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 I had originally made each file a spread made of two landscape-oriented U.S. letter-sized pages (top image).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 I had originally made each file a spread made of two landscape-oriented U.S. letter-sized pages (top image).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