Writing and publishing a book. From idea to first earnings.
True story.
Hi guys!
Everything you’ll read below is not another tutorial about writing and publishing the book. I’m not a professional writer, but I like stories and I want to share my own experience of creating the book. It’s called “Abel’s Dream”.
A few months ago, I successfully published the very first edition of my book “Abel’s Dream” in two languages, English and Russian. This is a story about one older gentleman, Abel. All of his time he spends on his favorite profession. He collects flowers and herbs and then sells them at his small shop. One day Abel finds out that his favorite visitor, a girl Marta, got very ill. To find a way to heal her, Abel heads out on a dangerous and very unusual adventure. However, what Abel is looking for turns out to be not at all what he was expected.
For me, it was a long journey to finish the book, and finally, I had a chance to hold it in my arms.
Now, I’m ready to share my story of the whole creative process with you, from an idea to printing and publishing the book at Amazon, and getting first earnings online and offline. I hope it will also inspire you to make something great as well. Not only a book. It’s up to you what you want to create. So, let’s start. Let’s dive into Abel’s world.
Here is a short agenda of what we’ll discussing:
– Script idea
– Storyboard sketches
– 3D characters
– Facebook page
– Book teaser
– Book illustrations
– Easter eggs
– Printing process
– Packaging
– Amazon publishing
Script idea
About 12 years ago I was so interested in the movie industry. I decided to learn more about it and took a course called “Screenwwriting and Cameraman Craft” in one of the oldest cinema studios in the world, Odessa Film Studio. I had a great time and gained tons of experience. While I was studying, I came up with small stories with a simple plot, but with an unusual ending, and most importantly, these stories should have had a deep thought. For instance, such stories can tell that we should be honest with each other and with ourselves. One of the goals for me was to try to put such a story in 1–2 pages. This is essentially a synopsis, but with a slightly more detailed description. At some point, I wanted to try to make the story a little more complicated, longer. You know, I like to play games. And when you are playing a game, comes the moment when you have passed many locations, completed many tasks, drained your character, and at this moment the game ends, not allowing you to enjoy the result. So, this is it. My goal was to immerse the reader in the world I invented. Therefore, 1–2 pages were few. And I had something to say. In life, people make many decisions on their own, quite of few of which are not easy. However, in the end, only we are in charge of our final choice. I had a simple, but a significant idea. So, I started working on it.
Storyboard sketches
My main tools were paper and pencil. Each day after work, I came back home and drew a few frames. They consisted of a sketch, a short description, and some helpful tips. Overall I drew about 296 frames. Time passed, and in one month or so, I finished drawing the frames and first version of the script. At this stage, it was crucial for me to get feedback from professionals. Likely, one of my father’s friends was a cameraman with a big experience, so I met with him and shared my idea. Those days I was in love with 3D modeling and animation, and my thoughts were to animate my script in a short cartoon, like 10–12 minutes. However, once I’ve shown the storyboard, the first impression was that this is not a story for 10 minutes. The full-length movie, not less. Those times I did not have money for such a great project, so I put the story on a shelf and continued creating small animations in 3D to improve my experience and hopefully one time come back and create a cartoon using my script. Time kept moving forward, but I continued drawing everything I had in my mind. I drew quite a few sketches of various characters that, in my opinion, could’ve inhabited Abel’s world. Here are some of them.
I also devoted a lot of time to construction, buildings, and nature. Almost every element was followed by a short description. For example, how one or another design can work, or what kind of behavior the plants should have, and other things that could be useful to me. Remember I planned to animate the story? Therefore, all this information could be helpful in the future.
3D characters
I’m not super professional with 3D. But one day I started modeling characters from my sketches. My main tools were 3D Max and Zbrush. Basically in 3D Max I created an ordinary mesh, low poly, then exported it in the “obj” format, and then imported it to Zbrush, which allows you to work with a model in the same way as holding a piece of soft clay in your hands. As you can see below, these models differ quite a lot from the final result. And all of it because initially, I wanted to convey a more oppressive and gloomy atmosphere of the invented locations. At that time, I was very passionate about Gothic architecture, and it seems to me that this influenced the appearance of some characters. At one point, my day job began to take away all my time, and the project went on the shelf for long 10 years.
Facebook page
Three years ago, at the beginning of 2017, during one of conversations with my friends, we touched on a subject of personal projects. Then it dawned on me. I immediately remembered “Abel’s Dream” and realized that the main idea of the story is still relevant to me. Then I decided that to begin with, I’ll just start sharing my experiences on Facebook, and I won’t let the material get dusty on the shelf. Breathe in a second life! I didn’t have a plan to create a book yet, however, in a way I wanted to start sharing what I have and maybe find someone who likes the story. Then, as a team, we can do something grand.
Somewhere on the Internet, a very long time ago, I found out that it would be better if I could share my best practices during the project creation process, and not just its result. This way, I can collect feedback from people, find out what they like and what not, and slowly build up a fan base. Therefore, I decided to create a project page on Facebook. This happened on April 6, 2017. I started from the very beginning, from the very first sketches, supplementing them with a brief description.
At some point, I realized that it would be great to also handle Facebook ads so that I could prepare competent advertising companies and share my process with a larger audience. So, little by little, I launched one advertising campaign after another. Budgets were minimal, on average about $ 10. Nonetheless, I was just starting to learn how this process works and could not afford to spend large amounts. In addition, this would be impractical.
Book teaser
While I was sharing Facebook sketches, I was increasingly thinking how I could breathe life into my idea. How exactly can I share it with people. I did not have a budget to create a cartoon, as I originally intended. I even thought about implementing a demo version of the game, because I really like to play, and it seemed to me that this is a good scenario for an adventure game. Even so the book option seemed to be more realistic.
After posting a lot of sketches on my Facebook page, I began to seriously think about finding like-minded people with whom I could make my dream a reality. As I previously mentioned, I decided to prepare a teaser. Why can movies have teasers, but books can’t?
This idea seemed interesting to me. I decided that this teaser would become a kind of elevator pitch with a duration of about 30 seconds. In fact, it turned out to be 38.
It was immediately decided to use illustrations with a parallax effect that would’ve added depth. Thus, I was able to kill two birds with one bullet. First, I would prepare some illustrations and show how the book would look exactly. Second, it would’ve been easier, faster, and cheaper to manufacture than do 3d modeling. There was only one small task left, to find an illustrator. Thankfully I got lucky. Having interviewed my friends, I was able to quickly find him. His name is Marcus Kean. First of all, I told him about my plans and his role. We also raised the financial issue. When we came to common grounds, I created a contract, which described his and my roles and duties, as well as moments related to the illustrator’s rights. It is essential to resolve all design and work related matters prior to the actual start of the collaboration.
I started by preparing a draft version of the teaser storyboard so that I had an idea at what point what to show, as well as where additional phrases should be shown. In addition to the storyboard, I began to prepare technical specifications for each illustration. This will be discussed below. I tried to describe each illustration as detailed as possible in order to minimize the time for discussion. What in the end turned out, see for yourself.
It took about 4 months to prepare the materials for the teaser and its montage. I wouldn’t say that this is a long time. All the same, I worked on the project on my free time, and devoting all my time to my family and work, I didn’t have that much free time.
Book illustrations
Less than a month has passed since the publication of the teaser. The search for people in the team did not bring any results. Either people wanted a big payment, which I could not afford, or their skills were beginner level. And then I thought, why not try to continue to work with an illustrator who helped me with a teaser. After all, everything suited me. But for some reason, I did not consider this idea right away. We signed the contract again. In fact, the process has already been established. Now it remains only to withstand it as part of the work on a large number of illustrations.
First of all, I began visualizing the connections between characters. This scheme helped me build relationships between each character. You can trust your memory as much as you like, but sometimes it fails. Therefore, try to take notes as often as possible. I assure you, at some point, they will save you. You may ask why I did this loop when the script was written? Everything is simple. I could not use take out the entire storyboard in the book, take out therefore I had to rewrite some scenes, make changes, add and even remove characters.
Then I laid out the script into keyframes. That way, I could understand how many illustrations there would be. Additional editing was required. Some scenes had to be combined, some completely removed. Thus, I was able to squeeze 296 frames to 86.
The first row is the skeleton of history. From left to right, key points are located in it. Each card column — this is all that should happen in a particular location.
To write the script itself, I used the Highland 2 tool.
It has a simple and intuitive interface, and it’s very pleasant to work with it.
In general, work on one illustration can be divided into the following steps:
- Creating a technical task. It is important to give the illustrator the full picture. Describe all the details. Starting from the size of the canvas, the margins to crop when printing, the resolution size, and ending with a description of the character’s personality at the right time. All this will form the basis of the illustration.
- Draft Sketches. Iteration, when a few foreshortenings are prepared in haste to select the best one and work on the details with it. It may take several iterations. It all depends on your vision. It is also important to understand where the text will roughly be located since the area under it can affect the illustration itself. This part can be made darker or lighter, and not add a lot of details so that the text remains readable
- Detailed sketch. The illustration is still black and white. At this stage, it is important to work on objects and details.
- Coloring. Even in the technical assignment, I indicated the desired palette. Sometimes it was necessary to describe such moments as separate parts of a flower. For example, the stem should be one color, the leaves take out another, and the flower take out third. My task was to save time for the illustrator to understand and find the right color scheme. Based on this description, the illustrator prepared the first color version. On average, 2–3 iterations were enough for us to arrive at the desired result.
- Post Processing. This is the final stage to prepare illustration. To make all illustrations look in the same style, I gave them additional effects, such as noise, rough paper patterns, spots, and of course color correction. Let me remind you that printing guidelines suggest the layout should go in CMYK encoding. Nevertheless all the illustrations were drawn in RGB. For this reason, I did one color correction for RGB, converted the entire group of layers to a smart object, converted it to CMYK, and did another additional color correction, since CMYK significantly dims the colors and makes them less saturated.
One of the most interesting steps in the process was working with color. This work can be divided into two stages. Once, I read an interesting article about color correction. There was one point that I really remember. It talked about color communication between scenes of the same location and the entire story. The example below shows that, for instance, illustrations in Abel’s house have one color gamut, in the forest another, and so on throughout the story. In some cases, this helps to create additional tension in the scenes. That is, for example, you subconsciously understand that something bad can happen.
The second stage consisted of the selection of colors for each individual illustration while keeping in mind the fact that the frequent previous and next illustrations should have a similar shade. To do this, I prepared a series of templates with different color overlays, using both a uniform fill color and gradients.
In my work, I constantly use estimation. Therefore, “Abel’s Dream” was no exception. Taking as a basis the time that we spent on illustrations for the teaser, calculating how much they needed to be done for the book, and as you understand the whole process described above, I needed to do even a little more than 86 times taking risks into consideration I was confident that we would manage in 8–10 months. Since we started working on illustrations of the book in January, simultaneously began to plan when I could start printing.
Easter eggs
For those who do not know, Easter eggs in the works mean references to a particular topic. You must have seen many such Easter eggs in films and games. Usually, they are well hidden and difficult to notice for the first time. But when you find them, then some kind of warm feeling inside you says “Wow! It’s amazing!”. I also wanted to achieve a similar effect in my book. It’s quite difficult to come up with and arrange Easter eggs right away. And I did not have a goal to do it in one sitting. I even added some easter eggs when the book was almost finished. I will not disclose them all here. I will be honest, some are very difficult to recognize. Nevertheless, I want to show a couple.
- In the book on different pages, you can see that on the walls there are a lot of paintings with different images of flowers. However in Abel’s bedroom, there is an easel, and the drawing on it is different from the rest. The fact is that about 6 years ago I had a project. A mobile game about zombies. And I drew a splash screen for it, which later became a poster which hangs in front of my workplace. Thus, I decided to acknowledge it in the book as well.
2. Running a little ahead, I will say that the book has two editions. The very first version was printed in a small print run. I thought I could make this print more unique. The book has an image of an arch, which is an entrance to a forest. So it was on this arch that I decided to add a number, which won’t be noticed at the first glance. As a result, in the first print run on this arch number 1 is displayed. On all subsequent, 2.
Can you find the rest of the easter eggs? It all depends on your attention to detail.
Printing process
Before initiating all the communications with publishers, it was necessary to make a decision regarding the rights to the book, as well as the method of its distribution. I’ve had several meetings regarding this matter. What I’ve decided was to print the book on my own using my own finances. Distribution in bookstores did not appeal to me very much. And the size of the payment in the case of buying your work by the publisher is not too big if you are not Joan Rowling of course. It is important to understand what format you have and who your target audience is. Therefore, I decided that the best option for me is to post on Amazon. But more on that later. Now we are talking about the print edition. I really wanted to have a physical, not a virtual instance. And in my head was its full view. Initially, I wanted to create at least one book, just as I see it, and I had no plans to distribute it.
Having compiled a list of publishers, I began to communicate with them, talk about my vision of the final product, its quality, and other details. It turned out that not all publishers could assign an ISBN to a book. This is essentially book’s ID. Some printed books from contractors. As a result, I settled on the “Astroprint” publishing house, which could carry out all types of work, but most importantly they had extensive experience in printing.
Then we began to select paper, printing methods, layout preparation, and other subtleties in more detail. We’ve determined the maximum allowable book size. By the way, the format of the book changed about 3 times. From initially vertical to the final square. We even completed a test print, when I still had only about 5% of all illustrations prepared. Although believe me, it is important to find out as soon as possible so that the illustrations and layout are prepared correctly right away, and then you do not have to make a lot of changes, as in my case. This 5 % of illustrations then had to be updated taking into account the new format of the book.
Time passed. Illustrations were drawn. Remember, I mentioned that according to my estimate, we had to be done in about 8–10 months? So, force majeure situations have made an impact, but we eventually proceeded, although a year later. It wasn’t scary for me. Because I did not have deadlines or obligations to customers. I did the book for me, to begin with at least. I was ready to spend as much time as it was necessary.
Finally all the layouts for printing were ready. I returned to the publishing house, and I was very pleased that after more than a year they remembered me and everything that we discussed. The time has come for the first full-fledged test printing. We did not start the battle in circulation, because we had to understand how the book would look in principle. There were 98 pages. It was necessary to print a test version.
The cover was printed separately because it required matte lamination. Similarly, it is the outside of the book that requires protection. And secondly, the size of the printed area of the cover is more than a spread, since the cover is wrapped around the perimeter on the flyleaf and sealed there.
When all the pages were printed, the next step was to collect them all. Given the number of pages, we had 2 options. To just stitch individual blocks of pages and then glue everything from the front side or, after stitching glue the pages further at the seam. As a result, the U-turn looks a bit different. We settled on the second option, as the pages held on more firmly and the U-turns looked much better.
When the test version was on hand, my happiness had no bounds. This feeling is hard to convey. The brainchild that you have been working on for a long period is finally falling into place. Even so, there was a little disappointment. I initially chose coated paper, which I like and I was convinced that it was great. Even after printing test pages, I still believed that it was a great choice. But after layout, it turned out that the paper and printing method needed to be changed. Pages flashed too much while I wanted a warm matte shade. This is why you need to do test cases. You can be sure that individually everything looks great, but when everything is assembled into a single monolith, perception can change.
Yes, we printed another test version. This time, it was at its entirety! Incidentally, the example below shows the difference in the type of the paper, printing….
Aren’t you tired yet?
Then continue!
Packaging
The publication is printed, but how to distribute it to the audience? I began to think about packaging long before the printing process. There are some very important points I should mention:
- When an individual receives an object, whether it’s a purchase or a gift, the package that hides the content gives a feeling of suspense. You do not always know what is inside. This provokes interest and the game begins. This is the first contact.
- The moment of opening the package can probably be compared with catharsis. You are excited. In a moment, the truth will be revealed.
- The package is open. You got to the content. Such a moment will not be repeated. But it can be a little delayed. And this can be done at the expense of the packaging itself. In my case, it consisted of several layers.
So what have I done? Without spoilers, I can say that a flower plays a big role in the book. I wanted to try to transfer its role into our world. Therefore, I decided to collect real flowers, dry them, and attach them to the book itself. By the way, this created additional pleasure and comfort.
For about 2 months, the flowers laid at home in books. In order to dry and flatten out. That same Herbarium. Second, had to imbue the energy of the book before their journey into the hands of the readers.
Thinking ahead, I immediately decided that with a real flower I could not give absolutely all copies. Rather, it was only about the first limited edition. To somehow preserve this effect, I got an idea to print a flower in the book itself, at the end on a separate page. Thus, I emphasized how important this is for me, for the story, and I hope for the readers.
Initially, I asked the publishing house to pack the book in a vacuum package. That was the first layer. Then, I wrapped the book in parchment paper. It seemed to me that it perfectly conveys the mood of the story. Besides, it was pleasant to hold in my hands. This was the second layer. The final chord was twine, threaded into a transparent bag with a dried flower, and then wrapped in a few turns around the book. Thus, unpacking in some cases took about 30–40 seconds, which is quite a lot. And I, in turn, was damn pleased to watch the emotions that future readers experienced at that time.
Finally, here are a few turns of the book itself. Absolutely all U-turns have a full-size illustration. I intentionally did not select the area under the text in white or another color. I wanted to try to achieve maximum immersion in the atmosphere of what is happening.
Amazon publishing
I will not go into all the details of the publication process. There is a lot of supporting material on Amazon and the Internet as well. But I want to share some links and details that may be useful to you, because for instance I did not immediately know about all this, and spent some time studying what I needed to start with. Hope this information helps you save time.
- The book itself and all the data about it you should upload to kdp.amazon.com. You can choose between a Kindle eBook or Paperback. Electronic and print media, respectively. It is necessary to prepare files in different ways. Initially, each book will have a separate link. However after publication, you can combine electronic and print publications and the appropriate options will appear on the page of your book.
- You also need to register at https://www.createspace.com/, which is essentially a subsidiary of Amazon. The whole charm is that CreateSpace can print even just one copy of a book when someone places an order. This helps young writers reduce publishing costs.
- If you are not a resident of the United States, then the answer of withdrawing money is right below you. In my case, I chose the service https://www.payoneer.com/. Everything is simple here. You create an account and connect your bank card to it. Go through verification, and then add the data of your Payoneer account in your profile on kdp.
- It is also worth noting that money can only be withdrawn when book sales reach a minimum of $ 100. Perhaps at the moment, this information has already changed, so I’d suggest to recheck it on your own time.
- An important step in achieving the popularity of your book is receiving feedback and rating. Feel free to ask your friends to leave a few of kind words about your book, and give 5 star rating. The more reviews you have, the higher ranking in the results will your book have.
If we are talking about sales, then they have just begun on Amazon, so there are not so many at the moment. Nevertheless, I was able to sell about 100 printed book editions in the first couple of months.
By the way, I want to share some reviews on my book. These words are very warm, and I’m glad that someone found my work interesting.
And of course, I cannot help but leave a link to the book again “Abel’s Dream” at Amazon
That’s all!
I hope you enjoyed my article and found a lot of useful information in it. More importantly, I hope it could inspire you to create your wonderful product, of course, it doesn’t need to be a book.
Mainly it’s to do what you love and believe in your idea!
And once again I want to say special thanks to Marcus Kean for the help in creating such beautiful illustrations, and to Jennifer Kellett for the help with the Russian to English translation. You guys are awesome!
Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Penname publication
Share your stories on ManyStories.com to reach more readers. Auto-tweet your stories on repeat with Signal to increase engagement.
