Getting Started

By the author, Jim Doti


Last year, Lisa Mertins and I published our children’s book,
A Christmas Adventure in Little Italy
.  She illustrated it, while I wrote the story. That description of our division of labor is too extreme.  Actually, the story and illustrations are very carefully interwoven.  So it would be more accurate to say we collaborated on the book.

A Christmas Adventure in Little Italy
turned out to be much more successful than we ever thought possible.  It not only made it on Amazon’s top-100 children’s best sellers list; but the first edition of 3000 sold out, and it’s now in its second printing.

By the way, the book is available at bookstores on-line and near you, and you can even get a read-to-me version for your iPad.

Our collaboration was so successful that Lisa and I decided to do another children’s book together.  It was Lisa who came up with the bright idea, “Let’s do a blog of our experience this time, so that others who dream of doing a children’s book can see first hand what’s involved in producing a finished book.”

Quite frankly, I don’t know too much about blogs, but I understand everybody’s doing them.  So here goes.  Please expect about one contribution each week from each of us.  While we’ve already started the project, we’ll be doing this in close-to-real time, so you can get an idea not only of the steps required in the project but the amount of time involved—especially for two people who have other responsibilities, like full-time jobs and full-time families (including dogs, cats and other critters).