Homeschool Writing Course for 7-Year Old Leads to Published Book

By Sun Kyu Bae | Published May 14, 2010 | Articles | print printer friendly version

It's easier than you think to have your child's book resting on her own bookshelf!

Ryan's Book Gets Published

I noticed that there was an online self-publisher called createspace.com that will publish your book. Since createspace.com is owned by Amazon.com, there was an arrangement that any book published by createspace could be sold on Amazon.

Now let's pause for a moment. Because I bet at this point some of you are asking yourselves, "I don't know a thing about publishing a book, how do you expect me to do that by myself?"

My response - because I did it myself without any special knowledge of publishing either. Createspace gives you step-by-step directions on how to fit your child's book to their publication specifications.

The only thing I would strongly recommend that createspace is not clear on is to use OpenOffice, a free writing program that works very similar to Microsoft Word. For those who rather use Word first, no problem. After the story is written in Word (which is what I did for Ryan's story), you can download OpenOffice and just copy and paste your story from Word into an OpenOffice document. The reason why I recommend OpenOffice is because createspace requires that you convert your document file into PDF and I noticed, after many attempts, that Microsoft Word is just horrible at converting exactly what you wrote into PDF format (there are many extraneous items in PDF that are added to the file when you convert from Word - many of these extraneous items are not visible to the eye and are instead, incomprehensible technical-sounding gobbly gook (at least to me) that make your PDF unacceptable to createspace). Using OpenOffice's "Export as PDF" function (in the File menu) allows a clean and exact replication of your child's work into PDF acceptable to createspace's requirements.

For our illustrations, we got my niece to create our book cover (although createspace allows you to select from their own preformatted covers) as well as one illustration per chapter. We did give her credit in the book for her awesome job.

Anyway, getting the proof copy (the copy of the book before we approve it to be sold by Amazon) from the mail was such a blast! Ryan's favorite author is R.L. Stine (as evidenced by the fact that Ryan chose to display his author name as "R. M. Bae") so getting a hard copy of Ryan's own book really gave him some deep inspiration that, he too, could write books if he chose to do so.

After reviewing the proof copy, we approved it through createspace for publishing and by end of February, copies of Ryan's book were officially available on Amazon.com.

So from beginning to end, the process of getting Ryan to write his story to getting it published and sold took about 4 months. And yes, in every step of the publication process, from editing for grammar mistakes to approving the book cover art, Ryan had a say in the matter, and I might add, some great insight into how authors write books and get published.

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