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 I had originally made each file a spread made of two landscape-oriented U.S. letter-sized pages (top image).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.