The Day After the Big Day Is Another Day

I felt different this morning when I woke up. I felt an inch more myself. I’ve been lousy at completing my personal projects for most of my life, but when I’m working on a project for someone else, I’m a demon at “getting the job done.” When I’m working for myself, I start with enthusiasm and energy, and then, as I enter the hard work stage of a project, my enthusiasm is sucked dry by my fear of failing…but that didn’t happen this time. Every time the prospect of failure dripped poison into my ear, I turned away and thought, If I can put my head down and just do another inch today, I won’t succumb. I became an art soldier, marching into the teeth of doom. But for art soldiers, the only doom is not to put one foot in front of the other and keep going.

Now that the print book is done, I’m moving on to the eBook version. I looked at it today for the first time in five months. It needs updating with the final images and text. It will take about a week to bring in the new images. After I publish the eBook, this project will be complete and I will move on to the next book in the Jimmy Jay series.

Here’s what a screwed up page looks like when the original image is missing and InDesign uses a cached low-res thumbnail. The jaggy problem will be fixed when I re-link to a high resolution PSD file.

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Click to see the jaggies!

Going Beyond a Simple eBook

When I started this project, the idea of creating a real paper book and an eBook was more than I wanted to deal with. I thought that I should just do an eBook and get something published as soon as possible. I believed that I had good reason to be hasty. For one thing, I had to learn how to draw…and paint…and use Photoshop…and Procreate…and learn color theory, and everything else that goes with starting a career as an illustrator. Yes, I consider myself an illustrator, an illustrator just starting out.

After watching the process of other children’s book illustrators, I got to thinking that, to be taken seriously, I have to publish an actual paper version of my book as well as an eBook. Even though a paper book has mean special considerations than seem complicated, I have to face them. There’s the front matter, title page, cover images — all every exciting features that contribute to the professional “feel” of a book. I want my book to have that feel.

Today I created a second inDesign project for the paper version. The main change is that the paper book will be in portrait mode, not landscape mode. I’ll have to redesign the layout of images and text, and even create images that cover two pages. This is exciting stuff!

Here’s a view of the some ideas I have for the first few pages of front matter as they would look in portrait mode.