The Title Page Image Is Now the Cover Page Image

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The white rectangle is reserved for the ISBN bar code.

The “finished” title page is now the cover page. I decided to to expand the title page to double width and use it for the front and back cover. The spine will cut off the tip of Buddy’s right wing. However, when the reader opens the book and lays it face down, they will see the image in all its seamless majesty.

For the title page, I’m going to extract parts of the cover image with most details removed. The title text should be the big feature of the title page.

Just keep movin', folks. Nothing to see here.

My inch forward today is nothing more than opening InDesign and staring at the screen. I scrolled through my book from beginning to end and began to feel the pressure of the blank front matter and back matter. There’s a lot of empty space that needs something to fill it up.

• I have to create the realistic images of the Steller’s Jay and Monarch Butterfly for the back matter.

• For the copyright page I need an ISBN number — in fact, I have to buy a batch of 10 ISBN numbers to get a decent price for the two that I’ll need, one for the print book and one for the e-book.

• I need a bar code for the last page and the cover, which shouldn’t be a big deal — there’s software for that sort of thing.

• Oh, yeah…I need to create a cover image. I just thought of that after 8 months of nothing thinking about it. The book has to have a cover.

And that’s it, as far as I know … at this point. I’m wised up enough to know that I really don’t know what I’m clueless about. I overlooked the cover. What else did I forget? We’ll find out.

No picture today. That’s sad. Between my day job and tweaking the pages and text, I haven’t drawn or painted anything since the last meeting of the Al Fresco Art Club four day ago.

The Final Five Pages of My Children's Picture Book

I’ve placed all of the images into my 40-page picture book. There are 10 more pages that I didn’t account for when I started this project: six pages of front matter and four pages of back matter. That’s a lot of white pages to fill with details like the title page, copyright page, frontispiece, end notes, and a blank final page for the publisher’s barcode.

I’m still tweaking the text bubbles…some of them are ugly and distracting. And, now that I have the whole piece completed, I can see that some images, even after my adjustments, still need some more room between the subjects and the outside cut line.

Here’s a screenshot of the final five pages in InDesign. Next step, after a few final touches to the text and crowed images, will be figuring out how to generate a publishable PDF.

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Learning How to Design My Book

I’ve been orbiting around the topic of designing my print book for weeks. Today I read Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book, edited by Ellen Lupton. If I could transport myself back to December, 2018 and start this children’s picture book project over, I would read this book first. But I didn’t — I chose to go directly to the e-book format without going through the hassle of learning how to produce an actual book. Ironically, though my goal is to create an e-book, I don’t enjoy reading theme. Despite my bias against e-books, my goal now is to produce one that I would want to buy.

In Indie Publising, the frontispiece illustration faces the first page of the content. In other resources I’ve been reading, the frontispiece is described as facing the title page. I’m going to go by the suggestions in Indie Publishing and put the frontispiece illustration facing the first page of the story.

From Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book, edited by Ellen Lupton.

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I spent hours poring over this page.

Creating a frontispiece image for a children's picture book

One of the pictures I’m repainting is the frontispiece image. The frontispiece is one of the front matter pages that precedes the content. It’s usually a picture that captures the overall feeling of the book. My original cover image will become the frontispiece, and I’ll do a new front and back cover images. It’s originally a picture of Jimmy Jay leaning against the feared chimney; the new version will be Jimmy and Buddy leaning against the chimney.

It’s a work in progress. I’ve been sketching on this picture for three days in an effort to get some good body language going. The fact that Buddy Butterfly is a flying insect with 10 appendages doesn’t make it any easier. Yes, he has two arms, four legs, and four wings. I’m not complaining — he’s my anti-hero and I’ll own up to creating him.

This is definitely a work in progress. The first edit was to flip the image horizontally to get the position of the chimney to match the rest of the pictures in the book. I haven’t got them right yet.

This was going to be the cover page, but now it’s going to be the frontispiece image,

A 32-Page Book is a 27-Page Book

Children’s picture books usually have 32 pages. This number is arrived at by the way eight-page “signatures” are created by folding two pieces of paper in half to create an eight-page unit. As a consequence, the number of pages in a children’s book is a multiple of eight. There are some 24-page books, and some longer books, such as Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, which has 48 pages.

Initially I assumed that I would have 32 pages to tell my story. As an impatient rookie, I didn’t do my homework — I didn’t consider that a professionally published book has “front matter” that uses five pages for the title page, a page for the ISBN, publication date, blank pages, and publisher information. Without these pages, the book lacks the fundamental features of a serious book.

Since I don’t want my readers to think I’m a hack, or worse, a lazy, sloppy, hack, I’m going to bring my book up to a professional level. However, adding five pages for front matter gives me a 37-page book. I’ll have to cut five pages of text and images. Despite the extra work I have in front of me, I’m relieved that my book will look like it was done with care and attention to detail.

In the image below (from inDesign), you can see that the story in a 32-page book actually starts on page six.