How did you self-publish your books?
This is a question we get asked A LOT!!
Self-publishing a book all by ourselves has been an adventure of it's own! When we got started we knew nothing at all about publishing a book. It takes a lot of time, a ton of trial and error and most of all...passion.
Thought you might like to know a little bit about our process. While much more complex than this, we thought we'd share it in simplest terms. A nut shell version!
We would...
1. Come up with a concept for the story that fits in with our Seymour & Hau theme of bringing a love and curiosity for other cultures to children and their families, while creating a joyful and enriching reading experience.
2. Research the country and even more so the culture. Talk to as many people as possible from the country we are representing, research more, talk more, and then, hope the kids get curious enough to find out more after the book.
3. Write. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite. Rewrite….
4. Get feedback. Rewrite. Edit
5. Send the manuscript to a bunch of friends for their edit. Make changes.
6. Decide what illustrations we want. Find references for them, write in-depth descriptions for all of them, and send a detailed spreadsheet to our illustrators. (here is our news article about how we found our illustrators!)
7. Back and fourth with illustrators until everything is just right.
8. Layout. Phew. Tom does the layout for the whole book, gets all of the text and illustrations in the right spot and makes it all pretty.
9. We print out a copy at home and do another edit making sure there are no more errors in the text (there are ALWAYS more errors), make sure the layout flows, the illustrations are in the right place and the front and back cover look good.
Going through a print copy of Seymour & Hau: ITALY. Tea is a must! (and a red pen!)
10. Print out two completed books at the online printer. (We use Ingram Spark.) Once we have the books in hand, go over it all AGAIN. Make final changes.
11. Take a deep breath and go for it. Print a bunch of copies! Set up a launch party and then…repeat.
So, that’s the VERY quick version. It takes us about two years per book, which we hope to make shorter but until we can focus solely on Seymour & Hau, it take's us a bit longer than we'd like.
At this point we are completely self-published, and we fit in our work on Seymour & Hau in between our regular jobs, parenting teens, and being a part of our community.
Our dream is to continue writing Seymour & Hau books and though our book sales, be able to set up successful outreach in countries all over the world to meet a community’s specific needs and to promote awareness and action for our children and their families, creating Little Global Citizens who want to help make the world a better place.
Questions? You can always email us at info@seymourandhau.com
If you want really FANTASTIC information on self-publishing, check out our pal Rachel DiNunzio's AWESOME podcast! www.bookcreatorpodcast.com