I finally had a rough draft of the story. I had a filled in story template. I didn’t yet have the name Super Sonya vs the Woodpecker.
I sent the story template on to McQuina (my illustrator) to review. This all took much longer than I expected.
I set a meeting with McQuina to talk next steps. I think this was about June.
Next steps
We discussed the book and how we would proceed. Now, keep in mind, I’ve done book layouts in the past but never anything with illustrations. What would we use to build the book? I know we didn’t have any illustrations yet, but it seemed important to me to know how we could actually assemble a finished book.
No sense creating illustrations that couldn’t be put into a final, printable form.
I had used Microsoft Publisher a little in the past. I didn’t have the software. I also knew about inDesign. I didn’t have that either. I also didn’t have unlimited budget to spend on the project.
Canva
McQuina suggested we use Canva. She had the Pro Version of the tool and I could use the free version to collaborate with her. Sounded ideal.
Except, of course, it was a brand-new tool to me that I needed to learn to layout the book. Would I be able to do it justice?
As I often do, I overthought the exercise. Canva is a decent tool that does the job. It doesn’t have a lot of frills; just the basics you need to put words and pictures together. It also has a fantastic collaboration feature (even at the free level).
Now the work really began
We decided the steps to the book would be as follows:
- McQuinna would create sketches of all the identified illustrations
- I would continue to tighten the story and review the illustrations as they were completed
- Once we had a tight story with all the corresponding illustrations we would review the cohesive whole and make any storyline/flow changes
- Illustrations drawn
- Layout pages with illustrations and story
- Review and tweak
- Cover creation
- Finalize book
All of this took a considerable amount of time. A few months. The story was heavily edited although it didn’t change considerably.
Lessons learned during this work
It can really be summed up with a couple words: patience and communication. This all takes time and keeping communications flowing is key. A lot of this work was done over the summer when we were taking vacation so it kept surprises and the resulting rework to a minimum.
It was amazing watching the story come to life. It just took time.
See you next time when I wrap up this thread.
