Originally Posted by RedShoe

RRRED,

I worked on a book called "Heverly" I shot 17 of the 22 images for the book. It was a children's book written by an ex-ex-boss when I was still in FX. I was pretty much with him since the beginning.


People are telling you to write the book first, blah blah blah... bullshit.

What my boss did was shot the cover picture (it's an elf riding on the back of a dragon fly) The dragonfly was like 18" long, but you're supposed to think it's a regular dragonfly... whatever, you get the idea.

Ok, so he shot the cover image, and wrote a few chapters of the story. He opened it with a little bit of a back story that was intended for the publisher to get an understanding of the story, then he kicks in with the 'sample chapters' the whole thing was like 4 or 5 pages, and he had that bound with a cheap plastic spiral binding from kinkos of all places.

It didn't matter, he knew that once they saw the imagery and the writing they'd either buy it or not. They knew they cover and the binding and all the half-assed shit was just to give the publisher an idea of what it was going to look like. It was just a mock-up.

So he sent it out to a few publishers, and sure enough one picked it up and bought the rights to distribute.

Since he wasn't sure if anyone would buy he didn't invest any $$$ into creating the other scenes. Once it was purchased, we built all these bad ass sets, and I was able to shoot some really cool imagery for it. He and I both pulled all nighters working on photoshop to really make it a cool little book.

His main problems.
1) he wasn't willing to go out an promote it.
2) he didn't know his target audience. The subject matter is geared towards a young adult, but the imagery is more for younger kids. And even though there are 22 images in the book, it's pretty text heavy for little kids. So he kinda missed the target audience.

The publishers set him up with a co-writter to help target the audience, he refused their offer. Also, the editors were able to coach him along in the writting.

So before you go off and write a whole fucking book, send out the storyline with some sample chapters of your writing to as many publishers as you can. No one is going to read the whole book anyway. They just want to see if the book is saleable, and if it is, they'll buy it.

Think of it as promoting a site that's not 100% ready. You put a girl out there to see if anyone bites. If they do, you move forward with a full launch. If not, you find another girl and move on.