What happens when you have an idea to write a childrens book with the missus and you pursue the idea all the way to completition?
You become self-published authors. Click more to read what we did.
TLDR: Here’s the obligatory link to our book now available on Amazon for paperback or Kindle.
A couple of months ago I was reading up on the self-publishing business which is exploding around Amazon due to the popularity of e-readers and kindles. I’d been aware of ebooks, kindle unlimited subscriptions and so on but over the last decade or so my book reading hunger had become rather stale and, apart from taking in the odd thriller, a new James Bond novel, the next in the Reacher series, I’d not been doing much of it. I lost most of my books in a downsizing over a decade ago, and, while I have amassed quite a collection since, most of them are books about retro gaming, computing history and music biographies rather than straight novels.
I was quite passionate about throwing stories together in the late eighties and, if I’m honest, I still like the idea, but my problem has always been getting most to a conclusion. I’ve got folders full of half-finished work, ideas, actual completed stuff that I’ve sworn blind that I’ll never show anyone, and the odd bit of work that I’m actually quite proud of. Most of this stuff is incomplete, as I’m terrible at seeing things through and just jump into new ideas without working them through properly first. That’s why most don’t get anywhere. Hell, I even have folders with a brief template note in them where I’ve not even explained what the story is about, so all that’s there is the actual title I came up with at the time.
Some of this can be explained by the fact that in those days I didn’t always have access to a computer for financial reasons so used to keep my notes on every project in a handwritten notebook and other information typed up in old folders. Most of that shit all got lost over the years when I spent most of the next thirty years forgetting I’d even been doing all this, and got more into computers, work and other life stuff.
And yet somehow at least the computer files have survived up to now. I’ve even added to them over those decades, although it’s mostly just titles, a few brief notes, and maybe half a chapter when I’ve been really enthusiastic. And so it’s scouring through all this stuff that made me think about changing all that and actually trying to get something out there so it’s not just stuff that I’ve written that will literally die with me because I’ve only ever shown any of it to a few people that you could count on one hand.
And, of course, there’s the desire I’ve always had to be able to walk in my living room and see one (or more) books sitting on my shelves with my name as the author on them. That’s one off the bucket list very shortly now we’ve made it happen.
So my partner is aware that I used to be into putting stories together as the subject has cropped up over the last decade we’ve been together, and she’s proof-read a short story I put together eight years ago to use in a game that I never actually ended up finishing. I’ve pretty-much decided I’ll resurect that, expand it into a chapter size that will suit a novel, and get that out there in print form next. I digress, as the point is that she suggested I have another crack at it, or perhaps we could both try doing something together. And so we did. Why a childrens novel, you ask? Well, why not?
They’re popular. They spread well. Children love short stories as they have attention spans even shorter than mine usually. And, of course, the most important part being they aren’t too long so it might be possible for me to actually finish one before moving on to the next great idea. And the time is now right due to the self-publishing options that didn’t exist back in the days when I was writing to book agents trying to get them interested in my first attempt at a novel, and totally not realising that it was a dreadful piece of shit.
So my partner comes up with the idea. She’s Vegan so has specific ideas about what she’d like in a story and what she wouldn’t. It’s a childrens story so we’re definitely having no violence, no bad language, no animal cruelty and we definitely need a good theme to. inspire a growing child. The key aspect was growing here so why not a tale about a child trying to grow something on their own and give them a heartfelt reason for doing it.
The Tomato Dream features a young boy called Sam who is around 9 years old. He and his parents have recently moved into a new house with, to his delight, a huge garden. The family have moved to be nearer granddad, the only living grandparent as he has mobility issues and can’t get to visit them any more. Sam decides that he wants to build a tomato farm in the new garden so he can sell his tomatoes to friends, neighbours and other local people to help get his grandfather get a mobility scooter to get around on.
Originally the story was around 12 pages long when completed so we had to expand on the story a little once I checked publishing limits because it was absolutely always my intention to have the physical copy as well as being on Kindle’s for reasons I explained earlier. So we added in information for teachers to discuss key points with children, if by some chance a copy ended up in a school library, and other pages discussing the key concepts that it teaches children in relationships with other family members and the obligatory instructions on how to build your own tomato farm, should any children be inspired enough to copy Sam’s journey.
Will we make any money from it? Highly unlikely as the world is saturated with other stories from people doing the same thing, and probably better. But, as sketched upon earlier, that was never the aim in the first place. We wanted something physical that we had both created together and could give as gifts to parents and have as memories for the days when we’re too old to even type any more. I’d definitely recommend it as a good hobby to involve yourself with your wives/husbands/partners if you fancy doing the same.
Amazon kindly let us order our own author copies for just the price of the book creation for physical copies so I’ve ordered some that should be here before the end of the month. I’m betting it will be pretty exciting opening that package and actually having a physical copy in my hands to read through.
So, what was the process to getting the story done from idea to book in the post?
Firstly, you need the idea and the dogedness to get it all on the page. Triona came up with the idea and we fleshed it out to add the motivation for Sam to be creating the tomato garden and consciously developed the story to give him both extremely supportive parents (Dad is out there helping him dig the garden over despite being tired from working all day) and an elderly grandfather who you might suspect was quite strict in his time breaking down with admiration for what his grandson has been trying to do for him without looking for any praise or reward.
That was enough to get the story fleshed out with the knowledge that Sam was never going to be able to achieve his goal himself but showing enough determination through adversity led to others helping him get there. His contribution towards the new scooter ends up being negligible but that was never the point, as the story hopefully clearly illustrates. It brings a family unit so much closer together from what he has tried to do, whether it was a massive success or huge failure.
It’s only a short story and I had no idea of what kind of size it would need to be to be publishable via Amazon so the extra parts were added later by Triona in the hope that they might be useful to a parent or teacher and the instructions for creating the garden should have been a shoe-in anyway.
Next was the cover art and that’s where neither of us could do much. We weren’t planning on the book really selling any copies – just hopeful that it might. But it’s unlikely we’d ever be able to recoup the costs of hiring an artist to create the cover for us (expensive), so we got ChatGPT to have a go for us. I used the first image it came up with because it seemed to convey almost the whole story with just one picture. I also used ChatGPT for a grammar and spelling run through, while making sure it didn’t have any opportunity to edit the story itself. Fortunately we’d done a reasonable job as there weren’t many errors in either of our sections.
Putting a book online is a bit more fiddly. As it’s the first time I was putting one up there’s a lot more questions. You can use your own Amazon account, though. When going through the creation process you need to answer questions like book physical size, paper type, cover image, synopsis and making sure it all looks correct in a pdf preview. You need to also set pricing, territories, set up a USA tax form and set bank account details just in case you actually get sales.
After you’ve got all that sorted you have to wait through Amazon reviewing it and set indicators like metadata and reading age as well as category types of your book. It took me a fair bit of time to get it all through in the end.
As I’ve already said, I’m definitely going to do it again. I have lots of old projects I’d like to resurect and see what can be done with them. I’m using Scrivener to develop my projects going forward so hopefully that will make some of the grunt work like research and story building much easier to manage at a project level as well as creating the actual stories.
Be handy not to have loads of dusty manuscripts and folders around the man cave as well, if I could turn them into physical writing work.