The idea came about during a virtual coffee with my pal Stephanie Moon. Steph and I were talking about how so many people self-publish on Amazon. Many of these people don’t have traditional publishing experience and are making fantastic book series fast and fun. But I was worried that I didn’t have an idea for a series, and wondered how I would pull together the materials, let alone market the thing. But Steph reminded me that I know how to make books. She told me: Do something easy and low touch. Look at all the black-and-white lined journals out there. You can make something great looking. Sure, I know how to make a lined journal, but how would I market it to the masses? Steph told me to take baby steps: You will get there, but you need a product to market first.
So with that in mind, I decided to make a lined typewriter journal. I contacted one of my favorite designers, Teressa Bonaddio, to see if she could help me pull it all together. She was happy to help, but we had a hard and fast deadline as she was having a baby in 6 weeks, and we were starting this project at the beginning of the Christmas holiday.
I started by searching Shutterstock for imagery of typewriters, creating a library of images that I liked to share with T. Then we scheduled a creative meeting to discuss my vision, the specs of the book, paperweight, full-color, black-and-white, number of pages, trim size, and art. Could we take parts of one image and add a background like this other image? Do we want section breaks? Should we include some inspirational words or phrases? Fortunately, this isn’t the first time T has made a book for KDP, so she knew how to navigate their systems and understood the file set-up.
Post-holiday, she came back to me with cover concepts and interior design options. We were able to move quickly to choose covers and interiors we liked, and PDFs were soon to follow.
Then I had to figure out how to set up an account on KDP. There were a lot of pieces of information to fill out, and I was overwhelmed at first, but I reminded myself that lots of other people had figured it out, and I could too. I quickly discovered while selecting paper and print colors that the unit cost of the version of the journal I wanted to make was going to cost the same amount as the retail price I wanted to charge, so I had to scale back on the paper and ink quality. I also played around with the retail price to see what kind of royalty I could expect at different prices. I did the math on how many journals I would need to sell to earn back my investment in art and design costs.
Then, I had to wait patiently for proofing. While this is Amazon and POD, it still took a little over a week to get the proof. By that point, T was in labor, texting me from the hospital, and I sent her notes about minor tweaks to make to the page count of the files. (See why she is one of my favorite designers???) With one more file upload and a quick preview (no need to proof again), I pushed the journal LIVE!
I still need to figure out how to create a search inside the book (ebook?) and upload interior images, but the actual mechanics of doing so weren’t as challenging as I had thought. And now I have this delightful calling card that typewriter lovers can purchase, and I can give as a gift or another piece of marketing collateral.
