We’ll be dedicating 2016 to providing a more detailed look at the process of producing our Grub Tales. To start, here’s a post from December 2014 when we were putting together our first ebook:

Originally posted on Art by Claire NgM (formally known as The Creative Corner)

We have completed the initial phase of preparing our children’s picture eBook series for publishing. It’s been a long roller-coaster over the last 18 months, with many pitfalls and time-wasting doing many things back to front! A lot of the time has been spent staring at the wall as I’ve struggled through the ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s…

I’ll share our progress with you in a series of short posts and hope that it may be useful to other aspiring children’s eBook creators out there.

This post addresses our first step on the path to e-publishing.

Platform Research

Initially, I thought I had done enough research on e-publishing. It soon became very clear that I hadn’t.

It’s very important to consider carefully where you intend publishing your books and to sift through the terms and conditions of your chosen platform(s) with a fine tooth comb. Depending on what you are prepared to risk (i.e. Have you developed a unique character, design and name that you should protect?) and your end goal with the book (i.e. Is it a one-off story or part of a series that you will develop in the future etc?), ensure that you are comfortable with the policies relating to your rights.

Depending on what you have developed and how far you want to go with it, you may need to consider the importance of copyright and trademark research.

In addition, if you are planning on making some money from this venture, you will want to be clear on what percentage of the royalties you will actually be getting. It can be a very grey area. Although we chose Amazon Kindle as our publishing platform, their royalty policies are rather convoluted. Platforms such as Lulu I found to be more straightforward.

Copyright

We started by registering for copyright with http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/ and found their service to be fast, user-friendly and affordable. Many questions arose along the way as to whether or not it’s really necessary to register for copyright.

Although, theoretically, any work is automatically protected by copyright under international law, it’s difficult to provide evidence of copyright ownership. Registering with a copyright service helps to make it official, and we wanted to ensure that we didn’t cause potential future problems for ourselves by not having proof.

Trademarks

After registering for copyright, we proceeded with setting up the manuscript for e-publishing. We didn’t consider the character itself and the possibility that we hadn’t protected the design and names sufficiently. Copyright only protects the stories and related illustrations themselves.

After months of work on the electronic manuscript and copious amounts of testing (which I will address in a later post), we decided to publish on Amazon Kindle. However, after reading through their publishing terms & conditions in greater detail, we were exhausted, confused and apprehensive about going any further. Our biggest mistake, which seems obvious now, was not to have read their terms & conditions thoroughly whilst we were doing our platform research. Browsing through them isn’t sufficient.

This prompted us to think about protecting our characters better and trademarking them. We pored over the information on the UK’s intellectual property website https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/intellectual-property-office and have now started the process officially. We have chosen to do it ourselves and not through a trademark service. The latter is helpful and they provide years of knowledge and experience in the field but they are very expensive. Going through the process ourselves is time-consuming and frustrating at times, when we’re expected to sift through 4,000 terms and pick those related to our trademark. However, with some patience and dedication it’s entirely possible.

We have just submitted the trademark for approval and fingers crossed it will be accepted! More on that later and on the process of creating an electronic picture book for publishing 🙂

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Copyright © 2014 Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.