Beyond the pages

The idea for Paddy Plum started off as something slightly different to what ended up being published. The original idea was conceived when my son asked for a bedtime story. All his books were downstairs, so I decided to do what any parent does and just improvise. I just started making things up, such as the pizza rocket and the next day, I sat down and tried seeing how far I could take it.

The original manuscript for the book was more or less a poem and I sat on this idea for the best part of a year. When it came time to developing the book, some major changes had to be made. I was lucky enough to have a relative who was in the publishing industry who guided me on how to properly develop my story in to a book.

I was also in touch with an illustrator through a mutual friend, who gave me his rate and a month later, I was getting concept art coming through. The refreshing thing about this was the freedom I had for how all the illustrations looked in my book.

I was presented with amazing ideas from Toby. Such things I'd never even thought of and some things which turned out better than I could imagine.

For the next few weeks, I was back and forth with Toby on several ideas and I was impressed with his dedication and strong will to help me realise my vision. He even presented ideas which had never occurred to me such as the page dimensions, font and the use of page bleeds.

Not everything was plain sailing. We had to strategically figure out which images were to go on which pages, we had to consider the page count and font size etc. When it came time to uploading, Toby and I were quite perplexed at how precise Amazon's KDP upload requirements were. We had to be exact on each page down to the millimeter. The book was rejected three or four times due to certain issues on certain pages.

However, thanks to Toby's unlimited patience and a bit of trial and error, we finally managed to upload the required PDF files for the paperback edition.

Moving forward, Toby and I are going to put our focus on the ebook format and from there we will link the two format options together to give readers the choice on how they would like to purchase their book.

I'll address the development in another post and other future plans for the character of Paddy Plum.

Thanks for reading.