Every once in a while you hit upon the one person who goes the extra distance by connecting you to that person who can change a game that is heavily stacked against self-published you.
To illustrate, let’s do a quick exercise: everyone who has a soft cover copy of Centipede Dragon, look at the spine. What do you see?
One major roadblock in self-publishing to getting your book onto actual shelves is the inability get text on the spine. This seems like a minute detail, doesn’t it?
A second exercise: everyone, shelve your Centipede Dragon. Now, ask someone else who didn't see you shelve it to go find it!
For years, the “trend” in children’s books has been to keep the page count to 32. But in self-publishing, unless your book is at least 48 pages, you can’t put text on the spine because your book is not thick enough. When you don’t have text on your spine, brick and mortar stores will not sell your book, because once it's shelved, no one knows what it is or where it is; it is unidentifiable. This is a rather unfortunate hindrance to your sales.
My person who found my person, is Christine T. from the Children’s Book Illustrators LinkedIn group. After seeing my desperate SOS post, she dug around to find me a post from months ago, written by Tzivia M., who writes a blog called : http://blog.writekidsbooks.org/. She had faced this spine text conundrum with her own book, No Santa!, and decided to submit the book cover file to her self- publisher WITH spine text designed right into the layout of the cover design. I want to give a HUGE shout-out to Tzivia for this ultimate in “workaround” solutions, because it worked for me!
I.LOVE.HER. And you should too. Just for me.
A big thanks to Christine as well, a true moderator who knows her stuff for ALL OF US struggling to get this done.
To illustrate, let’s do a quick exercise: everyone who has a soft cover copy of Centipede Dragon, look at the spine. What do you see?
One major roadblock in self-publishing to getting your book onto actual shelves is the inability get text on the spine. This seems like a minute detail, doesn’t it?
A second exercise: everyone, shelve your Centipede Dragon. Now, ask someone else who didn't see you shelve it to go find it!
For years, the “trend” in children’s books has been to keep the page count to 32. But in self-publishing, unless your book is at least 48 pages, you can’t put text on the spine because your book is not thick enough. When you don’t have text on your spine, brick and mortar stores will not sell your book, because once it's shelved, no one knows what it is or where it is; it is unidentifiable. This is a rather unfortunate hindrance to your sales.
My person who found my person, is Christine T. from the Children’s Book Illustrators LinkedIn group. After seeing my desperate SOS post, she dug around to find me a post from months ago, written by Tzivia M., who writes a blog called : http://blog.writekidsbooks.org/. She had faced this spine text conundrum with her own book, No Santa!, and decided to submit the book cover file to her self- publisher WITH spine text designed right into the layout of the cover design. I want to give a HUGE shout-out to Tzivia for this ultimate in “workaround” solutions, because it worked for me!
I.LOVE.HER. And you should too. Just for me.
A big thanks to Christine as well, a true moderator who knows her stuff for ALL OF US struggling to get this done.
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