Chris Stead's Blog

Understanding bleeds in printing and how they affect your images is vital! If you’re creating your own art, a self-publishing indie, or just working on your cover, it’s important you define the bleed area accurately before you begin your image.

This guide takes you through a full explanation with accompanying images.

I hope this helps.

Happy new year creative people.

We are hoping to double down on our free guides this year: I hope this story provides some useful advice that helps increase your sales!

Enjoy

Hi Guys! I'm excited to share the first image and some information about my next children's book. I hope you like it!

You can see it here.

Why IngramSpark’s New Trim Size is Great News for Children’s Book Makers

There was a small announcement today from print-on-demand service IngramSpark that offers a great new opportunity for self-published authors. This article offers a detailed breakdown of that announcement and shows how it can impact the way you think about your book’s design. If you are making or are about to make a book, it’s well worth staying informed.

I hope it helps

... what happens next?

My little self-published children’s book just received some love from Apple. Follow the Breadcrumbs - which is the second book in The Wild Imagination of Willy Nilly series after The Little Green Boat - can currently be spotted in the “New This Week” section of the main iBooks page, and in the top carousel in the “kids” section. It’s an exciting start to the promotional campaign for the new book.

But it is just the start. I’ve yet to have any insight into how the increased visibility on the store will convert to sales, but it certainly will not be enough on its own to help propel the book into regular visibility on the store’s popularity charts. Or to start organically receiving reviews from bloggers and websites that service parents across the globe. So what next?

I want to build on any momentum that this storefront feature provides, so will be hitting the emails hard this week to reach out to contacts - existing and new - and to try and generate some coverage. I’ll leverage my history as a journalist and editor, offering to contribute blog pieces that can entertain while empowering other parents to take that next step and turn the stories they tell their children – as I have done – into something for family, friends and the world to enjoy.

Just over two years ago I quit a rather high-profile role as an editor of one of the biggest magazines in the world to go independent and to begin being creative again. To be completely free of any existing template or expectation, and to build on my foundation of skills by learning new tricks and then applying them in the unexplored terrain of burgeoning mediums like digital media.

One of the challenges I put to myself was finding a cost effective way of turning the tales I told my kids into actual books that people could buy and share with their children. Which meant doing as much of the process as possible myself. I’ve accomplished that, but now I need to face the other, more challenging half of the battle – awareness. And that requires, in some form or another, the help and faith of others.

Wish me luck – and if you feel like I might be able to add value to your audience through a blog, or that the books may entertain them, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Follow the Breadcrumbs