We got news and quotes back from our printer, so this seemed like the perfect time to catch everyone up on how our quest has progressed so far and where we’re at now.

For those few of you who don’t know or who haven’t looked anywhere else on our blog, we’re attempting to publish a children’s book. In the course of our journey, we’ve decided to strike out on our own…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

One day, Joy (mom) pulled out an assignment I (her daughter) had done in 6th grade. It was a story about how the birds had gotten their colors while playing a game of telephone. I don’t remember the exact details, but somehow that got us excited about writing together and after a few starts, a primitive version of Just Another Monday was born.

I should insert here that Joy is a previously published children’s book author (Nightlight and Agate) and worked as a graphic artist for a publishing company for many years. She brings a lot of expertise to our project – lucky me!

Just Another Monday (which has had quite a few working titles) started life as a very short blurb of an idea, maybe 4 spreads. Today they read like these first two, but at the time, they were wordy and much less clean:

Just another Monday.
You follow your mom to the car.
Look! A perfect skipping rock.
You pick it up . . .

Whoa! What was that?!

A dragon lands right beside you!
Yikes! Do you . . . 
run like crazy
or 
hop on?

From here, things progressed and a lot of decisions had to be made. We wanted colorful pictures for kids, with straightforward (not wordy or difficult) choices, and no sudden endings – all roads lead home. It has as many elements of a flash game (with decision-making and all roads leading to the end goal) as anything else.

The “simple” decision of having all roads lead home was a huge undertaking. The first 10 spreads and even the first path through were easy, but we constrained ourselves to 48 pages (so we wouldn’t end up with a 150 page children’s book – which is probably an oxymoron). That meant we had to reuse a lot of the spreads for different paths. Talk about a puzzle! Near the end I was sitting in a restaurant on my lunch break with the pages spread out around me, scribbling numbers and muttering to myself madly. Most people were avoiding me like the plague (I think I even hit myself in the head a few times 😉 ), but one nice man came over and asked if anything was wrong. I told him what I was working on and he even asked if he could help me. It was a very kind gesture from a complete stranger.

In the end, the two of us (more props to the other half of this venture!) managed to write all of the spreads.

Once we had it all written, one of our other major decisions was to cut down on the wording. No one wants to read (to themselves or out loud) a paragraph when a sentence or two will do the job just as nicely and more time can then be spent interacting with your kid (or your nephew, friend’s kid, rented child, whatever). This was again made more difficult by the need to reuse pages. (What a major foundational decision we weren’t even really aware we were making!)

During and after this, there were art decisions (we went with my line art and mom’s InDesign shading), book layout decisions (again mostly my partner in crime), cover layout decisions, and so many others. We’re still making decisions on whether the cover should come over the tabs for protection or be cut away because it looks so much, well, cooler.  We’d also like to make a series, so cover design and spine layout will matter a lot since it will be repeated (hopefully!).

After the book was set up, we sent it to publishers. It’s said Dr Seuss was rejected 27 times. Well, we’ve only been rejected 24 times so far. It’s a little (understatement) disheartening. You know you’re just number 203 in the stack they’re looking at, so it’s not personal, but phew. Also, as a note to publishers everywhere. Asking us to wait 8 months for you to make a decision did not happen. That seems unrealistic especially in today’s market. Maybe I’ll write another blog on the publishing companies’ business model. I personally think if they could tap into the online gaming model (I’ll have to think if there’s a way to reasonably do that), they would have a much better chance of staying afloat. Anyway, so no go on the over-taxed publishing companies. If it sounds like I blame them, I don’t. I just wish there were a better system…

So now we are 2.5 years in and we (and our respective husbands) sat down and tried to decide if we could start a publishing company. That is a huge jump in time, capital, and just general investment from having someone who is already set up to do so print and distribute your material. After much deliberation (drum roll please…) we went to the printer to get a quote.

We also decided to make an app for androids and iPhones. We’ll add a  part two to explain that adventure later.

I think that catches everyone up on how we got started. If you have any questions, we’re happy to let you in on anything we’ve learned, just ask!

Now, back to the beginning of the post. The short answer: inconclusive. The price is a little high to print the book with tabs, but we’re pretty sure we don’t want to do it without. We’re considering kickstarter (thanks to my brilliant sister-in-law) to get more capital for it, but we’d still need it to be a viable project. We want to be able to see a future of profit, not just breaking even, otherwise we can’t quit our day jobs and become world-famous children’s book writers 😉

Here are the major things that raise the price:

1. die cut tabs (the dies cost up front [we’d own them] and then there’s a small price increase to use them)

2. we’d like to do a 5,000 print run to start, much more expensive than 10,000 copies in a per book view, but much less in terms of available capital required

3. hard cover – we can’t have anything else and protect the tabs

4. heavy paper – the paper poundage needs to be quite high to make the tabs durable

So, we’ll update you when we’ve made a decision, but for now, we just need to sit down and see if there’s any way to make this work.

Wish us luck! and I feel like shouting out a thanks to all the support we’ve had in getting this far. We love you guys!

Filed under: DoU