Now that Autumn is well and truly here and that little feelings of Christmas are slowly starting to form, we’ve been putting our time into creating our first Christmas story. Above are a few sneaky previews of some of the images – click to have a closer look. And below is a little 10-second video that we put together – our first of many!
Copyright © 2016 Brenda Martin & Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
I have a completely irrational fear of spiders but now when I look at them I start to see Sophie or Sammie Spider instead. I still won’t go near them though 🙂 It gives me great pleasure looking at a real insect and turning it into a smiley little creature for children to make friends with.
I have often thought of how I might unwillingly pass on my fear of spiders to my children, how children are so impressionable and react to how we behave around them. With that in mind, I aim to create friends for our little readers so that they might learn with them, have fun with them and, as they get older and grow out of the Grub Tales, take their love and respect for garden insects and creatures with them.
I focus on supporting Brenda’s wonderful story-telling with expressive faces to help convey the surprise, dismay and laughter. As you may have noticed, I love enormous smiles…
Below you can see the progress when creating our latest Kiddies’ Corner addition – Claire Cricket. Her brand new profile will be available to view in the next couple of days!
Copyright © 2016 Brenda Martin & Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
We have now added The Flower Town Picture Board to our site, featuring our little Grub fans’ own interpretation of the colouring activities found in the back of our books.
We’re thrilled to see such a wonderful display of colour and creativity.
Click here to see our little collection – if you have any Grub Tales pictures to share, do send them through to us and we’ll add them to the picture board for you.
Noemi M. – 3 years old, UK
Copyright © 2016 Brenda Martin & Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
We’re so excited to share our happy news. We have 5 Grub Tales in Print and Ebook formats, now available on Amazon and CreateSpace! We’re thrilled at this massive milestone after more than three years of hard work. We’ve set up a links page here with details about where each book can be purchased.
We have lots planned for the next few months. We’ll be working on the next 5 tales and will also be taking part in some fairs in the London area. Details to follow.
In the meantime, we present to you our first 5 tales. Enjoy!
The Grubs Move In: Share the excitement as the Grub Twins explore Vegetable Row in Flower Town! Follow them under Sophie Spider’s web into a garden full of pretty flowers, and join Sammie Spider’s birthday party.
The Grubs Go Camping: Join the Grub Twins, Stevie Slug and Sally Snail on a camping adventure! After a cosy night’s sleep in their tents, something very odd happens in the early morning, with strange noises…
The Grubs In The Snow: It’s the first time the Grub Twins see snow! Join in the fun of getting ready to play in the snow, and making a snowgrub with Emma Earwig, Stevie Slug and the Spiders, Sophie and Sammie.
The Grubs At The Pond: The Grubs are off to the Pond! Join the Grub Twins and their friends Alice and Andy Ant, and Sophie and Sammie Spider for their exciting new adventure. Find out what happens to Doctor Wallace Woodlouse…
Winnie Worm’s Wonderful Idea: How are the Grub Twins and their friends going to cross the path to get to the carrot patch? They’re hungry, so Winnie Worm comes up with a clever plan…
Copyright © 2016 Brenda Martin & Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
We’re very excited to confirm that three of our Grub Tales will be available in paperback in the coming weeks!
We opted to use CreateSpace as our print-on-demand publishing platform. Their publishing process has been straightforward and helpful, and their support team very attentive.
After many months of proofreading and editing, the following Grub Tales will be available to purchase on Amazon and CreateSpace. Details to follow shortly!
Copyright © 2016 Brenda Martin & Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
Originally posted on Art by Claire NgM (formerly The Creative Corner) in January 2015:
In this next post on our experience with eBook publishing, I am going to talk about my first step using Amazon’s Kindle Kid’s Book Creator.
Overview
When I started creating the electronic manuscript for publishing on Kindle, it was before the days of the Kindle Kid’s Book Creator. Our book is full of colourful images to complement the story, and because of this, I wanted to ensure that the images were presented perfectly. Using Amazon’s standard KDP Publishing process, though fairly straightforward for text-only books, did not yield the best results for images. My research on the issue led me to the most common solution of tweaking the relevant html code to get to the desired image presentation; a daunting prospect for someone who has very little knowledge of html… After a few months of trying unsuccessfully to correct the image presentation, Amazon launched Kindle Kid’s Book Creator.
This new tool is so much more user-friendly and is built to produce picture books. It also has added features like fun pop-up boxes that allow children to tap text that will expand and pop out for them on their devices. In addition, it accommodates the traditional landscape layout that children’s picture books adopt, and fixes it so that devices default to landscape when opening the book.
Step 1 – Manuscript Creation
Manuscript creation doesn’t start in the Book Creator but in Word. Outlined below is the process that I followed. You may have already thought of some of these steps before starting your creation process, but I discovered and decided a lot as I was going along:
Initial layout
- Start in landscape format, adding story text and inserting images in relevant places.
- Go back to your text and delete passages that you will want to transform into pop-up boxes – pop-up text will be added in the Book Creator.
- Keep a record of the passages that you have omitted for later.
Formatting – text & images
The manuscript is uploaded to the Book Creator in PDF format. Therefore, very little editing of format and presentation can be done once it’s uploaded.
- The Book Creator currently only comes with Georgia font. There is the option to add additional fonts, or the code can be adjusted in CSS to accommodate other fonts. However, my experience with the latter was that it would default back to Georgia in my testing phase on my Android tablet, despite still showing up as my chosen font in the programme itself (I have not established whether this is related to the device I’m testing on or whether it’s a glitch in the programme but it’s something to bear in mind).
- I learnt (the hard way, after days of work!) that the Book Creator font sizes don’t line up with Word font sizes. If you’re planning on adding a mixture of Word text and Book Creator text, do a little experiment first by uploading a small section of text to play with in order to find a close enough match.
- Go back to the images and think about whether or not you want text to appear over them, in which case, add text to the image at this stage (there is functionality in the Book Creator that enables you to add a text box but I found that it always adds the box as a pop-up even though I haven’t selected it – this is something that will hopefully be fixed in the next update to the programme).
- Format your text presentation.
Saving your manuscript
Prior to uploading, the Book Creator presents you with the option either to upload your manuscript as one PDF document, or to upload it page by page.
Choose the latter option.
If you encounter a mistake that you missed on one page, or if you change your mind about anything at all, the latter option enables you to delete and rectify the affected page, without affecting the rest of your manuscript (another lesson I learnt the hard way!).
At this point, you’re ready to upload your manuscript and start reviewing and/or adding features in the Book Creator! More on that next time…
And on another note, our trademark application for our book characters has been accepted :).
Copyright © 2015 Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
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 🙂
Copyright © 2014 Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2015 Brenda Martin & Claire Ng-Martin. All rights reserved.
Danny Dragonfly has joined his friends in Kiddies’ Corner. Children can read his little biography, learn about dragonflies and print the black & white version of his picture to colour in at school or at home – click here.
Claire Cricket will be arriving next in the New Year. Watch this space… 🙂
Thank you to everybody who downloaded The Grubs Move In during our free-book week. The response has been amazing. We’ve had a lot of requests for a printed book. We’re working on this right now, so we’ll eventually have each story in e-book and print formats.
In the meantime, Danny Dragonfly will soon be joining his friends in Kiddies’ Corner. Claire Cricket is also hopping around, waiting for her turn, so watch this space!
The Grubs Move In is available to purchase on Amazon here – a fun little book to keep your children entertained during the Christmas holidays 🙂
The Grubs 