This particular project is "The Story of the Sheep," an illustrated children's book I wrote circa 1994 when I was home from college for some break or another. The astute reader will note that some time has passed between the original writing and the date of this post. I was inspired, at the time, by a conversation with a good friend about the wild origins of domesticated animals. We could imagine wild predecessors of pretty much everything except sheep. Sheep, we felt, were simply too stupid and defenseless to have any reasonable chance of surviving in the wild. I believe the phrase "jungle sheep" was spoken at some point and the seed for the story was planted.
After writing the story, drawing the pictures, scanning all of the pictures into the computer, and assembling a tidy little Word doc, I naively thought I was all set to submit my masterpiece to publishers and await the onslaught of bidding. All those who have ever attempted to publish anything are invited to take a break, here, for some uproarious belly laughter before continuing... That's not, as I discovered, how the publishing world works. Disheartened and discouraged, the project went into a file.
Despite my disappointment, I never forgot about my dear little story and always intended to resurrect it someday and make a real effort to get it published, if only for the sake of having a copy for my kids that wasn't printed at home and stuck in a 3-ring binder. Opportunity, they say, always knocks twice (or something like that) and my second opportunity came three months ago when a long period of unemployment gave me a lot of free time amidst exhausting my life's savings and avoiding thinking about it.
On pulling out my old computer disks and folder of printouts, I discovered the only images I still had were the low-resolution drawings embedded in the now-ancient Word doc. Fortunately, my last frivolous purchase prior to unemployment had been a small Wacom tablet that I hadn't gotten around to using. They say, when the student is ready, the tool will appear. ("They" don't get out much. Or pay attention when they do.) Killing two birds with one tablet, I loaded my low-res pictures into Gimp and practiced tracing with the Wacom to get higher-resolution images. After a few days, I had 25 improved copies of my illustrations. This, of course, was the point at which I finally remembered to think about publishers.
As before, I found that A) traditional publishers don't take unsolicited submissions as a rule, B) that goes double for children's books, and C) especially from no-name authors. Oh, yeah. That. Well - all I really wanted was a copy for myself and maybe for others in the family, right? Self-publishing has, it turns out, come a long way from when I'd first looked into it. The traditional self-publishing route - pay the printing costs up front and try distributing them yourself - is still there, but doesn't work for those with modest aspirations and zero funds. Enter, print-on-demand publishing and eBooks!
While checking out the submission process for the Kindle, I stumbled upon CreateSpace, a print-on-demand publisher also owned by Amazon. CreateSpace was exactly what I was looking for. Naturally, my new images had to be completely redone (twice) to get copies with the necessary size and resolution and there have been issues getting the cover layout and internal page ordering figured out thanks to gaps in the documentation, but I have in my hands, the first proof of my beloved book - evidence that the dream is becoming reality. I'm awaiting a second proof that may or may not be the final before the book can go live. While waiting for proofs, I managed to get the Kindle version live and have one sale already. In theory, I could someday actually collect that royalty if enough people buy it to reach the minimum royalty check size. Hmm... "Professional author". Where does that fit on my resume?
If anyone is interested in checking them out, here are the links:
