It’s been a goal of mine to someday publish a kid’s book and that day came today. I’m officially a published author having used the Lulu.com system to self-publish my first book “Rebuild it with Moonbeams.” I wanted to condense some thoughts here after having gone through the process start to finish and I also want to publicly “tap” a few people I know to write a book of their own.

How

I looked at a couple different sites for self-publishing including Lulu, iUniverse and Cafepress and ultimately I went with Lulu. Their 5min video tutorial adequately shows the process for how to use their system – you basically create a word doc with the pages of your book, upload it to their site and then set a bunch of preferences about how you want your book to be printed. They take 20% after covering manufacturing costs which seems completely reasonable. Start to finish this project took a total of about 30hrs working nights the past 2wks with most of the time going towards doing the coloring on the illustrations. I sketched the illustrations at Starbucks then scanned them in and colored via Photoshop and used a creative fill technique with iStock photography. The publishing process via Lulu took the least amount of time of anything and was only about a 20min process. The book is a 40pg full-color paperback consisting of a series of whimsical “what-if” scenarios for kids in the same vein as Cooper Edens’ masterpiece “Remember the Night Rainbow.”

Why

The “how” of this process was relatively easy. Perhaps the more interesting question was “why?” And there are a couple of reasons. I started the book as a birthday present for a girlfriend-now-just-friend but the more I got into making it, the more I was curious about trying this as an experiment to see if I could do it. One of our goals with Grid7 is to know how to do a bunch of different things, to help others to build stuff they’re passionate about and to create a series of small, passive recurring revenue streams. This project was consistent with those goals and also satisfied a goal I’ve had for some time of wanting to write a kid’s book.

Kathy Sierra has a great post here that talks about the power of embracing constraints and forcing yourself to build something good in thirty days. It’s a great exercise and truly does satisfy something primal to just go and make something. I think about the story of JK Rawlings authoring the Harry Potter series on the train to work every day and I imagine what the world would be like had she not done that. I also think about “what would it be like if everyone rode the bus once a week and used that time to work on a book of their own?” You never fully realize the ripples of what you do – the prospect of creating a moment of shared closness between a child and parent via one of the scenarios in Moonbeams book is mind-blowing and is truly at the core of why I wanted to do it.

So without any more words, here’s the book. You can get the PDF online or purchase the paperback via the site. I put 1/3rd of it up on WithMoonbeams.com so people can get a flavor for what it is. I’m also challenging the following peeps to write a book of their own because selfishly, it’s something I would buy and read if they wrote it:
Noah Kagan – The Burrito Diaries
Jamon Metz – The Cobblestone Thesis
Amanda Harbin – The Wishmaker’s Playbook