September is here, and a new book!

Well, here we are, it's September, fall is (almost) in the air. The days are getting noticeably shorter. I commented just today that it was 8:30 and almost dark, just a few weeks ago it was still light at 9:30! I'm not complaining though, I love getting into fall weather, the nights getting crisp, the days cooling off. Heck, we are even having a sort of second monsoon, we have been having rainy afternoons for a few days and it's supposed to continue that until Saturday or Sunday.

It won't be long and it will be time to clear off (dust off) the wood stove, which is actually a pellet stove now. PB really perfected the pellet stove design over this last winter and it pretty much runs all by itself, it even has a thermostat so that it comes on and goes off, pretty handy!

Last week, a friend of mine asked me to help her with an adult coloring book (a coloring book for grown ups!), it was mostly formatting, she already had the images. In the process of helping her, I got the coloring book bug again. A few years ago I had wanted to create my own coloring books but just didn't get very far with it. In working with my friend's coloring book, I decided that maybe it was time for me to dust off my skills and get to work. 

The last 3 days I have been working on a West Texas coloring book, one that features the landscapes and scenes from the Fort Davis, Davis Mountains, far west Texas area. I went through a bunch of the photos I had snapped over the years while driving around to service the various dollar stores, I had forgotten about how many of these pictures I had! 

I used them as reference material and worked up 30 images that I was happy with. They are pretty detailed, I have seen a ton of those really simple cutesy coloring books that are super popular, I didn't want to hop into that genera, that market seems pretty saturated. I also didn't want to do something that everyone else was doing, so I settled on the west Texas theme.

I managed to get the images completed, the cover (front and back) done, and the inside talkie pages. I then went through the process of uploading them to Amazon KDP, that can be a challenge, and it was. It's not always intuitive trying to figure out why it's not working right. But eventually I got it fixed and uploaded. It said it could take up to 72 hours to be published, the part where they review it actually went pretty quickly, surprisingly!

Now I am just waiting on it to be published, it says it's publishing, but it's not there yet. One thing I noticed once I uploaded it and had it going, the thumbnail wasn't as poppy as I thought it should be. Something that may look good at full size doesn't always translate into "looks good" at thumbnail size.

I fixed the cover to make the thumbnail look better but it will not allow me to make any changes until the book is published. Hopefully sometimes soon (Thursday) I expect it to go live then I can pop into the backroom and update the cover, which should then go live quickly.

I am only offering a physical book, as cool as digital books are, they just don't translate well into coloring books. I considered offering a digital copy for printing purposes, but the risk of people just sharing the file is too great. I may offer single pages either as giveaways or selling cheap, probably would do both if I went there. What do you think? Would you be interested in single pages?

So now it's just a waiting game, hopefully it goes fast (it seems to be hopping along quickly). 

My Amazon author page is here if you would like to check out what I have published so far and see the coloring book once it goes live. Be sure to follow me on Amazon so that you can be alerted when I publish new books.

https://amzn.to/46EXWVO

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Wretha,

Thanks for visiting!