100 Days of Childhood Memories: The Making of the Book
Last year, I wrote and drew 100 Days of Childhood Memories (and on Instagram). Since then, I’ve been working on getting the work published as a book. If I thought the original 100 days of drawing and writing was a lot of work, well, I had no idea how much more work publishing would be.
The work is unexpectedly hard. The drawing and writing phase of the project, the actual 100 days, was about sticking to a rhythm and learning how to pull stories out of my memory, out of my self. It was discipline and artistry. This publishing phase of the book requires figuring what to do next, learning new technical or artistic skills to do it, all while shepherding the work towards an artistic vision. I have to be project manager, technician, and artist at the same time.
This is my publishing journey thus far.
In September last year, I put together a book proposal and reached out to a handful of publishers in Singapore. I focused on publishers who had printed at least a couple of similar books in the Singapore history / memoir / illustration genres. One by one, they replied saying no. While they found the concept interesting, they felt that it simply wasn’t commercial enough. I understood. I have trouble describing and classifying it myself. It’s a bunch of childhood illustrations, but it’s not a children’s book. It’s about my memories, but it’s not quite a memoir. It’s about life in Singapore in a specific period in time, but it doesn’t fit in the history section. Well, I embarked on this project out of pure personal inspiration. It never crossed my mind whether it’d be marketable.
However, one publisher was immediately interested. I was so excited. I could be a published author! We discussed what the book would be like, what would be edited to broaden its appeal. He envisioned it as a lightweight read. A small simple paperback, almost like a comic, very cute, very readable. Remove a bunch of the Singapore-specific references, like the streets and neighborhood names, so it can appeal to a wider Asian audience. I got as far as having them send me a contract. I was going to sign.
Then I was seized by a feeling that this wasn’t the right choice for me. And I turned it down.
Choosing the self-publishing route
I realized I had a specific vision for this book. These are my memories. In fact, some of these are my family’s memories, and there is something to be said for wanting to honor that. Make it good, make it nice.
I decided I would self-publish.
I was looking forward to all the tools and skills I’d have to learn to get this book printed by myself. Lots of people self-publish these days, I told myself. There must be tons of services out there that make it easy. Here’s the thing: most people are self-publishing novels. If your book is mostly about text and you want to get it printed for the market, there are plenty of straightforward services available. At the other end of the spectrum, many people print photo books for their personal collections. If you want great pictures and you’re willing to pay $100 for one copy, there are also plenty of high quality, well-guided services for that.
But if what you want is to create an illustrated book that looks good - specifically, looks like the vision in your head - and can be printed at an affordable price, then you are wading into less charted territory. It is at least less packaged territory. I didn’t know all this back then. I just liked the vision in my head.
Finding a self-publishing service
The next step was to find a self-publishing service. I needed a service that would print books for me. There are many, but they all do slightly different things. Kindle Direct Publishing is the most obvious one to start with, but as far as I can tell, they are great for text-heavy books like novels and of course, ebooks. They’re not really set up to print an artistic picture book.
I eventually found my way to Blurb. They are better known for deluxe photo books, but I discovered that they have a trade book option. I could print a 6x9 or 8x10 book at a reasonable price. My original drawings were done in 5x8 sketchbooks, so it made sense to print the drawings at about the same size. Blurb also had free software I could download and use for layout. I watched a few Youtube videos of people show samples of the trade book work, which looked very promising. I was ready to try it out.
While I could have considered looking into cheaper options in Asia, I wasn’t prepared to make trips to Asia for this. I could also have considered a big batch offset print in the US, but I didn’t know where to start there. I also didn’t want to be locked into printing a certain minimum amount. So I went with the online publishing services.
I started with the scanning. I have an old, plain scanner at home, and was concerned about whether the quality of home scanning would be good enough. Since my needs were simple - just 300 or 600 dpi black and white - the regular old scanner turns out to be just fine. Scanning was surprisingly straightforward.
The thing about scanning this particular project though is that I had to sit there for a very long time over several sessions to finish scanning all 100. Doing a task 100 times takes a long time.
Then comes the photo editing. I drew on off-white paper, across 3 different types of sketchbooks, which all look like various shades of light gray when scanned. I used a blue ink pen early on and switched to a black pen later. Why all this variation? Because poor planning. I didn’t start this project thinking it’d be a book one day. But all I needed now was for the gray background to be actually white, and the ink lines to be actually black.
With some help, I figured out how to do this in Affinity Photo, the more affordable, equally awesome competitor of Photoshop. I basically had to adjust color curves. At first, we tried a template mask to try to automate it, but it didn’t work consistently. So I eyeballed each one and adjusted the curves until off-white looked white and near-black looked black. Again, because this is 100 days, multiply by 100.
A crash course in typography
Then came selecting fonts. I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but it’s true: the fonts I started with were Times New Roman and Arial. Here is evidence from an early test print:
While I know that there are people who devote their entire lives to understanding typography, and I even appreciate lovely typography, I thought my needs were simple: I just wanted the fonts to look clean and not draw attention. It turns out the way to achieve that is to actually put a lot of considered effort into it, not to use the default fonts on your computer. A dear designer friend was very enthusiastic and patient about teaching me - I think she was also appalled by my Times New Roman 12pt - so she gave me a pep talk, lent me a typography book, and sent me off to get myself a little crash course on fonts.
There were many details I absorbed but two stand out. First, I learned about grid. It was quite a revelation actually because it explained why my random placements looked, well, random. After that point, i started noticing grid everywhere. Second, a very minor point but I learned that large font sizes look very childish. On screen, 12pt looks fine. On paper, 12pt is huge and makes it look like a kid’s school workbook. 8-9pt is more reasonable for print. Such a minor thing, but I just didn’t know before!
Discovering tone, articulating vision
Most of all, I learned to pay close attention to tone. While I’ve had a vague notion of how I wanted my book to feel since the very beginning, this was the point at which my friend really pushed me to articulate it. It was time for that vision feeling in my head to be pinned down with concrete words.
This is what I came up with:
I want it to be nostalgic, contemplative, introspective. That’s what the experience of recording the memories was like. I want the book to feel like flipping through someone’s old curated family photo album or diary.
With that in mind, it became easier for me to choose fonts that speak to the work. I used Adobe TypeKit and shortlisted Trajan Sans Pro, Classico URW, Tisa Pro. Hypatia, and Vatican.
In my final selection, I chose Trajan Sans Pro and Classico URW. I wanted the headline font to feel clean but very slightly like calligraphic strokes. I wanted the paragraph font to echo the headline but be different, and also feel subtly understated to create that introspective tone.
We finally get to layout. Since I was going to test on Blurb, I downloaded their BookWright software. Once I got the hang of a few basic things, it became relatively easy to use. One of its big drawbacks though is that it doesn’t have good application of templates. Whenever I wanted to change fonts or move placement of image blocks, I had to go change each and every page. There was no way to update a template.
When I first started with layout, I thought I would just go along with each story and find a layout that works. Go with the flow and plop things down on the page. This meant that every page had a different layout. None of them were following a grid. I soon discovered that this doesn’t work, and nobody does layout this way. You need to choose a handful of templates that make sense for your story, and just repeat those over and over. Now I know.
My designer friend pushed me further. She asked me how I would group my memories. Are there some that go together? Are there some that you’d describe with the same emotion? Those could have a similar layout that emphasizes them appropriately. For instance, I found that I have a bunch of significant memories that I would label as “how love is remembered” or a bunch that were about family celebrations. Some drawings could be grouped by their visual simplicity, while others were similar in their complexity.
At the same time, I decided to edit the order of the drawings so that the book has editorial order instead of merely chronological drawing order (Day 1, 2, 3...). I wanted to place thematically similar memories side by side. Visually complementary drawings should go together. It all reminded me of my photography editing days in college, where I would spend hours poring over what flows well visually. That said, it was also important to me to show the improvement in drawing skills over the course of the 100 days. So I settled on broad chronological order in the macro but editorial order in the micro. Day 9 and Day 12 may be paired together side by side, but Day 9 would still come much earlier in the book than Day 90.
In the final design, I only have 4 page templates. They look very plain, but it took a tremendous amount of iteration to arrive at something this satisfyingly plain.
I fought the plainness for a long time. Even in a fairly late version, I still had the word blocks pushed off center toward the outer edges. I thought it was more “poetic”. In my head, I wanted to the text read like poetry. Or I wanted it to feel like you were browsing art in a gallery. Another designer friend suggested that I just center the text blocks, none of this offset nonsense. She was right. The balance felt much more natural. You stop noticing the layout and your focus goes to the content.
Once again, every single layout change? Times 100.
The final, centered version:
Test prints and switching printing services
Every time my test print books arrived, it felt like Christmas. I would beam and beam over my books. But I was worried about the cost. I wanted to sell them at about $25, and the Blurb version cost about $22 to print, excluding shipping. I looked into batch discounts and special offers, but nothing lowered the costs enough.
Then a friend asked, did you try Lulu? I knew about Lulu and had skimmed over it before, but it seemed like a much noisier site to navigate. But now that I was less green about publishing and knew what I wanted, I could just quickly drill down to see what it would take to replicate my book. I found out that Lulu could print my 6x9 trade book hardcover for well under $20. Ah ha! Now I just had to find out if its printing quality was comparable.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as uploading my file and hitting print. My old file was in BookWright format, which obviously Lulu doesn’t accept. So I had to re-create my layout from scratch, this time in Adobe InDesign. InDesign is the industry standard, and I could have used it even for Blurb, but I was trying to avoid its cost. BookWright is free; InDesign is $29.99 per month. It’s also a more complex tool to use. Now I didn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to try out Lulu, so I bought InDesign.
InDesign is more complex to use than BookWright, but InDesign is built for precisely what I was trying to do. It has the exact templating tools I needed. Change the master template and everything flows through. This is how it should be! The product-appreciating part of my brain lit up with joy. I watched lots of videos and learned how to achieve the effects I wanted.
Well, that was the abbreviated version. In practice, I fretted with much sound and fury about the learning curve, even though I actually have no problem learning new tools. I am merely very impatient with myself when learning new tools. Okay, D disputes how I’ve described this. He remembers a lot more frustration in this phase. This may be true. At one point, I remember being so irritated about not being able to achieve an effect I wanted that I just had to stop working on it and go to bed. D very kindly kept googling for instructions on how to do it, and left me an email with a solution that I read the next morning. This project has had the unexpected side effect of making me more aware of my impatience with learning new tools.
Weeks later, I had test prints from both Blurb and Lulu to compare. They are relatively similar. But Lulu had crisper printing of text. This stood out. It just looks more fine without the slight bleed that Blurb had. (It’s a little hard to tell from the photographs here.) This is a comparison of the trade book black-and-white print, not of their printing services in general.
With its lower printing cost and finer printing, I’m going with Lulu.
Lulu (left) and Blurb (right):
Cover design and material
For the cover, I had this idea of a partial grid of small squares, where the squares would be close-ups of various drawings. Windows into the memories, as it were.
But during one of the test print iterations, when I was rushing to get the book done, I just didn’t feel like recreating the complex grid. I thought, what if I just put one drawing on the cover. One drawing, the title, my name. That’s it. I tried out it, and against the white cover, it just worked. This is the cover I am publishing.
First cover vs. final cover (notice also the change in fonts!):
The other aspect of covers to consider was what kind of cover material. Between softcover and hardcover, I figured that if I could make the hardcover work cost-wise, I would prefer it. So hardcover it is.
Then there is a question of image wrap vs. dust jacket, and also matte vs. gloss. I have tried all kinds of combinations. This actually gets somewhat expensive since I have to pay for the book and shipping each time (why is shipping so expensive on these services!). I’m at the point where I’m trying to decide between glossy image wrap, which is more practical, and matte dust jacket, which is heftier and more beautiful but gets dirty easily because my book is so white. There is one more combination I have yet to try - the glossy dust jacket. We’ll see if I get around to that.
First row: 8x10 softcover, 5x8 softcover, 6x9 softcover.
Second row: 6x9 hardcover image wrap Blurb, 6x9 hardcover image wrap Lulu, 6x9 hardcover dust jacket Lulu.
Introduction and epilogue essays
I have always imagined that there would be essays bookending the work - an introduction and an epilogue. Both have been very hard to write. I keep wanting to do justice to the rest of the work, so I’ve set some unrealistically high bar for myself. I’ve experienced that feeling that writers talk about where you feel like you’re slogging through the work, but all you’re doing really is sitting in front of your laptop typing. Or not typing. Or deleting a lot. It is like trying to pull stories out from the depths of your soul.
The epilogue came first. It is one of my favorite things I have ever written. Titled “Going Home Again”, it is a story about revisiting a site from one of my memories that I thought was lost and gone forever.
As for the introduction, I’ve written several drafts of it. The first one was more factual, giving background on the 100 Day Project that inspired the work. The current version puts the work in broader context of Singaporeans looking to tell history in their own voices, and also describes what it was like for me to revisit my childhood through these memories.
I’m still debating whether I need one more short essay describing my history of homes to put Leicester Road, Upper Boon Keng, and Jalan Pacheli in context.
Details, details, and care
Which brings us to the present. Things that are left on my to-do list: re-edit and proofread all entries, fix the content page, decide on image wrap vs. dust jacket, etc. I do think I am actually pretty close to the finish line. There are no more big creative decisions left.
There are probably a hundred other details that I’ve had to work through that I haven’t captured here. For instance, when I decided to try out the dust jacket, it wasn’t a matter of simply hitting the radio button for dust jacket, and boom the image wrap turns into a dust jacket. I actually had to figure out how to create it. At first, I tried to use Lulu’s online cover tool, but it was far too limited (and ugly). So I went for the advanced option where I have to upload a PDF that met specific dimensions. I had to figure out how to do it in InDesign. Should it be 1 wide page or 5 separate pages for each side (flap / front / spine / back / flap)? I did the 5 page method before realizing that it had to be 1 page. Unlike the middle pages of the book that could be a little more approximate, the cover had to be precise down to the pixel so that each side would align in the actual printing. You don’t want the spine text appearing halfway down the back cover!
Then there are so many smaller decisions that also required care. How I did the page numbering. How I went from having it say “Day 23″ to deciding on “Day Twenty-Three”. The idea is not to make a perfect book. But I would like to produce a book infused with all the love and care that the memories inspire in me.
What’s next: how you can get the book
Finally, there’s releasing the book out into the world so you can order a copy. For that, I’m planning to do a Kickstarter. I’ve been trying to explain to myself why I want to do a Kickstarter instead of just putting it up on Amazon or wherever to sell. I don’t really need it to be a large batch order to make the economics work. But I like the idea of shipping out a whole bunch at one shot, instead of dealing with it over time. It’s also more interesting to set a deadline so that people will order now. I thought it’d be fun to have a couple different rewards to go along with it. Imagine a high tier reward: send me a photo of your childhood home and I will draw it.
But then I think, all that is more work! Do I really want to do more work?
I think my brother put it best. “You actually have a product! You should totally do a Kickstarter!” There is a certain joy and glory in getting to do a Kickstarter with a real product, so I shall do that.
