My Road to Self-Publishing

It is almost 5 years now since Canadian author, Giovanna Lagana, first contacted me and asked whether I would be interested in illustrating a couple of educational children's books. Would I! - it had been an ambition since schooldays. Just 10 weeks later, and lots of to-ing and fro-ing with a e-book publisher, signing contracts, etc, the illustrations were complete. There followed a year long wait before we saw the final ebook and it went live. Then, nothing, zilch, nada.

We enquired after sales figures a few times but were told that there had been none. We knew this couldn't be right as we had both purchased the ebook ourselves under different names. Another year went by and still nothing so we pulled the ebook off the site and continued looking for publishers with the dream of one day seeing the story in print. This year, we discovered several sites where the ebook was offered in its entirety, free of charge. This proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that sales had been made and where we could, we contacted the sites to notify them that they were breaching our copyright. Lesson one.

Meanwhile, I had got a taste for book illustration and was eager for another project. "The Adventures of Sailor Sam" pretty much wrote itself. My handsome tabby, Samson (already a local celebrity) was only too happy to model for me and I drafted in family and friends to play the human characters. The story was rejected by several publishers. I was thrilled to receive a letter from Dorrance Publishing accepting the story but the jubilation was short-lived as the letter went on to say that it would be illustrated in black and white by their in-house illustrators and I would be charged around $4,000 for the privilege. Strange I didn't see any figures like that when I answered the call for submissions! Lesson two.

So, I decided to self-publish and after much internet-browsing, chose a 'self-publisher' which seemed affordable and certainly much cheaper than most. I know now that these 'self-publishers' are actually vanity-presses and on the whole are best avoided. I learnt the hard way and don't wish to recount all the hurt and stress caused. I chose to draw a line under the whole incident, walk away and start afresh. Lesson three.

The following year, my 40th birthday, I decided to turn things around. I purchased a batch of 10 ISBN numbers (I'll talk about them in a later blog), researched 'Print on Demand,' spent months trying to get to grips with Adobe Indesign, and preparing a book for print. It was a steep learning curve but at the end, I was proud to be able to say, "I did it all myself." The Adventures of Sailor Sam was republished in October 2007. Since then, I have published three other books, including a print version of the original Rickie the Raccoon story.