Beautifulbirdbooks's Weblog

I did it.

beautifulbirdbooks — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:23:48 +0000

Ahhh, well it was easier than I thought…. I have recently returned from Sydney where I did my school visits and it was acutally really fun! I have to admit that I was incredibly nervous to begin with but I was extremely well prepared and it all went really well. I think that the children liked hearing my talk, I tried to involve them as much as I could and they all responded well. Now I will offer to do a talk at my local library and my eldest daughters school. Gotta get myself out there….

More public speaking

beautifulbirdbooks — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:47:21 +0000

A lot of exciting things have happened recently! A school in Sydney has approached me to do an Author talk in August. I will also do a couple of story readings in Sydney and Tasmania which is just so great! All I can say is how glad I am that I did the public speaking course. I do feel slightly nervous about this, but I dont feel like I will pass out. I’m actually looking forward to it very much. Before I did the course, if someone had asked me to do a talk, I would have been sick to the stomach with fear.

Things also seem to be going very well for the book too. My distributor has sold out, and they need more books hooray! It is just so amazing that The Wombat Stole My Shoe is being well recieved. After a very stressful year of publishing the book, I have had the stress of considering that perhaps I had produced a flop and wasted my dear Grandmother’s money. Well so far so good, and most importantly, I have to keep it up because if I dont do my best, I will never recover the costs.

Love to anyone who reads this blog

Too Bold

beautifulbirdbooks — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:09:33 +0000

For some reason this is in BOLD and I cant seem to change it. I dont really want to have the whole post in bold because your eyes will start to hurt.

hmmm

beautifulbirdbooks — Fri, 09 May 2008 04:38:51 +0000

My books arrived in Melbourne today and about 50% of them are damaged. Unbelievable. As you can well imagine I am extremely upset about this. Anyway, I will find out the exact scale of the damage in the next couple of days when they finish counting them. There is absolutely nothing I can do either. How can I trust anyone in this country to send them down in one piece? I would love for someone to recommend a firm that can be trusted not to completely destroy parcels in their care. Thats a lot of damaged stock, 50%, and not much I can do with the books now that the corners are all bashed in. I suppose next time I will have to drive them down there myself.

Oh dear.

beautifulbirdbooks — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:44:43 +0000

Yesterday I sent 500 books to Melbourne to Dennis Jones & Associates who are my distributors by post and, I think that they will all be horribly damaged by the time that they get there. I really researched the best and most cost effective way to get them there and was told that Australia Post was the way to go. Anyway after visiting my local post office and speaking to the head guy (who incidentally was extremely helpful!) we decided that it would be best to package them in bubble wrapped packages of 60 books. These weigh about 14.5 kg each and were quite difficult to pack up. So, I was so happy when I finally had 9 packages of them ready to go, all wrapped up, took them to the post office, and the worker promptly threw the parcels on to the floor. Aaaaaargh!! “What are you doing mister?” Oh I felt like crying, I feel enormous stress and anxiety even now remembering. I just dont want to think about it anymore. He didn’t throw them on the flat side, he just threw them down. Oh well, I guess this is a lesson in detachment…. Aint nothing I can do about it now.

On a good note, I just got 2 cards from Sophie and Hannah Versteeg thanking me for the lovely story. They like it and think its really funny. Thats great and I’m glad. Oh and my website is nearly ready!

www.beautifulbirdbooks.com

Whats the trick?

beautifulbirdbooks — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:09:15 +0000

What do you need to do to get people to read your blog? How do you put up pictures? I am irritatingly inept and now that I dont have Karen here to show me how to do everything, I am lost ha ha. Are you there Karen?

I have a distributor! Yay!

beautifulbirdbooks — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:05:37 +0000

I sent my book to a distributor for review some time back and, to my great joy and surprise, they want to take The Wombat Stole My Shoe on! This was the first company I had approached so I was actually expecting them to say they were not interested. So anyway, there you have it, and I am very happy.

However, it is a double edged sword.

Once I have deducted the standard percentage for a distributor, plus GST, plus freight, and other costs that are bound to crop up, I am actually losing money on these books. But it doesnt matter! Right from the word go I said I was not doing this for money, it was for the love of it. A gift to my children. Not only that I just love reading, and books, and all things bookish, and book stores, and I LOVE well written and well illustrated children’s books and I love reading them to children. Kids books when they are good really make me smile and I know that this is true for most people. I dont know that mine is that great though (OH how I wish I had written it differently now, there are so many changes that I would like to make) but there are so many brilliant children’s authors out there and they are quite inspirational. My husband and I took the children to the library the other night to do some reading and I read some books that made me laugh out loud. You see, there is some really great stuff out there for kids (and adults too for that matter) and there is no reason why people cant just keep on churning out a whole lot more great books too. Maybe I’ll even give it another bash! If I do, I think I will go the traditional route to publication this time and see what happens…. Maybe I wont be published…

Anyway, back to losing money on the books. There is only one solution to this. I must sell all stock and do a reprint. Then once those have sold I can recover costs and be happy that I did what I set out to do. That is, write a cute book for my children and have it pay itself back. So, I guess that brings me back to the whole saga of how on earth am I going to promote it here? Its very competitive in Australia you see. Or at least thats the general idea I have been given after speaking with those in the industry. What should I do? Have all nifty schemes been exhausted? Whats original now days? I’ll have to think of something, I am thinkingthinkingthinking all of the time. Soon something will click.

Is anyone reading this?

Katrina

Back Again

beautifulbirdbooks — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:00:48 +0000

Its been a really long time since I wrote here in this blog but an awful lot has happened in my life. I launched my book, “The Wombat Stole My Shoe” and then 2 days later I left Singapore and moved back to Australia. The launch was great fun even though I was absolutely terrified and shook like jelly when I read my book. All the same it was a success and I sold some books, it was well recieved, and worth every minute of the blinding fear.

Public speaking is a bit of an issue for me. I am terrified of it! Its not just getting up and speaking in front of a group of people its the thought of doing it that freaks me out. If it isn’t planned, I have very little problem. Take me by surprise and ask me to say something at a gathering, and its just fine. If I know in advance, whether its weeks, days, or even minutes I just cannot bear it. My whole body shakes and my lips tremble and its just horrible! Does anyone else have this? I do know that speaking in public is up there at the top of the list of phobias, but why is it ok to impromptu public speak but having a prepared talk is enough to scare the life out of an otherwise confident person? I went to “Toastmasters” as a visitor the other week which was really very interesting and nice but I spent the whole meeting privately freaking out about somebody asking me to get up and say something. Toastmasters is fabulous by the way, not for everyone, but fabulous all the same. I am deciding whether to go back again and throw myself in the deep end. Or maybe not. So, all of this is not much good for me as an author trying to promote my book. I need to be able to read my book in libraries and schools in front of an audience but I am scared of kids too. Thats not true. I am not scared of kids ha ha. For those of you who know me, I bet you didn’t know I was a wuss when it came to speaking in public! The thing is, I know I am not alone…

Nearly there!

beautifulbirdbooks — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:40:17 +0000

Well its all happening folks! I am nearly there and what a journey it has been. I have just been to the printers today with the artist who illustrated my story to check the proofs for the scans on the artwork. For all of us who are not graphic designers, this is not a simple task. I absoulutely marvel at the process. All of the pictures are too blue. How is it that you can’t just copy it and there it is? In my ignorance, I actually thought that all you had to do was “photcopy” it and then you have a book of lovely colourful pictures all as you intended them to look. Well, we all had sore eyes after scrutinizing the proofs figuring out which sections needed less magenta, and more of other tones, and well… thank god I am surrounded by geniuses who for them, it is second nature what needs more and what needs less. So its back on thursday to check the colour corrections and then its all on to disk for the design and layout. I want my book to look warm and inviting so its up to me to choose a font that will portray the feeling I want to convey. The text has to be a particular size to make it easier for young readers to identify the words, and easy for a teacher or parent to read upside down. That is, when we put the book on our lap to read to the little ones and, read it looking down from the top. Then its back to the printers for another set of proofs to make sure that the text is placed well, and then another set of proofs to make sure that everything matches correctly. Then I get my “dummy” copy and then if I approve; we are away! This is in a nutshell. It has been a long and intensive project. Then there is the legal stuff….. All rights reserved etc etc. I have to write this myself and I hope that I get it right because it would be a major inconvenience if I print 1000 copies of the book only to discover that I haven’t covered what I need to legally. Anyway, if all goes well it looks like I will be launching my book on the 1st of December which incidentally is my birthday. So, we will be in the Forum on orchard rd so all of you who are in Singapore, you will know where that is. Hope to see you there. December 1, 12pm.

Cheers!

Am I allowed to tell people that? Hmmmm…….

Katrina

Gotta say sorry.

beautifulbirdbooks — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:29:03 +0000

You know I only ever get a chance to do this blog every so often and when I do, I have usually forgotten how to log in, and most importantly, how to respond to comments! Really, I want to do it, but I just dont know how. Thankyou to those who leave comments, I love to hear them and one day when I have more than 30 seconds I will finally figure out how to respond. I think that I can blame it on motherhood. Somebody said to me when my babies were very small “It never comes back you know….”. The “it” they were referring to was SHORT TERM MEMORY. Those babies sucked it out of me oh alas and alak; and indeed it never returned.

Hava good day.