How I Wrote My First Children's Book | Self Publishing | KDP & Ingramspark | Very Detailed

hello everyone thank you for joining me today as i explain my process in writing a children's book so if you're at all interested in what that was like stay tuned okay so i'm going to talk about how i wrote my children's book and some of the steps that were involved in me writing the book um i'm a self-published author i did not go through a publishing agency although currently i am seeking representation for my book so hoping to get into a publishing agency in the near future but until then it's all me so i'd like to start by talking about the production component to writing the book there is of course the other side once you finish the book you know selling the book promoting the book there's the business side i'm not going to get into too many details as far as that is concerned but that's something to keep in mind honestly i would almost say before you even publish the book keep that business side in mind so let's start by looking at my book so i have here two formats sorry the sunlight is making it so bright but here's the hardcover version of where is baby k i'm really excited about this book here we have pretty nice binding here back cover wonderfully written pages and beautiful illustrations so that's the hardcover i also have a paperback so here's the paperback and it's it's the same but the binding doesn't have the title or you know my details there it's just a simple um kind of paperback binding so i have this format paperback i also have the hardcover and then i have an e-book as well so three different formats i have so i wrote the poems that are in the book so there are cute little rhymes but i have an illustrator who i used for this book and i actually knew my illustrator back from being in china i met her i saw one of her books i said oh wow you really are someone that i'm going to be in touch with because i would like to create a baby book like it all started off as a memento to my darling daughter but then i was like oh wait this is actually something that needs to be shared with the world so i contacted her and we got in touch i told her that i just needed eight pages and eight well you know eight illustrations and lo and behold i i actually struck gold with her because not only was she able to produce illustrations with paintings and watercolor i mean like this is beautiful i mean of course i'm biased it's my my daughter but um in addition to her producing the illustrations she also was able to do the book formatting which is something that is so important because once you have the image and the wording they need to come together and they need to be attractive so i'm going to show a little bit from fiverr how you know if you don't have someone off top you can at least go through fiverr i think it's an excellent site for freelance work if you just need to figure out someone to contact to get some work done on your creative projects check out fiverr they have many many illustrators on there okay so here we have fiverr the website um freelance services available for you and your business i'm going to go ahead and type here what i'm looking for but of course you should join their website in order for you to create an account and you know proceed with those services i already have an account but i'm just going to use the search button for looking for illustrators for a children's book and as you see the search results pulled up several the page goes on and on and all of these illustrators are available for you to check out their work and they should have samples let's look at let's look at this one here [Music] so you're able to see what they'll provide what kind of artwork they'll do for you and then of course you have the specifics of the job um 15 day delivery here it's a bit long to me but you then go ahead and contact you contact the um service provider and you know proceed with whichever illustrator that you want you have your price here sorry my price is written in canadian currency i'm connected to a vpn right now but if fiverr isn't an option for you or you would like to you know find someone through recommendations facebook groups as well also work like here i have a bunch of facebook groups that have joined here we have children's books and illustrators there are tons that are available to you all you have to do is just go looking for them and then negotiate book is all ready to go what is next it is time for you to choose the platform that you are going to use to release your book now i chose amazon's kindle uh kdp used to be create space kdp now kindle direct publishing that's where i am currently selling my book but i'm also using a website my website but i was a little bit late with having my website available but it's all good because i'm learning here what this industry is really all about if you want to sell a book so i have my book available on amazon paperback version and then i have the hardcover version and i have the ebook available now kdp does not allow for you to use their platform to uh create your hardcover you have to go through a different company who will then manufacture your hard cover for you to then send to amazon so there are print on demand companies there are several of them so many lulu book baby and ingramspark so i chose ingramspark and i mean it's up to you do some research and figure out what's the best bet for you but ultimately after googling all kinds of um information as it relates to these print-on-demand companies and also watching some of these youtubers hey honestly they were helpful to me i realized that ingram's mark was where i wanted to put my my focus because i just overall heard that the quality was better and also this is very important if you want expanded distribution ingramspark is your go-to now i'm i'm just getting my feet wet in this world so who knows maybe i'll make a video a couple of months from now and i'll say ingramspark is the devil but i don't know all i know is that if you want to get your book seen by major retailers you know i mean amazon pretty much pretty much they dominate the industry right now so you really something on amazon more than likely you'll be successful if you're really doing a good job marketing it ahead of time um but that expanded distribution barnes and noble like i said and um just other major retailers i think ingramspark is your go-to so keep that in mind okay so i'm checking out the pricing how much did i spend to make my book and it's a pretty penny but it's worth it so my illustrator she charged me forty dollars per every two illustrations i have eight total so that came to 320 and then 40 additional dollars for the cover and 40 more for the overall book formatting and i think it was worth it because i mean you can just tell that she really took some time to make sure that the icons that i included were you know well represented this isn't necessarily the best page to show as far as the book formatting but overall like here we go it's just well done i think she did a really good job so forty dollars for me to pay i don't think um it was that bad and four hundred dollars total i think it was worth it i mean she painted these pictures and they're all produced with watercolor and then she formatted the book for me as well so four hundred dollars total is what i paid and then i well isbn numbers so kdp actually allows you to use their isbn if you want for free however that means that they own your book you know pretty much so i didn't want that i chose to go and purchase my own isbn numbers and i went through bowker.com now if you do that it's 120 for one isbn number however you need an isbn number for every format of your book and since i have three i needed three isbn numbers so purchase one for 125 or purchase 10 for i'll leave that right here um how much i paid for 10. but i thought it was worth it because i do plan to produce another um book you know i plan to have a little series of where's baby k books so i recommend that you go with the the 10 isbn numbers option so already here i am at 500 plus now you have to make sure that your book is copy written so i paid 55 to register uh copyright and uh i received my certificate of copywritten work so that's exciting so now we're at like 600 um what else did i do oh the fiver the fiberbook formatting like formatting your manuscripts for upload onto the um kdp space so i could have done this on my own i mean and anyone really can if you have the time to kind of go through their manuals of like making sure that like you know the margins are well defined so that like when it turns when it's time for printing your your images are not like cut off or like the words are not falling off the page so it just got too tedious for me and i said you know what no i'm going back to fiber fiber fiber is a really great resource when it comes time for you to write your own book or any creative project really i i say i recommend everybody go on the fiverr so keep fiverr in mind i think fiverr is great um and then what else did i spend i mean kdp is free on its own ingramspark in order for me to have them produce that hardcover uh version of the book i i think they charge 49 for both ebook and print options print meaning print like paperback or hardcover but ingramspark always always has coupon codes discount codes available all you have to do is just go digging for them join facebook groups and books about you know authors releasing their work products and you will find someone talking about discount codes so i didn't pay the 49 for england's part so that's good uh what else i think that's it that's all i paid overall so definitely less than a thousand dollars and have i broken even yet not quite because selling a book is a monster in itself and i'll just talk really briefly about that but i'm not getting into the details on it because uh i'm just i'm still learning once you have your account um you'll come to a page that looks like this and then you create a new title and you enter those details for this title i'm going to go ahead and show you the details involving my book and um i have available on this platform and ebook and paperback so what are the details here you can edit paperback details or the content rights and pricing request printed proofs now that's something i didn't do after i uploaded my manuscript and was ready to receive the actual finished product of my book i didn't do that i was just too eager and i just ordered author copies so i placed orders for my book like immediately but i think it's it's a safe move if you have some additional time you're not in a rush go ahead and just get the printed proof so that you can decide if you know the formatting looks good if the images fill the space well or you know if the wording is not off the margin or anything like that although amazon will inform you if there are some issues with margin and they will not allow you to upload your book and also there's promote and advertise your book and of course unlinked books and unpublished paperback let's let's check out these paperback details so you have the language you have the book title and a subtitle if you have one series if you have that i am only in the beginning of my my my book life my author life so i've only produced one book one series um edition number author me and the contributors contributor being the illustrator or a narrator translator editor any of those details i have mine here the description publishing rights so that is very important obviously you want to go ahead and make sure you take care of the copywriting through copyright copyright.gov and register your work i believe it only costs 55 for me keywords that will be used when people are looking for your book um i may update my keywords here um and then the categories categories are incredibly important you know when i first did this my categories were all jumbled and um i ended up like looking at similar titles and children's literature in order for me to choose the title that or the category that best fit me um and of course does the book contain language situations or images inappropriate for children under 18 no it does not i'm not going to press save and continue because it will send my paper back into a review stage so i'm just going to go to the next stage up here in this tab now isbn like i say you can have amazon provide you a free kdp isbn but that means that your book um will be somewhat limited as far as your ownership with that books um with the book and then the imprint well the imprint is your publisher and the publisher since i published this book is made publication date you choose that print options here is where the pricing comes into play what will determine how much your own author copies are going to cost you and also here is what is going to determine whether or not your book qualifies for expanded distribution so this is incredibly important this section right here that's why i'm going through this because you um i mean the interior and paper type is not so important but this trim size is so the standard trim size for uh most children's books are eight and a half by eight and a half inches so i chose that because i wanted to stay in that realm but also it made me eligible for expanded distribution and then some other details here i wanted glossy a glossy page and paperback cover and and then bleed as far as the book and the images the do you want them to kind of just be cut off no bleed or do you want them to kind of like you know fall off the page bleed finally we have manuscript and the book cover so here is where i got held up because the specific documents that you must upload have to be formatted in a certain way that is approved by kdp and i got really really fragile looking at their um their manual and the directions for you to do this so i went back to fiverr and i used fiverr services to help me with like hey anybody can help out with um uh kdp paperback upload or manuscripts so i did that for both my ebook and my print but if you have the time go ahead and do it because it'll save you like thirty dollars and then you launch the previewer once you've completed all of those details check out what your book will look like and here we have our summary how much each book will cost me if i were to place the order as the author and i think 3.65 is not bad especially if you want to build your own kind of inventory of your books then why not go ahead and knock that one out so i mean you want to make as much of a profit from your book as possible right now here we have the page count 24 and i'm going to highlight this because this was something that i did not know about and i i still am not able to find the details of why a children's book for kdp has to be 24 pages my book was originally it was eight pages long but then you know each illustration had the text attached to it so if you divided that then it was actually 16 pages long but still that was not enough for kdp so what i had to do was add fly leaves in the front and the back and also the copyright page i turned that into something beautiful and a dedication page oops don't want to save and continue so that's totally something to keep in mind as you are preparing this final step and getting your book out into the distribution phase so here we have the territories where the book will be distributed i want it all over the world because i'm not mailing anything it's all amazon but what does that mean that means you're going to sacrifice a little bit because the royalties that you'll receive will be somewhat limited you see every book that i sell is 13.99 and i'm going to receive a little less than five dollars for every book that i sell and that might seem like you know terrifying but when you think about all of the work that is going into um sending this book out to perhaps someone in germany and i'm not doing that i'm not printing i'm not mailing it's it's not terrible um but then we have here expanded distribution and my royalty rate looks it just it actually hurts a little bit but when you think about what is expanded distribution this means your book is in major bookstores or you know bookstores that show up in airports online retailers and so on and so forth so we're talking perhaps hundreds of your book hundreds of copies of your book can be handed out so is it too bad not really selling a book i would say start early when it comes to all the promotions and marketing your book as much as possible because i fell short and i also rushed the process which is not a good idea if you want to sell books i did not go through the library of congress in order for my book to even get access by library so that will never happen at least not for the first book in the series the next book i would certainly make sure that my book is part of the library of congress their records i went with kindle select so kindle select you can enroll your book into kindle select and that way uh readers who access kindle through kindle university ku they um they will see your book i mean there are some marketing tools that you can use some free marketing tools too that will allow for your book to uh capture more attention so i i thought i saw that i said oh 70 royalties let's go for it however when you do that um as many pros as there are to that a major con is that you can only have your ebook available on amazon's kdp uh for i believe it's a 90-day period you can't have it available on barnes noble or nook you can't have it available on itunes any other platform no other platform besides kindle um not even your website i can't even put my own ebook on my website so that's downside um what else like i getting momentum going this is really important before you release your book have a website almost you know just ready to launch and uh talk about like pre-orders or personalized orders and then remember how i was talking about i can place my own author copies and receive my book for uh like what was it three something three dollars and some change you might as well take advantage of something like this i highly recommend that you do that and just have your own kind of like bulk stock inventory at home and um you know offer buyers the option to receive your book by um you know like a personalized auto autographed copy you know that's what i'm doing now i'm using my websites just like i'm trying to capture as much of those coins as possible so you know that's those are just some of the ideas that i have off top as it relates to selling your book but there are all kinds of promotions out there marketing schemes and things that you can try out um but for the time being i'm i'm sticking to amazon and ingramspark because i'm new and i'm just trying to like you know feel out this entire industry so i hope that this was somewhat useful in some way shape or form to you if you are getting started or you're interested in writing a children's book because i mean some of the things i shared here i needed to hear like i needed to hear and i i was like as soon as i finish writing this book and i get it out there i'm definitely i have to make a video about it and just put it out there sorry sun is all on my face right now but um thanks for listening if you found this useful then definitely let me know leave a like uh drop a comment if there's any questions that you have and i wish you all the luck in your future endeavors as an author

Channel: K1 & K2 Daniels

Views: 69,881

Keywords: #selfpublishing #childrensbook #kdp

Id: zkcbdpMUTAE

Length: 24min 54sec (1494 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020