A little about the process.

When I envisioned my website, I knew I’d have the typical author’s page where I’d talk a little bit about me, a page dedicated to the book and a place to buy it (obviously!), but then I thought what else would I even put on here? So, I decided to put on here what I thought I would want to see on an author’s website… a little about the process.

Maybe it’s just me, but I had no idea what this entire process was like before I jumped into it head first. And when I say jump into it, what I mean is I gave myself the tiniest timeframe to work with and then plowed through it like a crazy person. I can’t exactly recommend that route for everyone, but it can be done.

I’ll start with the story itself. Shortly after my daughter Ruth was born in August of 2015, I started to jot down short stories that I thought would make good books. I read almost daily with her and have always loved reading myself. I hope she grows to love it too. But I will say, what prompted me to really write down my own stories was the fact that I read so many books that were very blah. It was that category of blah books that made me think to myself, ‘I could probably do this.’ And so I did.

Shortly before Ruth turned nine months old, I got the brilliant idea that I wanted to write a story about her and Mack our dog for her first birthday. Yes, her first birthday. Remember that timeframe I told you about? Well this three month span is what I gave myself to write a story, have it illustrated, format the book and prepare it to print, have it printed, and allow time for it to ship to the house before the party starts. I’d never done this before and had zero idea if that was even doable, but I was going to do it anyways!

The stories I had already written were not the ones that I wanted as my first book and the one that I wanted to give to Ruth on her birthday. So that day, right then and there, I jotted down another story. I’m not sure if this is one of the things that I should put out there as a good thing because I wrote it so quickly and maybe that shows some sort of talent? Or is it a bad thing that I busted this thing out so quickly? I promise you the book doesn’t suck! Let’s go with the talent theory for now. In any event, in about thirty minutes I had a pretty decent story that I thought would be the one to give her on her birthday. Now that doesn’t mean that it was ready to print right then and there. I went through several revisions and tweaks along the way. But ultimately, I was ready to move to the illustration phase within a few days.

This next part has got to be my absolute favorite. I would legitimately write a dozen more books to have the chance to go through this process a dozen more times.

My third grade teacher from ages ago has written a few children’s books in her retirement. I noticed the illustrator had a Facebook page or website, something like that. I looked this girl up and emailed her about doing some illustrations for my book. She had too much on her plate at the moment, but really gave me some good advice and walked me through the process of it. She was super helpful. From her advice, I checked out a couple of websites that specialize in freelancers doing all kinds of different work from around the world. I wouldn’t publicly list the positive or negative about either site I used, but if you’re interested to hear my thoughts just shoot me an email.

I sampled work from probably a dozen artists around the world. I described what I considered my most challenging scene, Mack as a kangaroo. I figured I’d give that scene a whirl with several different artists and see who did the best work with it. If you can draw a dog as a kangaroo jumping around with a little girl standing next to him wildly entertained, you must have some serious talent. It was quite neat to see what someone else envisioned for my characters based on the description of the scene that I gave them. Artists would send me sketches and I would go back to them with revisions and see how they listened to my edits and worked through them. Interestingly enough, I had two great artists out of Russia, one from the Ukraine, and one from Pakistan that I was trying to decide between. Since they were half-way around the world, they would work while I slept and vice versa. So for several days there, I had the opportunity to wake up to something new every morning when they would send me their work. I thought it was just the coolest thing. There are people that are so incredibly talented all around the world. Some of them came up with ideas for that scene that that I hadn’t thought of myself.

There is so much to consider with illustrations, I don’t think I was half prepared for what I would uncover once I started researching and pulling back the layers. Of course there’s the obvious, are you going to sell the artwork and try to profit from it or are you just hiring someone to draw for you for fun? It’s a question that I needed to think about at first because this project for me was initially just about a gift for my daughter. But I decided to go ahead and buy the copyrights to the illustrations so that I could publish the book.

Ultimately, I chose a very talented watercolor artist named Tashna from Pakistan. When I decided on an artist, the next step was to be extremely detailed in describing all of the scenes so that she could go ahead and pull the story together visually and really bring it to life. I gave her several pictures of Mack to go off of since his character is my real life dog named Mack. If you know me at all, you already know I probably have thousands of pictures of Mack on my hard drive, so there was ample supply of images to provide to her. Ruth is of course my baby girl. The girl in the book is five or six years old. Ruth as a baby is my spitting image, so I provided a few photos of myself to give her a general idea. That’s not to say that the illustration looks just like me when I was a kid, but there is a resemblance. After seeing Tashna’s initial illustration, I was so excited to see the rest of her work. I gave the project a one month deadline that would bring us right around two months out from Ruth’s first birthday. Tashna’s process is to sketch an image, then do a final line drawing once I have approved it, then paint it using watercolor. She then uploads it and digitally enhances anything that perhaps looked a little muddy in the skin tones or wasn’t super clear with the watercolor.

Tashna and I spent several weeks working through the illustrations. She worked very quickly. I was rather impressed. She’s half way around the world so I would send her all of my scene descriptions and go to bed. By the time I would wake up in the morning, I’d generally have work to review or some clarifications on specific aspects of each scene. Interestingly enough, I told one very good friend about the project here in the United States (because it is impossible to do this solo… even though I wanted it to be a total surprise to all my friends and family) and that friend happens to work night shift delivering babies most nights of the week. I felt like we had the dream team because while I slept, she could also glance at the work when she had free time.

I had a last minute added illustration due to a format change, which Tashna worked up in a day or so for me. Once all illustrations were finalized, I moved to the format for Ruth’s printed copy. I used Blurb to make a hardcover for her and it turned out beautifully. Their in house formatting program was really easy to use. Reformatting the book to publish it through Amazon’s self-publishing wing (previously Createspace) was certainly more challenging. I did the layout of text and illustrations myself because I enjoy that kind of thing. But if you don’t, you’ll pull your hair out and it would be worth it to pay some of the relatively inexpensive formatters available out there. I also did the formatting for the iBook for iPad.

So there we have it! The English one is out the door (someone should probably teach me legitimate publishing lingo…) and the Spanish version is ready to roll! My dear friend Laura in Costa Rica did me the great favor of translating the book into ¿Quién es Mackie? and I think it turned out wonderfully. I can say that with great certainty as I have actually read a surprising number of Spanish books here in the United States that seem to be poorly translated, these being put out there by some of the major publishing houses. I am confident ours is awesome!

Have questions about the process? Shoot me an email!