Kat Kuan

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children's book

How to Prep For a Book Signing Event

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Since I’ve had the opportunity to do several storytime & book signing events for my book, I wanted to share my experience on prepping for these events.

I don’t really have to practice the speaking part because I’ve read aloud the book enough times already lol. Also, when you’re presenting to kids, there’s not enough time to tell your whole elaborate backstory because of their attention span. 😛 So after a quick intro, I usually jump right into the book!

Photo Credit: Eastridge Center

I usually prep the night before by packing the car with anything I need to bring with me. I suppose this packing list could be applicable for any small business owner doing a booth as well, with modifications for their product.

use your voice kat kuan

PACKING LIST

  • Books. My books come in boxes of 30. So I usually bring a box or two of books into the event, and leave extra boxes in the car for backup. I haven’t even needed remotely close to that many, but doesn’t hurt to be prepared! 
  • Rolling cart. There’s a lot of stuff to carry from the car to the venue, so this helps.
  • Sample book. This is my demo book that I use when I pitch bookstores. It has sentimental value! But it’s also beat-up around the corners, so I continue to use this one for storytimes because the book has been opened many times. (You know how new books don’t really fully open, and you don’t want to ruin them by opening them up?) It is pretty banged up though, so I may need to retire this soon! 🙁
  • Pens for signing. I bought some quick dry pens from Office Depot. They’re great because you sign and it dries quickly – I would hate for it to smudge.
  • Sign with the Book Price. My book doesn’t have the price on the back of it because I wasn’t sure how I was going to price it or if it would change. At first, I tried to avoid having a sign with the book price – to keep it classy! 😛 But that didn’t work out too well because people would need to keep asking me, or even more awkward, they would think the books were free… So yeah, bring a sign with the price clearly displayed.
  • Business cards. I made them from an Office Depot template and really like them. I often get compliments on them too!

  • Binder of early drawings. I gathered early sketches and printed out iPad drawings from on the book illustration process. I put them in a binder so people could easily flip through it and see the evolution of my drawings.

  • Activity materials. I have copies of a coloring page and crayons for the kids to use. Sometimes the place I’m going to already has coloring supplies.
  • Water. You’re going to be talking a lot. Stay hydrated.
  • Spare friend/family member. Sometimes it gets really hectic with talking to potential customers, and fumbling with accepting cash/credit card. It’s easier if there’s another person available with you. And also to watch the booth if you need to go to the bathroom. 🙂
  • Sign up for mailing list. Sign up sheet for people to join your mailing list

  • Canvas for signing & colorful Sharpie pens. To add a little more interactivity, I also bought a blank canvas and had people sign by filling in the blank “Use your voice to ____” with their own phrase. Pretty fun to see what people write down.

PAYMENTS

  • Square payment reader. If the location is a bookstore, then the bookstore will handle the payment transactions. But if it’s not a bookstore, then I collect payments. I use a Square reader for accepting credit cards. I tweak it for the city that I’m going to (automatically back calculates the tax). Charge the device ahead of time. Bring your phone because it pairs with Bluetooth to complete the transaction, so the customer can provide their signature and get a receipt emailed or texted to them.
  • Cash for change. A cashbox is useful. I also got a paper receipt book too in case anyone wanted a receipt, but no one does, ha!

DISPLAY

In case you’re wondering about where I got the extra decorations, I went to HomeGoods, Ross, and Michaels to collect a bunch of supplies. From watching interior design videos on YouTube, I tried to create an eye-catching, cozy, kids-room type of feel to the booth. Sometimes, people are more interested in the decorations (i.e. the colorful train pictured above) than the book, haha!

home goods

My cart of things at HomeGoods

Overall, these in-person events are a fun way to meet new folks (parents, grandparents, aunts / uncles, etc..) and also little kiddos! The kids have so much energy and I love when they open up and chat with me. Hugs are even better! The perks of being an author!

Photo Credit: Kristin Antons

Hope you enjoyed this glimpse into what it’s like to be an author. For more details on my book, check out Use Your Voice on Amazon. Plus, since it’s Prime Day, I think there’s a discount code for $5 off $20 purchase of books shipped by Amazon. Sweet!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. And of course, I recommend the book regardless. Well, I am a little biased since I wrote the book. 😛

Getting My Book into Bookstores

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From my recent social media posts, you may have noticed that my book has been accepted into a couple of bookstores! I’d like to share some insight about the process for those who may be curious.

Note: If your physical book is self-published by Amazon or CreateSpace, then some bookstores may not accept it for consideration. Instead, I self-published with IngramSpark.

Independent bookstores / gift shops each have their own process for acquiring new books. Across different cities in the Bay Area, I basically use my two legs and walk into these stores to try to pitch my book. I introduce myself and ask them if they would consider reviewing my book as a possible fit for their store.

Some stores have a policy that they don’t work with independent authors individually. I’ve gotten rejected quite a few times like this. One time, I walked into a bookstore just ONE hour after their staff decided to discontinue their local author program. I couldn’t believe the timing. Oh well.

No hard feelings though, it’s understandable. They have tried working with local authors in the past. The problem is the economics. These stores barely broke even by taking on books from local authors, so they just can’t make it work despite their best intentions. Instead, they work with big publishers that have a larger catalog of books.

If the store does agree to review the book, then you either leave them a copy or they review it on the spot. If they decide it’s a good fit (woohoo!), they will either purchase a couple of copies upfront at wholesale price or it’ll be a consignment agreement.

Consignment is when you provide them with the inventory of books (several copies) and they put it on their shelves. If a consumer buys the book, then you’ll get paid at some later pay cycle. If the books don’t sell through, then you don’t get paid. There may be a fee to cover the overhead of entering the book into their inventory system.

So the consignment program is how I got on to the shelves at Books Inc in Mountain View! The above image is the first 5 books I handed over to them. 🙂 It’s a 3 month trial basis, so we’ll see how the books do.

More details on the Books Inc Consignment Program here. The application form is online too. Each location of Books Inc in the Bay Area handles consignment differently though, so I’m going to try to pitch the other locations to see if they’ll carry it too.

Once your book is carried by the store, then you can also discuss with them the option to do a storytime or in-person event. Speaking of which, my storytime event just happened last Saturday, June 9, 2018 and I had a great time. Hooray!

Hope this was helpful, good luck!

10 Steps to Create an Awesome Amazon Kindle eBook

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I really didn’t know much about eBooks when I started this process about 2 weeks ago.

I have Kindle devices, but aside from clicking to buy and having them magically appear on the device, I didn’t know much else.

If you’re new to my blog, I wrote and illustrated a children’s book called Use Your Voice and initially released it as a hardcover. I wasn’t starting from scratch, but I thought the eBook conversion process was an interesting experience and worth sharing.

  • My book Use Your Voice
  • The eBook version of my book

ADVANTAGES OF AN E-BOOK

I wanted to do an eBook version so that my audience could have another option in accessing my book. The eBook would be at a lower price point and easier to carry around than a physical book. From a marketing perspective, it would also be easier to share my book with influencers digitally instead of mailing them a copy.

Actually these reasons came from fellow author Eevie Jones, so thank you Eevie!

STEP 1: CHOOSE LAYOUT TYPE

The first step is to decide on the format of the eBook:

  1. Reflowable eBook – mostly black and white text, where the amount of text on the screen can be adjusted according to the screen size / font size / other user preferences of the e-reader device
  2. Fixed-Layout eBook – often children’s books or art books that require a specific layout for each page, regardless of the device size

In my case, I have a children’s book and each page needs to stay exactly as-is, so I went with the fixed layout option.

STEP 2: CHOOSE A SERVICE PROVIDER

Initially, I was going to choose IngramSpark to self-publish my eBook because I had already used them for the hardcover version.

In the author dashboard, they offer a paid “Convert to Ebook” option, where they use your existing design PDF files. I didn’t want to go with this option because I wasn’t sure about the quality (it would be based off a format that wasn’t originally intended for eBooks). Since I already had to learn Adobe Illustrator and InDesign for the first book, I figured I could generate the eBook format on my own.

As I was digging through the IngramSpark documentation on how to do this, it appeared that if I created a fixed layout eBook with IngramSpark, it would only be for sale on Apple and Kobo – and not Amazon. Disclaimer: if this isn’t true, let me know.

Most of my hardcover sales from Amazon, and I didn’t want to leave them out, so I chose to go with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.

I also believe that the royalty rate would be higher with Amazon, and there would be no fee to upload the book or make revisions. To keep things simple, I focused solely on the Amazon Kindle platform, and didn’t worry yet about uploading to other ebookstores like Apple’s.

STEP 3: DOWNLOAD KINDLE TOOLS

Amazon has pretty good tools for helping authors publish their eBook. Check out this list for which ones would apply to your case.

I downloaded the Kindle Kids’ Book Creator for doing the eBook conversion. Then I downloaded the Kindle Previewer tool for previewing the eBook before publishing.

The Kindle Kids’ Book Creator takes a PDF file and will convert it into the proper format for the Kindle store. Hence, I went back to the design files to generate a proper PDF.

STEP 4: MODIFY THE ILLUSTRATION FILES

There were some changes needed to the illustration files because an eBook is viewed in digital format on a screen (RGB color mode), whereas a physical book is printed on a paper (requires margins / bleed regions for where the paper is cut and needs to be in CMYK color mode).

Let me clarify how my files were set up for my hardcover book:

I made a complete copy of all my design files mentioned above, and put them into an eBook folder on my computer. I didn’t want to mess up any of my previous files in case I ever need to make changes to the hardcover book.

From the new set of files, I went ahead and made these changes to all Adobe Illustrator files:

  • Remove the margin and bleed regions that were needed for the print version, so that the illustration on the page goes edge-to-edge (see screenshots below)
  • Switch to RGB color mode. This was a somewhat involved process because I had to unlock all the layers of my design and make sure I selected all of the layers for conversion to RGB. I still kept these illustrations as Adobe Illustrator (.ai) files. These articles were helpful: Adjust Colors and Converting Color Spaces.

Adobe Illustrator file for hardcover book (There’s a required white margin on the left, and a bleed region around the artboard marked in red)

Adobe Illustrator file for eBook (In this version, ideally, all the art should be within the artboard size, marked by the black border. However, the art still goes beyond the artboard size because I was too lazy to adjust the shapes to fit within the border, but that didn’t affect the final look of the image later on.)

STEP 5: GET NEW ISBN NUMBER

My understanding is that each format of a book should have a different bardcode. The eBook, hardcover, and paperback versions of the same book should all have different barcodes.

From the documentation, I wasn’t quite sure if this was required for Amazon Kindle books. To be safe though, I got another ISBN number and updated the copyright page to mention this new number.

Copyright page – edited within Adobe Illustrator

When I needed an ISBN for my first book, I already purchased a bulk pack of 10 ISBNs from Bowker. Hence, I used another barcode from my pack and assigned my eBook details to it within the Bowker database. The details were mostly the same metadata as for my hardcover book – except the publish date and price were different.

Note: The back cover of my book also contains the ISBN number, but for eBooks, there is no back cover file, so no need to update that.

STEP 6: MODIFY THE INDESIGN FILE

The Adobe InDesign file is what puts all the pages together. Adobe InDesign is used for layout design for things like magazines and newspapers.

I refer to this as the eBook Interior File. It starts off with the front cover of the book. Then I imported each of the 17 pages of my book (Adobe Illustrator files that I had updated in Step 4). I also modified the dimensions of the document to not have any bleed regions.

Next I did a pixel perfect check using the Adobe InDesign presentation mode to flip through the whole eBook. Sometimes there was white line on the edges of the pages because I hadn’t filled the content to the edge of the artboard, so I adjusted accordingly.

Adobe InDesign Presentation mode

When it looked exactly as I wanted, I exported the file as a PDF!

STEP 7: GENERATE EBOOK FILE

I imported the PDF file into the Kindle Kids’ Book Creator, downloaded from Step 3.

There’s some options in the setup process like whether the book is landscape or portrait, or showing 2 pages at a time or 1 page. I chose landscape, 1 page at a time. Then wala! It does its conversion magic. All the pages show up in the Creator like this.

Kindle Kids’ Book Creator

You can also add text pop-ups to magnify the text and make it easier for reading. I tried it out, but it made the experience feel ugly with big ol’ text boxes on top of the illustrations. I also felt like the font in my pages were already pretty big, so I decided to forgo this option.

STEP 8: TESTING

Within the Kindle Kids’ Book Creator, check out the Help > User Guide on how to test and export the eBook as a .mobi file. I also used the Kindle Previewer I downloaded earlier to test the eBook on various configurations like phone and tablet.

When it looks good, then you can do Save for Publishing for the final output .mobi file.

Note: When testing, I was actually able to view the eBook in black-and-white-grayscale on my Kindle Paperwhite (using this method). Later I realized it wasn’t a supported device for my final eBook version in the store though. Weird. Oh well. I think these children’s eBooks are only meant for devices that show color like Kindle Fire devices, Kindle Reader apps on phones, tablets, and on desktop. The available devices are listed on the product page for each eBook in the store.

STEP 9: UPLOAD TO KINDLE STORE

I created a Kindle Direct Publishing account, logged into the dashboard, and added a new book title. I entered in all the metadata (basically the same as what is already listed for my hardcover book, except a new ISBN).

Then I uploaded the .mobi file for the interior of the eBook and also a .jpg file for the cover of the book.

Note: For the cover of the book, I had to export the image in Adobe Illustrator as 300 ppi so that the resolution was high enough to be accepted. Amazon rejects lower quality images. They also have a cover generator if you need help with the cover art of your eBook, but it’ll probably be more attractive to create your own or have someone design it for you.

When uploading to book to the store, Amazon asks you to enter in your price and royalty option. Helpful resources: Amazon’s royalty rate (35% or 70% royalty options), their price requirements based on file size, and the pricing page.

To figure out my eBook price, I browsed through other kids books in my genre – social emotional learning books, Todd Parr books, Sandra Boynton books, etc… For those books, I also looked at how their Kindle book price compared with their hardcover and paperback prices. I decided on a happy medium and felt assured that I could always adjust it later.

STEP 10: PUBLISH

When everything’s entered, they give you one more opportunity to see everything with the Kindle previewer in the browser. Then you can publish! WOOHOO!!!! It said it would upload to the store in about 72 hours.

Once it went live, I tested it of course on my Kindle Fire device, phone, tablet, and browser. It didn’t work on the Kindle Paperwhite, and confirmed that the device was not listed as a supported device for my eBook. I also tested the “gift” option with another Amazon account and made sure that worked smoothly. Yay!

It was nice that the eBook automatically linked with my existing Amazon page for my hardcover book (which was created automatically through IngramSpark). It would’ve been awkward if they were separate product pages. If you have this problem though, check this link to resolve it manually.

Then I shared the happy news with friends and family!

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve got to say, it’s quite empowering to have finished my first eBook. *Flexes muscles* ;P And what’s even more amazing is that distribution is all done electronically. One of the lessons learned from being an author so far is that having physical books and inventory is hard! There’s the overhead of ordering books from my supplier, distributing them, needing to store and track this inventory, and sometimes books can be defective or get damaged.

No need to lift heavy boxes this time! I’m thrilled with my first eBook!

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to see the final product, here is my Kindle eBook: Use Your Voice!

For a behind-the-scenes look at how I created the whole book (including illustrating it), check out my YouTube series on Writing a Children’s Book on my channel Kat Kuan:

Playlist of videos on Writing a Children’s Book: http://bit.ly/2USrEEv

My eBook Launches

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After 4 months since my initial book release and lots of positive feedback, I’m excited to announce that the eBook version of my book Use Your Voice has launched!!! Starting today, it’s available on Amazon right here: bit.ly/useyourvoiceebook

It works on Kindle Fire devices, phones / tablets using the Kindle Reader app, and even on desktop! I know because the engineer in me tested those all devices 😛 haha! The full list of supported devices is on the book page.

If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I’d love for you to check it out, maybe even share with a child in your life, and let me know your thoughts! Thank you and have a beautiful day, everyone! 

Use Your Voice (Kindle Edition): bit.ly/useyourvoiceebook

My YouTube Channel: Writing a Children’s Book

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Hey y’allz! I forgot to update this blog with the fact that I started a YouTube channel! It’s a vlog series documenting my journey to writing a children’s book – which I have wanted to do for SOOO LONG!!

My motivation always went up and down. One day, I was all gung ho about starting it. Then I would get overwhelmed by the fears of all the worst possible outcomes or overwhelmed by all the things I didn’t know how to do (self-publish, illustrate, market a book, etc…). I would get discouraged. I would get distracted easily. Or I would just get plain lazy and go to the mall instead. 😛 Anyhow, it was a nonlinear process to say the least.

About 2 months ago, I FINALLY got the guts to seriously buckle down and work on the book, and by announcing it on YouTube, I feel like it’s going to keep me accountable to keep making forward progress. ONWARDS!

Here are the videos I have so far, Episodes 1 through 4. You can click each one individually or I’ve combined all of the videos into a handy dandy playlist!

If you enjoy these videos, subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow along!

Also, what are some of your favorite YouTube channels? I’d love to find new awesome channels for inspiration! 😀