How It Feels to Me Update 💫

Self Publishing a Picture Book

I thought it might be nice to do a formal How it Feels to Me picture book update before the end of the year.

A lot of the work that’s been happening is boring (printer research) and intangible (redrafts). But I wanted to offer a window into that process for anyone that’s interested.

Here’s a breakdown of the progress we have made this year.

First,

Gracie Klumpp

and I had a whirlwind one week crowdfunding campaign.

We chose a shorter campaign to be mindful of our energetic capacity (versus longer month-long campaigns I’ve done in the past.) It turned out to be a great decision.

We exceeded our funding goal and raised $3,263 in just 8 days.

If you’d like to take a peek at our campaign page you can see it here.

Even with the short campaign there’s a certain amount of energetic drain that is just inevitable during fundraising work. It took most of the summer to reset. We wrote about that here on Substack.

I noticed a new cycle within my own creative ecosystem.

After spending a lot of social energy on a big launch I love to work with my hands.

Last year it was a bricolage. This summer I cut hundreds of fabric squares to make a costume, which I wrote about here.

6x6 fabric squares from thrifted and donated clothing

Gracie reflected on “using special interests to ground me in the midst of chaos.”

And shared some life news about a big move along with some sketches and quotes. Keep reading here.

Sketches from Gracie’s post linked above.

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The In-Between Times

Moving out of the crowdfunding recovery phase we were both thrown into other big life changes.

As for myself, we lost our sitter-of-dreams and I was suddenly working without any childcare. This meant I wasn’t able to dive right into redrafting in the way I would have liked.

It was an in-between time of emerging from recovery, but not having the time for focused work in the way I had imagined. I wrote a bit about that here.

If parenthood has taught me anything it’s to expect the unexpected. I’ve always been a bit time blind, but I’m finally learning to build extra space into projects. Especially now that I'm responsible for a tiny human.

Meanwhile, Gracie transitioned from living in an airstream trailer to buying a (dreamy, magical) schoolhouse.

All of these things have impacted our capacity, but that’s why we gave ourselves an expansive two year timeline for this project.

We did make progress, but in slow incremental steps.

I compared indie book printers¹ whilst Davy watched Daniel Tiger episodes.

And Gracie researched digital cameras and the relative merits of tripods versus C stands while moving into a new house.

How it Feels to Me will be illustrated in analogue mixed media.

So we needed a way to get that real life art into the book at the highest quality possible.

Thanks to your early preorders we were able to order Gracie a new camera, C stand, overhead shooting mount, and all the bits and bobs to needed make the whole set up work. Here are some test shots (there’s also one opening this email.)

Publishing books is not a big money making endeavor.

(With a few notable exceptions.) Most authors write to tell stories and experiences we are passionate about. Creating a fundraising campaign is an opportunity to ask yourself what you need to make the project as best as it can be.

As artists we can be so accustomed to bootstrapping that we don’t always see our options. When Gracie mentioned creating mixed media illustrations (versus digital) I knew that I wanted the campaign to cover the best photography equipment we could fund. This is our biggest creative investment (alongside the cost of printing and mailing the books themselves) and it’s incredibly exciting to see this set up coming together.

When you invest in a crowdfunding campaign you are essentially becoming a patron of an artist’s career.

This photography gear is essential to making our picture book happen, but it will also serve Gracie in other creative pursuits for years to come. Thank you!!!

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Postcards

Another small step completed was designing, writing, ordering, and re-ordering (due to customer service chaos) thank you postcards for our launch team and backers.

I love how these turned out and they will be winging their way through the postal service very soon!

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Rewrites

This autumn I also managed to do two rewrites. Without a sitter my time for focused work is limited to weekends when Nathan can take Davy to the playground or play video games with him. It’s less time than I had before (in which I also have to grade university papers), but we’re finding our way with it.

One afternoon I also created a mockup using the process I learned in Neil Gaiman’s writing masterclass. Which, I suppose, is another thing I did in service of the book this year. I listened to most of the modules whilst parked in our garage after Davy had fallen asleep during a car ride.

sarahdshotts

A post shared by @sarahdshotts

This mockup isn’t the size or shape of the final book. Its purpose is to decide how much text goes on each page. This gives us information about what illustrations are needed and how many pages the book will be.

Before the holidays I’ll be sending this to a few neurodivergent families as alpha readers asking for feedback.

After that we are set to dive into book design and development in the new year!

Questions?

Pop them below and Gracie & I will do the best we can to answer them.

We can’t wait to send this book out into the world.

Sarah (and Gracie)

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1. It turns out Amazon can’t make hardcovers with fewer than 75 pages. This means we will likely use Ingram Spark for our small run of limited edition hardcovers. And Amazon for paperbacks due to their worldwide printing and delivery infrastructure.