This project took me thirty years to finish because I had very specific ideas on what I wanted. I wanted it to rhyme, I wanted to have African American characters, and I wanted it to be an ABC book.
This book was born from a simple thought: What if we could walk through the life and love of Jesus in a way that’s as simple as the alphabet, yet as profound as the cross? I wanted to create something that children could understand, adults could reflect on, and families could share together.
As a photographer, I see stories in every face, every street corner, every small moment.The Gospel isn’t just ancient history it’s alive today. My prayer is that this simple book will help you see that the message of Jesus still speaks in our world, in our communities and in our daily lives.
My first book Humanity Sans Human was a picture book showcasing some of my black and white street photography. There are so many forms of street photography. The photos in this book are a form of street photography as I see it. Humanity Sans Human makes the suggestion that people were around but there are no people in the frame.
I did this book as a kind of practice to get a feel for the self publishing process. I did not think too much about the formatting or the picture categories I really just wanted to go through the self publishing process and this project was something I could put together really quickly to go through the self publishing process.
I didn’t do much promoting of this book mostly just to family and a few friends. It allowed me to go through the self publishing process as well as check off an item on my long bucket list.
The reason why I wanted to learn about self publishing a book was to eventually publish my life long project of the Gospel Story from A to Z. I thought if I learned the process and it was an easy process it would motivate me to finally finish the Gospel Story, and guess what it worked. Read my next post to find out all about it.
Things I learned about self publishing
If you have everything completed it is a fast easy process because you do not need the publishing company to do things like edit or pick images. Basically, they assign the ISBN#, the library of congress # and publish the book. You get two chances to make any changes to the writings and check for errors, misspellings, etc. any changes made after these two changes will cost extra. Since my test book was mainly pictures with some short captures it was easy.
The self publishing company makes a bit of money off of just publishing but where they make the most money is once the book is published. They try and sell you a marketing package, which you do not need but they play on your vanity. Some of these marketing packages are huge sums of money and they are good at their sales job. They play on your vanity saying things like “This is the best book I have ever read, we can probably turn this into a movie.” If you are not careful you will end up paying a whole lot of a marketing package you do not need.
Because I knew I was just doing this book as a test none of their pitches worked on me because this was not the book I wanted to market but this gave me valuable information for the book I did want to sell.
This is a site where I express my opinions and views on written materials such as blogs, articles, books to include my two books, Humanity Sans Human and The Gospel Story from A to Z.
DEEHIBBS Speaks 