I realized I skipped over this binding dilemma that my particular self-publishing platform presented. Let's just chalk it up to limitations of their technological machinery, but given the industry they are in, I found this very strange....

All of us have seen and even own a landscape format picture book. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” for example, is a landscape picture book. This is NOT NEW.
 
For all my formatting work to date, I discovered that landscape-format books are not, in practice, possible to publish within the self-publishing platform of the company I chose (which was the #1 top-rated self-publishing platform in 2014, FYI). After searching through the forums, I discovered THE workaround that many SMART folks were able to work out and subsequently shared. You basically have to think of the book pages as calendar pages bound at the top/bottom edges (see top row images). The pages are oriented such that upper page’s bottom edge and the lower page’s top edge meet to make the binding. In a picture book, the RIGHT edge of the LEFT page, and the LEFT edge of the RIGHT page meet to make the binding. In general, most of us do NOT want our books to be oriented like a calendar, opening vertically with image on top and calendar grid on bottom. SO, in your original software program where you created your pages, you must rotate the actual document SET-UP 90° so that your RIGHT edge of your LEFT page is now your top edge, and your LEFT edge of your RIGHT page is now the bottom edge.
 
Why, in the age of developing rovers for Mars, and the creation of the world wide web, we cannot manufacture a book in its proper orientation on the self-publishing platform, is BEYOND my capability of understanding or explaining. But this is what worked....
 
OR DOES IT?

The world was finally my oyster! After “Operation Asian Conversion,” breaking spreads apart, tedious formatting for bleeds/gutter, and now the landscape binding dilemma, I had conquered all obstacles by utter perseverance!
Fortunately for me, the folks in the forum didn’t stop there. As I finished up my landscape page formatting, I began looking toward the next steps, such as the all-important marketing feature that Amazon offers: the “Look Inside” feature. Without an established name, a publishing house, a brick-and-mortar store to sell at, a formal critical review to bolster my book, nor even a marketing budget, the best weapon I had were things like “Look Inside.” In the very beginning I knew I had to take advantage of this vital marketing tool. I assumed oh-so naively that there could be no barrier, given that my publishing platform was an “Amazon” company.

In anticipation of setting up my “Look Inside,” I stumbled upon a forum that explained how to get around the improper display through the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon of self-published landscape books. Basically, “Look Inside” won’t work unless you don’t mind looking at the screen with your head cocked 90° to the right. And given that the viewer averages seconds per website, this cocking-head-to-one-side workaround was not going to fly.

But I’d already done all the work to format each of 32 pages, plus a cover page, to all the exacting specifications required for printing! I tried to convince myself, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe folks would find it fun and quirky to look at the book this way...

Who was I kidding? Only myself.

Apologies: this post should've come before the November 6, 2015 post titled: Book specs part deux.

Before my interludes about science books and birthdays, I was making the very important decision to represent Asian kids in this picture book of mine. Well, it took nearly a month for me to complete “Operation Asian Conversion.” I confess this because it’s not that straightforward to draw Asian features, just as it’s not easy to draw the features characteristic of any ethnicity.

When content changes were “done,” I finally got to the nuts and bolts of the self-publishing process. The first thing to do was set up the pages for submission. I had originally made each file a spread made of two landscape-oriented U.S. letter-sized pages (top image). How did I even decide on this format? This was dictated by having a long, skinny protagonist (middle image). One important word of advice: use an industry standard size. There are plenty to choose from and will save you infinite headaches in future.

Unfortunately, they wanted each page as a separate file. So, step 1 was to create two separate documents from each double-paged spread (bottom image). This wasn’t terribly easy because I had drawn the imagery as if the two-paged spread was one piece of paper. I had to essentially “cut” pieces of imagery apart, like the fence pieces in this example.

Next post we’ll get to more technical production specifications.

I was and still am a little hesitant to post this review only for its content, but the way it's "handled" is definitely noteworthy, so here it is: Jurassic Poop, by Jacob Berkowitz.
Now the reason I chose this book to review, aside from difficulties in obtaining some of these books from the library, is because I applaud the way the subject matter of this book is handled. There's a great balance between use of humor, without being too "fart-joke-like," blended in with some real tips about the scientific process. Being observant, using deductive reason, and having a thirst to solve mysteries and learn about our past lives, is at the foundation of this book. Once you get past the smelly content.
This balance is carried through in the use of cartoons and photography, while highlighting real scientists for kids to look up to. So, a word of caution with this book before you peruse it: either do it on an empty stomach, or not leisurely morning reading over breakfast!
 
The last of the books I'll be covering, from that WNYC Science Friday Broadcast of Sept. 11, 2015: "Buried Sunlight; How fossil fuels have changed the Earth," written by Molly Bang and illustrated by Penny Chisholm.
Author Ms Bang frames the changes in global warming due to human activity in a much more basic context. We are being pushed and pulled by media, by politics, and even contradicting evidence from the scientific world, to believe that perhaps it is not human activity that has caused great damage and peril to the planet. Earth has undergone cycles of warming and cooling throughout its history. Therefore, what does it matter if indeed the Earth is now slowly warming?
The fundamental difference now is that before, those warming and cooling periods took place over hundreds of THOUSANDS of years. Yet the latest measurable changes have occurred in a mere two hundred years. What has been proven in history is that these temperature changes had devastating consequences.
So, given that there is a significant change occurring NOW, and, in a blink of an eye relative to the other temperature fluctuation periods, doesn't it stand to reason that we should make greater efforts stewards for this Earth?
A straightforward, cogent take on our beloved Earth, and the choices we can make to shepherd it into the distant future.

Thanks for letting me share these books with you!

Now that we got past Step 1 of creating single-page files, let’s get to Step 2: Bleed margin.
The page size in your file needs to have a tiny bit of width and height added to 3 of the sides (outer edge, top, and bottom) that eventually get trimmed off to your final page size. This is called a bleed, and should not affect the size or placement of the content within the page. It only makes the overall page size set up in your file bigger than your final printed size. For example, say you had a 4x6 photo mounted onto a piece of paper that is 5x7. But your picture frame is 6 x9, so the 5x7 paper won’t cover the entire background in the frame. So you mount the photo onto a 7x10 paper, which you then trim down to 6x9. Now your paper covers the background entirely. This is essentially what you are doing for your pages.

And then there’s Step 3: Gutter margin. The fourth edge where the two pages meet where bleed margin was NOT added, faces into the gutter, or the binding, of the book. But if the image content goes all the way to this edge, that part of the image will get lost INTO the gutter, because a portion of paper is used to make the binding. So the image must be sufficiently outside this gutter margin to avoid losing part of the image to the binding. However, if the image is moved too far out, there will be a blank area in the middle of what is supposed to be a continual image. Personally, I didn’t want a gap in a single page or a spread image, so I decided to set up the page where my content would fall just beyond the gutter margin. Then I’d lose a tiny amount of image on purpose, but would ensure that no gap in the image spread would occur.

Another month of my life would be devoted to getting to this stage. NOW was I ready to go?

A belated note:
July 2, 2015 marked the 1st birthday, or anniversary (?) of Centipede Dragon A Benevolent Creature’s publication. To all who have supported me in this first year, there is no adequate way to express my gratitude. It’s been a tough road at times, having to constantly switch from editor to copy editor, production editor to technical editor, from publicist/marketer/advertiser to presenter…oh yeah, and slogging on with the writing and illustrating for book 2.

At every turn I’m making decisions far beyond my expertise and comfort zone, but this is what a one-person operation must do. Yet every time I have presented and every tiny bit of feedback reinforces that the hard work has not gone in vain. Of course, no person is an island, and there have definitely been some key supporters of me throughout this endeavor. I can only hope I’ve done you proud!