My Journey…Self-Publishing

Once my manuscript of “The Triplet Ballerinas” was finished, I needed to decide how to publish it: traditional publishing or self-publishing. In traditional publishing, you have very little control over your manuscript once it is accepted by a publisher. I decided on self-publishing so I could control the outcome that was most important to me: getting my book in the hands of readers as soon as I could.

With self-publishing, I could also control how my characters were illustrated. I envisioned my characters as human and that is how I wanted them portrayed. With traditional publishing, the main characters in “The Triplet Ballerinas” might have ended up being hedgehog ballerinas or mice ballerinas (oh wait, that one has already been done!). This is because the illustrations of the characters in those children’s picture books are usually left up to the illustrator the publisher chooses. The author has little or no control of how the characters they created are portrayed.

I had to make many more decisions as a self-publisher though. The first and most important one was to find an illustrator for “The Triplet Ballerinas”… Beverly

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