The Renfrow Story

In my last post I mentioned our new process for bringing Alice and, therefore, Edith into the illustration process. We are barely a week in and I’m so excited about how things are coming together. The picture above is one of the first ones we talked about – bloomers for practice pants, and if you look close a black stripe on her socks! The dress and shoes on the right page are just like what she said she usually wore.

Alice provides clear and focused input that helps Erica move forward with confidence. It is a wonderful thing and I think it’s going to make things easier going forward.

We’re now over 60% done with the illustrations (not counting the ones that will need some reworking). This means it’s time for me to get serious about finalizing the details for printing. I intend to have several pages at the end of the book to share some notes about the process and photographs of Edith’s life (and hopefully a note from Erica and from Alice and Edith too). In the end it’s going to be either 56 or 60 pages (it has to be divisible by 4 for the print process). After a lot of running of figures and looking at the print options, I’ve decided to go with a high quality paperback binding. This will allow us to keep the price at $14.99 and still makes all the numbers work.

Next on my list of things to do is register for an ISBN number for the book. As a librarian I’ve looked at ISBN numbers for the last 30 years, but I’ve never had the honor or being on this side of them. It’s really quite exciting!

One thing I learned today is that I need to come up with a publisher name, because I need to list that when I apply for the ISBN. As a self-published book, it is strongly encouraged that you create a fictitious name (DBA – or Doing Business As) to register as the publisher. I want to honor the Grinnell focus of the book. And I happen to be a huge fan of the unofficial Grinnell College mascot, Scarlet the Squirrel. I will confess I have a significant collection of squirrel related items! So I am thinking of registering as Scarlet Squirrel Publishing.