to find work. I trolled the profiles and fees and didn’t see much to suit me. I placed an ad and received very few inquiries.

In the past, I’ve used Upwork.com to find freelance writing jobs. I created a client account and within a few minutes was posting my first listing. Upwork is easier to use and navigate for me, possibly because I’ve used it before from the talent side. I interviewed a few artists and looked over their sample artwork. Within two days, I hired a woman from South America for a reasonable charge.

She asked me to explain what I was looking for, the size, pixel count, and what the images needed to be. It took me a bit to figure out what she’d need. The image information was available on the KDP website. That was a tremendous relief. I copied the information and messaged it to my artist.

I hadn’t broken down the short book into pages yet. This seemed to be the easiest way to show what I’d need. Taking the text and breaking it into bites that would need an illustration, I put together a list of the pages and text for each one.

Following up, I described what Emily should look like, and how I wanted her to appear on the cover, and how the principal characters would look and dress. I followed with a description of how I envisioned the illustrations for each page.

It was more work than I expected. Who knew you had to think about such things instead of just doing them? I didn’t.

Putting it all together

After my artist submitted the approved artwork, I loaded the text and artwork into the Kindle Create program and edited it until I was happy with a layout for the e-book. This is how e-readers, such as a Kindle, would display the book.

This part of the task was much easier than I expected. I logged into KDP on Amazon and loaded my e-book with little fanfare. It was easy!

I made this also available as a paperback book. The process turns out to be a little different. The Kindle Create program doesn’t automatically do everything for you for a paperback book. I guess that’s why’s it’s called “Kindle Create” and not Paperback Create.

I found they have a Microsoft Word template that made the job easier. I pulled all the text and cut and pasted as needed for the layout. I added the pictures and Voila! — It was too short.

I hadn’t thought about the need for blank pages to make everything layout perfectly, so I added a blank page after the title page and made sure that each section started on the front instead of the back of a sheet of paper. I was finally ready to upload and… Presto! — I learned it automatically removes blank pages in the upload process. Now I know what was going on in some government publications where the fine print says “this page intentionally left blank.” I added the same text to my blank pages. It worked!

Cover it up

The KDP site has a cover creator that worked marvelously for the paperback book. I used the cover photo my artist-rendered with no issues.

I wasn’t happy with the generated kindle book cover. I used Canva.com. Using their templates, I found one for children’s books and could make one I liked in a few minutes — and for free! I saved it as a pdf file and uploaded it with no problems.

A book is born

My children’s picture book was born. I advertised it on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. I also went back to Fiverr and hired two people to market the book. Last, I set up a free book promotion on KDP for three days.

Within the next couple of days, I saw my book rise to #17 in its category for kindle books on amazon. A few friends commented and liked my posts about the book. My mother even bought a copy.

A friend I knew through work sent me a message she likes it and only found two typos. My heart sank. My mother received hers in the mail and told me the same.

I skimmed the book aloud in the Kindle and paperback files. Yes, there were two glaring typos. I fixed them the next day. I am still mortified that I hadn’t caught these errors sooner.

It was a children’s book, for goodness' sake! How does someone overlook typos when editing their own work when it has less than 1,000 words!

Call to action

Learn from my mistakes. No matter how eager and excited you are to publish a book — even a simple children’s picture book… have somebody else proofread it too. You don’t want to have it published in a first edition with typos.

I think I’m going to be sick.

Thank you for reading. I hope you too have learned, there is a reason everyone gives this advice.