On Track to Publish in Fall 2025

Support our Kickstarter campaign to fund hybrid publishing costs.

It’s really happening. It’s becoming more reality than dream. We are comfortably on track to publish our children’s book, My South American Classroom, before Christmas 2025.

I can say that with confidence because most of the time-consuming work, the hand-painted illustrations, are complete.

So what’s left?

Timeline

May / June: Finish the remaining two illustrations. Digitize and touch up the artwork and finalize the layout. Run test prints at a local print shop.

Everything needed to illustrate a picture book. Easel. Paint supplies. Caffeine.

July: Kick back, put our hands behind our heads, relax, and hopefully travel.

Just in case you needed to see us relaxing.

August / September: Work closely with our publisher to finalize the layout to the printshop’s specifications, make final edits, put all that fine print that nobody reads on the copyright page. Submit to IngramSpark (a print-on-demand service) for the approval process, which can take a month or so.

Mid-October to Early November-ish: The book will be available for purchase.

Not the finished product. Just a mockup.

What I’m Excited About

Liuan and I met with Betsy King-McDonald of Midwinter Press back in mid-March. We set a tentative end-of-August deadline for the illustrations to meet our goal to publish before Christmas. I had ten-ish left to do. To date, I had finished 22 pages in 15 months. To be on schedule I would need to finish an illustration every two weeks. Brisk but doable, I thought.

What I didn’t count on was that burst of motivation and momentum that sets in when you can see the project coming together. I started dedicating every spare moment to the effort. I finished 8 pages in 6 weeks. And not by cutting corners. The quality exceeds what I thought I was capable of when I started.

I’m excited to see how the illustrations look on the page spreads, and looking forward to playing around with design elements like educational side bars.

What I’m Nervous About

What will it look like in print? Will the colors come out right? Will it be pixelated? Will the canvas texture be a distraction? (Why did I choose textured canvas paper, anyway?!?)

We’ll find out in about a month when our digital work becomes ink on paper for the first time ever. Until then, I’ll be holding my breath.

How You Can Pledge Support

We just launched our Kickstarter campaign.

With a traditional publisher, you get paid an advance in exchange for the publisher’s ownership of your work. With hybrid publishing, you own the work and retain full creative control. In return, you pay out of pocket for the professional input and collaboration. Going it alone was an option we considered, but we thought it was worth it to ensure a quality final product after all the love we put into it.

If you would like help offset some of the publishing cost, you can do so on our Kickstarter. There are rewards to choose from, including signed copies of our forthcoming book (essentially a preorder). Or you can just read more about the project’s backstory and take a sneak peek at some of the page spreads.

Whether or not you can make a pledge, sharing about the book in your networks would be a huge help. Thank you all for your interest and support in our travels and artistic projects. We truly appreciate you all.

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