So I thought I would use something like Lulu or blurb to to a monitised version of the The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry rather than having to set up my own webpage and once again face the termoil of trying to get a paypal button and what have you, working on my site. However this is proving a bit trixy.
Lulu was out as they are going only for the ereaders like the Nook which are not brilliant for picture book styles and I would basically have to make the book from skratch again within their upload stuff which would not be pleasant. I had already realised from looking at my husbands kindle that I would have to do another version at some point – one that is basically just the poems with maybe a small line drawing motif. Designed to be easy to read and enjoy in monochrome.
Blurb on the other hand has a great option for picture book ebooks which is great and though I have the PDF in the right format I need to make two new ones with the cover and body of the book separate – fair enough that wouldn’t take very long but then the upload instructions do not cover the software we are using.
So I’ve had to email them and now await a reply, earliest I should think would be Monday :/
I can’t sell it in my etsy shop as it would count as mass produced and is not a tutorial so can’t go in as a resource. ebay isn’t really right for it though maybe next year some sort term auctions might work. I may look it that a bit more. I have a half built e-shop which I may have to finish off which is a pain :/
One of the reasons I wanted to go with Lulu or Blurb was that they already have market places for books out there. I will investigate some others but am starting to want to get back to that writing and illustrating business to be honest :/
Also what ever I do for Spoogy I’ve got to do for Festive this month so it is a double whammy.
Yesterday I posted my list of ideas on here, as I have done every other year, and then I posted the link on the PiBoIdMo facebook page. I got likes and then I got comments from people who are rightly warning me not to put my ideas on the web incase they get stolen or, worse still, in case it screws up a chance for me to be published.
This is lovely of them but it assumes that I haven’t thought this through; and I have. I decided after several catastrophic traditional publishing events that I would take a different route. When I attempted the normal route I found that my exciting ‘yeah I’ve got a publisher’ quickly disappeared into dispair as they ended up bankrupt, or they shelved the project, or they had a change of management and decided the MS was too long but wouldn’t work as something smaller and they all retained the copyright of the work I’d done but nothing happened with it, and I no longer had control of it, and it is gone. I can’t get it published else where. I can’t get those stories back, I can’t share them.
If I’d been more savvy I would have had a solicitor check contracts, but a lot of the pub companies wont let you have the sort of contract that I would now be happy with. To be fair I was only dealing with small and medium sized companies; I have no idea about the larger ones – maybe if I get some of the longer stories polished I will try that route. But for my picture books? Nah.
But that is the reason for self publishing, there were others as well – to do with the environment and my craft background and what not – which I posted right at the beginning here on this blog. So why do I put my ideas and even some of the writing and illustrations on line? Where everyone can see them, where (if people want) they can nick them?
I do have a little copyright statement on all my blogs but that has never stopped piracy. So surely it is dangerous to have my stuff out here? Not only could people nick it but they could take it to a publishing house as their own work.
Well if they did that then they would be idiots – I have the stuff on the blog which shows not only that it is mine but often the dates at which the concept came into being. If they did that my openness actually protects me. It is easier to steal a story few have seen. It is one of the big problems academia faces in that due to the way the funding works they often have issues with this so it has been looked into. That doesn’t stop people being protective of their stuff and the protectiveness doesn’t stop it being nicked
And as for people stealing my brilliant ideas? Even if they do – which has happened, then they will have a different take on things and in fact when I tried to show my stuff to a larger company I found they didn’t want my stuff but produced something inhouse that was similar but different enough that all the copyright and intellectual property right laws didn’t protect me, and yet they had stolen my concept and even some of the design work. The value of an idea is not so much in it itself, as what it becomes when you bring it to completion.
This is why I share ideas, I give them away, at workshops, on the net, to friends, to kids who talk to me at craft fayres. This doesn’t just extend to my kidlit, not even to just my writing or art. Me and my husband have had many great ideas that should be out in the world and we have neither the resources nor the time to manage even a fraction of them. We have put lists of things up saying ‘somebody please do this cool thing!’ we expected people to take the ideas and run and not tell us and the first we’d know of it was it’s announcement on the news but that is not what is happening – people tell us and keep us upto date. I’m sure there will be people out there who have taken the ideas and are claiming them as their own but the net effect negates that. The thing is, we are people of ideas, we are brimming with them I think if someone finds it hard to think of an idea or design or concept then it may be an entirely different ball game.
When I was thinking of trying to self publish I started to think about what writing and art and all the rest of it really were, especially with the electronics of the modern world. I found blogs meant I could share my ideas and memories and rants but they became something more: a platform.
A platform on which I could build, The Creative Penn has some great info on this sort of thing for authors. I have my art work, stories, poems, instructions on how to bake my bean hodgepodge, I insert audio, video and interact with people via the comments. I have a web empire. I discovered I had a fan base.
I found people started asking me to do things! Run workshops, come and read, please start a writing group. Please can we have your poem/story in our publication?
None of this would have happened if I’d hidden the work away. And that Piracy thing? Well the stats show it works as free advertising and you know what? Me and others I know going down these different paths have found that it is our family and friend who unwittingly plagiarise and pirate us! From nicking photos to pop on facebook to putting your poem in their wedding invite, to using your little character as their avatar on some social networking site. But we all agree that it is when this sort of thing starts happening that you know you are doing something right!
XKCD and Cory Doctorow have far more to say on this matter and both are excessively successful.
There are more videos of Cory exploring all the different aspects of this – just follow the youtube trail!
And that brings me back to the idea of what is a book? Does the internet really need more content? Does the world need all the self published stuff? Does it need physical books at all – what is the future of the book? Is a book a tome? A codex, a collection of words and pictures or an information sharing device or something else? I think I shall be exploring that is another blog post 🙂
And before people start telling me I spelt the title of the post wrong – it is an intentional play on words 😉
And it is here again Picture Book Idea Month and I am excited as always – I will try to post everyday again during the challenge as I find that works best for my own momentum. I will be sorting out 30 ideas though I have to confess I see this more as a consolidation process this year – I’ve got words and snippets of things laying in note books that need collecting together!
I have also been taking part in the 12×12 in 2012 challenge were the idea was to end up with 12 finished picture books at the end of the year – well I am behind on this so my aim is to use this challenge to help me complete! I sadly seem to have lost all the twitter and Facebook feeds for it too – I did stuff right at the beginning of the year but was so busy over the summer I didn’t that much time on the net and then was without my laptop for two and a half months!
I did a similar self challenge in October to balance out my Gothic Novel frenzy and the results were a finished The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry which was amazing as that included all the illustrations and digitizing and putting the book together and copy editing and page setting and everything – I did have extrernal help for the later bits. For a start I am such a bad speller (as you have probably been wincing over) that to do anything without edits is impossible!
Now last year I used this challenge to help put together The Little Book of Festive Poetry which I sold to raise money for my little girls school library but they were all hand made as it were – I’d printed and stapled and decorated the front covers in metallic pens and there were only ever going to be 100 of them. This year I would love to get an actual print done and to maybe produce an audio book like I did for The Little Book of Easter Poetry earlier this year.
To sort out The Little Book of Festive Poetry would be brilliant as it was one of my first ideas in the first PiBoIdMo 🙂
So I am aiming to spend a minimum of 30 hours on my kid lit stuff this month – of course I am also doing NaNoWriMo as well which is a continuation of my horror story so it’s going to be a tight squeeze!
Today I am running a virtual launch for the PDF/free download of my The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry. To obtain a copy click on the image below before midnight on October the 31st midnight.
As part of the virtual launch of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry ebook here is a free Halloween Banner for everyone 🙂
Here is some HTML you can add to your blogs and things 🙂
<img src=”http://www.wigglypets.co.uk/press/ebooks/2012/Little%20Book%20Of%20Spoogy%20Poetry/badge-snakes.png” width=”770″ height=”205″ alt=”The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry” />
If that is no good to you then here is the image
Right-click the image and click Save As to download your own copy.
Update 2:
Twitter hashtag is LBSP
Update 3:
A Mummy eating cherry pie web-badge for blogs and what not
<img src=”http://www.wigglypets.co.uk/press/ebooks/2012/Little%20Book%20Of%20Spoogy%20Poetry/badge-mummy_pie_bus_stop.png” width=”160″ height=”173″ alt=”The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry” />
Or right-click the image and click Save As to download your own copy.
I have finished drawing all the pictures for the Little Book and have proceeded to scan them – this has had to be done via my husbands laptop as mine is sick at the menders 🙁 I am hoping to start compiling it all and getting it set up as some sort of e-book that people can download. The images need a bit of digital cleaning up.
I am very pleased with how this is all going 🙂 though I think the 30 hours is going to be all taken up with this project but that is fine – a book a year is cool.
So I thought I would be completely nuts and attempt to do writing challenges in October and November. October for the last few years I have taken part in a writing challenge called GothNoWriMo – this is Gothic Novel Writing Month were I attempt to write the beginning of a gothic/horror/paranormal novel in the month of October. I am again doing this this year but in addition I am adding a kidlit project to the jumble – I will be spending 30 hrs working on The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry which will hopefully see it pretty much sorted – I may even move on to others of my Halloweeny children’s books like Hetty Peglar.
Then next month I will once again be working on PiBoIdMo – Picture Book Idea Month. But I will be collating ideas and again doing another 30 hrs of working on my picture books. I want to make The Little Book of Festive Poetry available to buy and things like that. (This will be along side my NaNoWriMo novelling – National Novel Writing Month).
Also this year I have been working on 12X12 in 2012 which is a picture book a month for the year but I am very very behind on thing 🙁
I find all the writing challenges very useful, they help me set self imposed deadlines and stop me feeling so isolated and alone. As a writer and artist I can sometimes feel very out on a limb and with out feedback I tend to wither. Also the writing challenges help me set out what ideas I have, what ideas are a good idea to work on, which ones are half done an what is almost finished – it then helps provide the momentum to finish projects 🙂
I have discovered cake pops! I have a machine which was bought as a house warming thing and me and my little girl love making characters out of them which we video before we eat! We also take photos of them with the idea of making a web-comic at some point.
Recipes and decoration techniques for cake pops are on my cooking blog.
And include that to get this: