In honor of the International Children’s Book Day, I thought I would talk about publishing children’s books via CreateSpace. My particular experience started after my parents passed away and I was going through their files. My father was an artist and my mother was a teacher, actually almost direct opposites in temperament, so I was surprised and excited to find the layout of a children’s book written by my mother and illustrated by my father. It was very obvious the little project had never seen a publisher, so I determined to publish it for them.
Because the story was short and simple, appealing to younger children, I chose an 8”x10” paperback format for it — easier for small hands to hold, and the layout my parents had designed fit perfectly. Since the original work was done back in the 1950s, my parents had done a literal cut and paste — typing up the text on a typewriter, cutting the lines out with scissors and pasting or taping them onto the board mats where my dad had drawn the illustrations. Lucky for me, the glue and tape held on after all these years, so it was easy for me to see exactly how they envisioned the set-up of the book. Continue reading “Self-Publishing Children’s Books”
You have a new title out, or you’ve been asked to do a book signing or an interview, maybe participate in a panel discussion — a brilliant opportunity for some publicity. And then someone asks you for a media kit. Gulp. You don’t even know what that is, let alone how to put one together. The good thing is that you probably have all the ingredients for a media kit sitting around on your computer, your website, or floating around on the interwebs. Let’s hunt them down. A quick note first: What I’m walking you through here is only one possible version of a media kit, which is sometimes called a press kit. Your actual mileage may vary.