If you live in a house with at least one bookshelf, some of the books on that shelf are most likely written by famous authors. Although you may not know what those authors look like, you recognise their names. Some authors are a step higher on the fame ladder, with recognisable faces. And some are so successful that their wealth rivals that of the Royal Family!

As an author several rungs down the ladder, I have only been recognised by name once, when a checkout worker noticed the name on my credit card matched the name of the author of her brother’s favourite book. Even though they are called royalties, the payments I have received for my book sales fall way below what the lowliest member of the aristocracy would pay for a pair of shoes. So like many authors and creative professionals in other fields, I also have a day job. I’ve mentioned this before, so today let’s chat about the weirdest author day job I’ve stumbled across yet: Guinness World Record Holder.

Technically, being a Guinness World Record Holder isn’t a job, as it’s not necessarily a paid gig. It could be described as a hobby, a passion, or a seriously misguided use of time. However, I am proud to say that a writer friend of mine, Nick Manning, trained very hard for over six months and is now the proud holder of not one but two world records!

I met Nick way back last decade when we and fellow writer friend and all-round good guy Lee McGowan were selected to write some locative fiction stories for Story City. Locative fiction is a story you read on a mobile device in the place where it happens. I had an excellent day walking around with Nick, Lee and Emily Craven – the brains behind the operation – checking out the three locations our stories would be set in. At that time I had no idea Nick would become a multiple world record holder.

So what are the world records that Nick broke?

Fastest time to put on 10 pairs of undies

Putting on the most pairs of undies in 30 seconds

It’s something we all do every day, just not as fast or as often as Nick.

Needless to say, the time Nick saves getting dressed in the morning is put towards his latest writing project.

It’s been several years in the making, but Aisling and Amelia is due for release soon! (Please note: in the publishing world “soon” can mean several months…)

Aisling loves chocolate, ladybirds, and hopscotch, but her favourite thing of all is ballet. When Miss Karissa invites Aisling to perform a duet with Amelia, Aisling is unsure. Can two very different girls become friends?

The idea for this story was suggested by my daughter’s ballet teacher when my daughter was a tiny and forgetful dance student who would often leave a shoe behind at class. When I emailed the ballet teacher after my daughter came home with only one shoe for the third week in a row, the ballet teacher replied; “Is this the topic of your next book? I think so!”

The idea evolved (as ideas do) and rather than being a story about a forgetful ballerina or the adventures of a cunning shoe that escapes at the end of every dance class, the story came to include a dancer who was born without a foot.

My daughter’s teacher was kind enough to take the time to explain ballet terms to me and to choreograph some dance moves for an able-bodied girl and a girl with a limb difference, so I have obviously named the character of the dance teacher after her. Thank you Miss Karissa!

Big thanks also to the very talented and obliging Chloe Finnis for her beautiful watercolour illustrations, and to the Hawkeye team for giving me such agency with the book. Can’t wait to get a copy!

If you’d like a copy of your own, you can pre-order one now from Hawkeye Books.

We have lift off!

Last time I wrote I was stuck on the printing and distributing part of the self-publishing process. I’ve got the printing part done, but I’m still working on the distribution part. So what I have learned so far…

Printing is expensive, especially in small quantities. Despite not having cut-throat pricing, some printing companies are quite competitive in other aspects of their business. My advice is to shop around and to go with what works best for you (sage advice that should be applied to every aspect of life!).

I’ve learned all sorts of print jargon, such as ‘bleed’ (making sure your pictures, including your cover, are actually bigger than the page size so if the alignment isn’t quite right there won’t be a small white line around the edge), ‘stock’ is another word for paper (no surprise to my scrapbooking friends) and paper is quantified by gsm (grams per square metre).

I’ve learned how to format a book in Microsoft Word. This took me a long time, but when one company offered to charge me $3 per page for the privilege of doing it (which adds up quite quickly for a 300+ page book!) I decided it would be a better investment of my time and money to learn how to do it myself.

I’ve learned that B-format is not a standard measure of the size of a book and you need to specify the height and width in millimetres.

The saddest thing I’ve learned is that if you want a review in Books + Publishing, the industry magazine, you have to send in a copy of your book 3 months in advance of publication date. Missed that boat…

As far as distribution goes, rather than marketing to bookshops, I’ve been focusing on getting my books into libraries. With over 1500 public library branches in Australia and over 7000 primary school libraries (which is great news if you’re a children’s author), there’s a good chance your first print run will more than sell out to this customer base alone!

Regarding bookshops, I’ve only contacted a couple of the big chains, but neither of them have deigned to call me back. I’ll pursue this at a later date. In the meantime, the Brisbane children’s specialist bookshop, Where the Wild Things Are, was kind enough to host my book launch yesterday. I read a few passages from my book, and the audience laughed at the appropriate bits (phew!), then I gave them a couple of exercises to do, so they could experience what it’s like to be a trainee PEP Squad agent.

If this sounds like fun, then come along again on September 29 as I’ll be doing a few more secret code activities at a day camp, and at selected Brisbane City Council libraries during the summer holidays.

PEP Squad, a book about a secret boarding school for teenage spies, hit the shelves in 2014. As far as I knew, things were going okay. The publisher wrote to tell me the book was included in the 2014 edition of New Writing from Ireland, the annual rights catalogue published by Ireland Literature Exchange. All good. So a few months later I offered the publisher the manuscript for the second book in the trilogy. A few months further along, after taking into account sales figures and the fact that the Irish Arts Council wouldn’t be funding the company’s children’s books in the coming year, the publisher declined my offer.

So, for two years I concentrated on writing other stuff, even though I had book 2 ready to go, and friends who had read the first book were asking about the second. Then I decided to do something I never thought I would: self-publish PEP Squad Freshman Year as an eBook.

In order to do this, I needed a cover, and I have to say that the people at Mercier Press, PEP Squad’s original publisher, were super helpful. They sent me the original files of the cover so that I could then send them on to my graphic designer to modify. And voila, PEP Squad Freshman Year was available on Kindle.

When I told my reading community about it, some immediately downloaded the Kindle edition, but others asked for a print book. After thinking about it for a day, I realised I wanted a print edition too, so I started looking into how to go about this. Though I’m still investigating printing options, I have found out that before a book goes to print there are a lot of steps a (self)publisher must take. In addition to structural edits (does the story make sense?) and copy edits (is all the grammar and spelling correct?) there is formatting, which includes the title page, publishing page and formatting the text itself. And, even though we shouldn’t judge books by them, the cover! Once all this is completed you need to get a separate ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for each format of the book (print, Kindle, etc). A print edition also needs a bar code which makes it easy for bookshops to scan the book at the checkout. Once the book is printed you must lodge a copy with the National Library of Australia (having ordered a CiP number in advance of this), and depending on what state you live in, you may also need to lodge a copy at your State and/or Parliamentary Library.

The most exciting part for me (heck, it’s ALL exciting!) was creating a logo for my publishing company. When applying for the ISBN you need to include the name of the publisher. If you look at most companies – not just publishing companies – they have logos. These often appear on the spine of a book and on the title page, so of course I wanted a cool logo. Being more of a words person than a picture person, I was going to outsource my logo creation, but then I had a cool idea. The company is called Omitch Press, so I wanted to make a logo out of a stylised “O” and “M”. I thought the sun setting behind mountains would be cool, using the letter “O” as the sun, and the “M” as the mountains. Then I added some sunbeams. Then, when my son pointed out that the white space under the logo looked like an open book, I knew the logo was perfect.

Once the book is printed, you need to decide how you are going to sell it and how much you are going to sell it for. Options include online vendors (including your own website!), bricks and mortar bookshops and markets. You also need to decide the best way to get your book to retailers and customers. This is called distribution. Some printing companies will also distribute your books for you. It is the print and distribution part of the process, the part I cannot do myself, that I am stuck on at the moment.

Once I have that figured out, the print edition will be on its way. Stay tuned…