I Made a Book!

As a child I grew up reading books filled with cartoons. The Scholastic Book Fair always brought new cartoon books for me to read, and then there were garage sales, where I would bring home boxes of cartoon books to enjoy. So for me, cartoons and reading them in book form is how I’ve always enjoyed them.

“Books”

Later when I started to create my own cartoons, there was no other way to show off my work but to create a book. Not a real book… a Kinko’s book. Sure it was paper, with a cartoon printed on it, but spiral binding really makes it clear… not… a… real… book. Every 50 cartoons I would go to Kinko’s and copy off my new “book” and send it out to friends, family, and fans. When I would reach 150 cartoons… Or three “books”, I would put those into one big book. This felt like the real thing. I would pay for the more expensive binding and have to color the cover by hand for each copy (color copies didn’t exist at Kinkos during this time… it was the 90’s kids), but it felt like a real book. Back in the 1990s, I was able to create two of these big books. I was proud of these books, but deep down I knew they were not the real thing. Creating a real book was always something I wanted to do, but it was outside the realm of what could be done for a college student just drawing some ‘toons. Back in the 90s you just couldn’t create a book on your own.

We are back!

After college, I went into cartoon hibernation… 20 years passed… I watched the technology get better and better. Online book publishers began to pop up and became a thing. Amateur authors could produce their own books for audiences to read. Once I started updating my cartoons, the thought of creating a real book was always on my mind, especially now that it was a “thing.” Updating my cartoons took a few years, but I finally was able to complete a solid 150 cartoons.

Online Books

Now it was time to find an online book service that I could use to create a book. I researched sites, asked friends, read reviews, and finally settled on Blurb. It’s crazy how many book services there are out there, but finding one that suits your needs is not easy. I had a lot of trepidation about using any online book service, but one thing I really liked about Blurb was they made it easy to see a cost breakdown. I could see how much it would cost if I made 10 books, or 20 books. And knowing that information help to zero in on how to create that book. Formatting and page count go hand in hand when creating a book. How many ‘toons fit on a page, then how many pages you will need, and the cost of those pages to understand the overall cost of your book. You can’t do any of these in isolation. Finding the balance between these factors is important.

So I started to create my book. The learning curve was there, not impossible, but there. It seems like it would be simple, just throw a bunch of cartoons on page and print. But creating a flow, or order, of cartoons that works together takes time. For some reason I tend to do a lot of cartoons that involve angels, (if I ever go to counseling I’m sure they will tell me why…) so you don’t want those similar cartoons too close to each other, you need to space them out. Creating my book involved cartoon flow, placement of cartoons on the page, creating a cover, intro pages, and an ending. Most of my cartoons go out over social media, so being able to create a book felt more like surfing an endless wave. With Instagram, you read the ‘toon once and move on. A book allows you to keep going, to be able to stay in the world as long as you would like, instead of having to jump out. Keep turning the pages instead of swiping onto something different. Even though my cartoons are all very different from one another, you begin to feel the cohesiveness of the work when it’s all together in a book. Putting all the cartoons together really felt like I was shaping a larger experience for people, and that was a cool feeling.

Proofing

Once I finished the book I did not feel confident that it was truly finished. Even though I proofread the book many times, I was still finding mistakes. I decided to make one “proof“ book so that I could edit actual paper, instead of working in the computer. My “proof“ book cost me $40, which is expensive for one book, but it was well worth it. I knew I was going to order a bunch of books, so I wanted to make sure they were as perfect as they could be. I also had so many questions and concerns about what this book would look like, feel like, be like. This proof put me at ease on many levels. I chose the cheapest paper for the book… the paper turned out to be great! I wasn’t sure if my cover would actually fit where the program said it would… it fit perfectly! I didn’t know if areas in the page edge would get cropped out… they didn’t! There are very few times I can see the first version of something like this and be impressed. I can say, with this Blurb book, I was impressed! Now that’s not to say that the book didn’t have mistakes. I can’t believe how many additional mistakes I found once the book was actually printed. I highly suggest if you are going to create a book, create a proof book first. At this point my cartoons were almost perfect, the only problem (other than my numerous mistakes) was that the dark blue that I used for my characters’ police uniforms were just too dark. On a computer screen they look great, but once it was printed on paper the blue was just too dark, and that is something I had to go back and fix in my cartoons, however that was my only color issue. Overall, I got a little emotional seeing a real book of my cartoons. Even with ALL the mistakes… grammar mistakes... spelling mistakes… art mistakes… There were a lot of mistakes.

A great way to help correct these mistakes is to reach out to friends that are willing to proof an entire book for you. These are what we call, “good friends.” Having a second pair of eyes on your work makes all the difference. They see things that you just can’t see anymore. My good friend stepped up like a champ and proofed the “heck” out of the book. He highlighted all the errors, then I fixed all the errors, uploaded the fixes to Blurb’s website, then ordered a second “proof” book. After all the fixes in the first book, I no longer trusted myself to get it right in just one try. Luckily the second proof book came back and was perfect. In total I paid $80 to make sure the book I finally uploaded was ready to go. I definitely slept better at night knowing I made sure the book was as good as it could be.