Putting together any book is a long an detailed process, let alone coordinting a compilation of stories from various authors and an illustrator, to finalise the finished product. As for our 'Backyard Beasts & Curious Capers Anthology' the fun however, is in the final stages when it all falls into place with words that appear to jump off the page and illustrations that take you to another world or dimention.
In the words of our esteemed editor Katherine R. Pepper (a published author in her own right), read on to find out ecactly what is involved. "As well as writing my four stories for BBCC, I also formatted the book and put it together. Lucky me!
Every book, of course, starts with a story, or, in our case, stories. So, one day, at one of our monthly Ten Penners’ meetings, we decided we wanted to put together another anthology. Woohoo! That was the easy part. Next came the hard part – writing the actual stories! Aaaaggghhh!
Many, many, many months went by, during which we went through the process of creating, reading, editing and finalising our stories. There were lots of laughs along the way – which was just as well, because, even though it’s fun, writing is also hard work. You have to actually make up people and situations just out of your own brain! Crazy, right?
Anyway, we finally had our 20 stories. But that wasn’t the end, oh no. There was a lot more to come before our book baby was ready to face the world! And that’s where the fun really began – for me.
Although the stories start off as plain old Word documents, you can’t just whack them all together and then publish them. They have to be in the correct format for printing as an actual book. Fortunately, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) provides Word templates for this, setting out the correct front and back matter, section breaks etc., and you can download the template and use it as your base document. This does make things easier, but you still have to know what you’re doing (because Word can be a tricky beast…). The template is quite plain, but you can, of course, change the fonts and anything else to make the book look just how you want it.
Once the stories were all in, I then added Jennifer’s wonderful illustrations, and some other bits and pieces, and the interior of the book was done.
But a book also needs a cover, so that was the next part of the process. The cover is in three parts – front, back and spine. Once your interior file is complete, and you know how many pages your book will be, you can download a cover template from KDP to ensure everything fits together properly when the book is printed. Jennifer had already created a beautiful front cover, so I then matched the colours and the fonts to create the back and spine, using Canva and PhotoScape X on my MacBook.
The interior file and cover were then uploaded to KDP, and, once they were approved, we ordered our first proof copy! This bit is awesome, because for the first time you get to hold the book in your hands… After a couple of tweaks, and a further proof, we were ready to hit publish! And here we are – BBCC is out in the wild! Tada!"
As you can now see there is some time and work involved in the writing and editing.
As for me and the Illustrating side........I'll leave that for another post!
Please do feel free to ask us anything in regard to creating your own books. We are all more than happy to help you get started.
Happy reading and sketching! 😀👩🎨
Jennifer Scicluna
Author/Illustrator.
