This author is a 60-something financial advisor who decided to write the kind of recipe book he would have appreciated when he was a student with no cullinary skills in a downtown flat in a NZ university city. Baldy Bob's Bumburners is a 50 page self-published book with 40 recipes - beef, chicken, seafood and vegetarian - all using chilli and wrapped up in the sort of humour designed to appeal to male students.
Three cheers for enthusiasm but it can lead you astray
The front cover of the recipe book
First time authors who are having fun with their book can make life difficult for the designers who have to pull their creativity together into a book.
This author did what creative people will do when they're uncertain how to proceed. He went online and looked for a designer who could create his Baldy Bob character for him. He found someone in SE Asia who followed his instructions and he received everything he thought he needed. He then made an approach to BriarsBooks to pull it all together and to create a kindle print-on-demand book as well.
The trouble was that everything the overseas designer had done had to be pulled apart and reassembled. The designer's files were in an incompatible format. The text - instead of being provided separately - was locked into images that were too large, so that reducing the size of the images made the text too small to read.
The cover had to be redone because the title was far too small and crammed and the author's name too close to the trim line.
100 books for self-distribution and a spot on the CopyPress online book store for self-publishers.
Creating a Logo
We extracted Baldy Bob from his front cover and made it the author's logo - which he placed on a t-shirt.
The author took the extra cost in his stride and learned along the way. A-pass for initiative and enthusiasm but the designer and BriarsBooks should have been co-ordinating from the outset. The author - as a newbie - could not have been expected to know that.
Any resemblance between the author and Baldy Bob is entirely incidental.