Dinosaur's for Nana

When my grandson, now 13, was four years old he started sending me imaginary dinosaurs over the telephone line to help me do things around the house. It was a fun game that went on until he was six or so. After it ended I thought it would be a good kids' story. I had written down all the different dinosaurs he had sent me, but kind of put the whole thing on a back burner. Finally this past April 24th, his 13th birthday, the book was published. What a wild adventure it was getting it into print! First of all, major publishers no longer accept unsolicited material. If you're a known author they'll come looking for you. A friend of our daughter who lives nearby and is a publisher herself, was happy to give me more information than I'll ever need and guided me through the process of becoming a self-publisher. What an education! You need a bar code, an ISBN, a good illustrator, a sales tax exemption number, registration and publication of a fictitious name for your publishing company, and on and on, ad nauseum. This friend put me in touch with a local illustrator with whom I met with a couple of times. Her work was nice but she wanted more money than I could spend and we couldn't work out a payment agreement. She very kindly led me to www.Guru.com, an online source of 25,000 freelance illustrators. After five days of browsing through Guru's pages and looking over the work of many different illustrators I found Laurie Barrows from Northern California. We hit it off immediately and she did a bang up job of illustrating our dinosaurs! Finally this April "Dinosaurs for Nana" was published by Purple Turtle Books - my publishing company. Its available through Amazon and at www.creatspace.com/3719963. I've sold a few copies to friends and given away even more just to get it "out there". Now this is the hardest part of all when you self-publish. You have to do an awful lot of footwork - you are your own marketing person. The local bookstore has 20 copies of the book but is reluctant to set up a book signing until some copies have been sold and people are aware of it. A shop in New Jersey wants publicity money up front before scheduling a signing. I have links to Twitter and Facebook from my webpage, www.purpleturtlebooks.com, will have a blurb in the local newspaper, and on it goes. This simple dinosaur game has burgeoned into a large, ongoing project that will keep me on my toes for some time. I'm not complaining - its been a real education and a lot of fun - just sayin'