‘Five’: A Self Publishing Story From Concept to Print By Katriona Chapman

This is a guest post by Katriona Chapman examining the entire process of the production for her first self published book ‘Five’, from the initial concept through to printing.

The ‘Five’ book project actually began purely as a personal project, without any plans for publication. A friend who I work with, Masha, gave me a short story she’d written and I began to illustrate it just for fun. It became an absorbing project because I really enjoyed the freedom of doing illustrations just for myself, without any consideration of what markets or age groups they would be appropriate for.

I had planned eleven double-page spreads, and as it looked more and more likely I would complete all eleven, I tried to think of what I might do with it. I wondered about publishing it online as a free e-comic on my website, but Masha had a small financial windfall and decided she wanted to put the money into making it into a real book. We designed a front cover together, and we worked on the placement of the words once I’d hand-lettered all the lines from the story. She came up with the idea of splitting some of the spreads into two to vary the page layouts more.

‘We spent a lot of time playing with page layouts, which sometimes involved me doing a bit of extra drawing. The placement of the hand-lettered text was also something we worked on together.’

Masha’s idea was to make a handmade book, which would allow us to self-publish, but we wanted to avoid some of the stigma associated with self-publishing by aligning ourselves more with the craft side of things. Often there’s an expectation that self-published books are poorly-produced and printed, whereas we wanted our book to look beautiful and to be made with quality materials. That presented quite a challenge. We spent some time researching printing costs and material costs since we wanted to strike a balance between our ideals in terms of quality and what we could realistically afford to do if we wanted to be able to sell the book at a profit and not just cover costs. We wondered about creating a cheap edition and a deluxe edition, but we realised it would involve too much work to produce two different products. Our final plan was to have the inside pages commercially printed, but on quality paper, saddle-stitch them by hand and have an external cover (like a dust-jacket) printed on heavier card stock.

Finding out about different kinds of commercial printing was one of the biggest challenges, along with finding the right printer for the job. That stage actually took just over a month longer than expected, involving endless trailing around print-shops in London, as well as endless phone-calls and e-mails. We were told we wouldn’t be able to get laser prints (the cheapest kind) that reproduced the artwork well enough, whereas with the right kind of paper and machine, we did actually end up with laser prints that exceeded our expectations. Inkjet printing is better quality, but expensive in large quantities. Lithographic printing can work out as very good value, but only if you’re printing very large quantities: start-up costs are high, but producing large volumes of prints becomes cheaper and cheaper the more you print. With our handmade aspect we couldn’t really consider printing thousands of copies, so we persevered until we found a laser printing service that was good enough (and prepared to tackle a slightly unusual project.) There were a few things at this stage that nearly made me compromise on what I really wanted. For example, getting the printer to sort out paper samples for us was taking so long, I was tempted to give up and let them use the very dull white paper they had to hand. In the end, we stuck to our guns and accepted the delays in order to get the creamy paper we’d envisaged.

For the outside cover we had some luck when Masha came across some gorgeous heavy textured drawing paper on sale very cheap at her local art shop. We decided that for the first edition of 200 copies I would print the covers myself on my inkjet printer, since it printed well on the paper we’d found and we wanted to avoid another extended hunt for a print service we were happy with.

We also decided on fun extra details of the design such as a layer of tracing paper at the start and end of the story, a wrap-around band for the outside of the book and a free bookmark that would match the book’s cover.

The next stage involves tackling the business side of the publishing trade — not easy for me! I’ll report back in a month or two to let you know how we cope with promotion, marketing and distribution.

You can order a copy of ‘Five’ over at the ‘Five’ website.

About Katriona Chapman

I’m a London-based illustrator who has been working in children’s illustration for several years. I work almost exclusively in pencil, coloured pencil and watercolour. My illustrations are often themed around the natural world, especially animals, and tend to also have a lot to do with imagination and adventure.

You can see more of Kat’s gorgeous work on her website and blog.

Find out more about the ‘Five’ project on the ‘Five’ website.