Publishing is NOT Writing-Work is not play but can be rewarding

by Daniel Sekarski
(Switzerland)

Dealing with global warming

Print on demand, Lulu

It has taken years and diligence to complete the publishing process to a final near professional level. I have just finished my second children's book using the same process but the second effort was not much easier than the first one.

The first book, Bemba's Secret Garden, was originally written for The United Nations Evironmental Program. The second book, Four Part Harmony, was also put together for tha UNEP. They had political problems publishing the book in the end, and though they had great praise for the two books about teaching children to take concern with thier environment and being fair and supportive with their lives, they scrapped it near the end of publication.

I thought it was such a great shame to let such a well done and important topic drop along the wayside of office politics, that I decided to publish them myself and start a small publishing company to help others with the same problem.

I found LULU's system very flexible and of course quite inexpensive to start the process. It took another year for each book to bring them to completion.

You must consider that I am a stay-at-home dad and can only tackle the job in my limited spare time. You must also consider that my books were complicated, with 50 full page color images and the text to go with them. The formatting and editing is overwhelming for one individual. I was lucky enough to have two extremely talented illustrators to do all the images. The results are quite noteworthy.

I would also like to add that I made copies of the book for most of the finer editing and the time it took for the books to arrive at each editing phase was long and time consuming. This I believe is quite necessary to insure that the printed quality is well visualized at each edition. It usually took about 10 printed editions of edits to arrive at the proper quality level for distribution. This was at 20 bucks a copy for my 100 page book and 15 bucks for the 50 page book. The turn around time for each book was two to four weeks.

You can see how the time can add up. On the last book, I had to completely give up on the printing that was done in Spain because the quality was so dismal I could never work with it. They were never cut the same and the binding was so inconsistent I had to try to work with the pages falling out half the time. They are supposed to reprint the books at the US printer now, where I have had little or no problems, with either books printing and binding. The first book, in all fairness, was much less a problem at the printing and binding level.

In conclusion, if you do not have time and patience; if you are not willing to do the work and battle the frustration, find a differrent line of endeavour.

Visit Daniel's website, tpprince esquire international: Bringing childhood back to the children.