Good Things Continue to Happen for BYU Grad Who Published His MBA Sketchnotes

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From The Deseret News:

In 2017, Jason Barron compiled countless hours of sketchnotes from his two-year Master of Business Administration program at Brigham Young University and self-published a book he titled “The Visual MBA.”

Then, thanks to a kickstarter campaign that raised 1,000 percent of its goal, the Latter-day Saint husband and father of five not only covered the publishing costs, but he paid off his student debt and took his family to Disneyland.

. . . .

As an independent publisher, Barron estimates he sold about 2,500 copies. But the effort and time required to pack, ship and handle customer service led him to consider other options.

A friend with publishing experience suggested he find a book agent.

. . . .

Not only did Houghton Mifflin Harcourt like Barron’s work, they believed his book had major upside. The publisher has plans to translate “The Visual MBA” into at least 10 languages and release it worldwide. They also see potential for a series. Barron signed the deal, he said.

Now he’s really glad he didn’t give up on the idea, although he almost did several times.

“It’s been incredible. I’m really humbled,” Barron said. “It came back to that time when I wondered is anybody going to like this? My wife encouraged me. I’m so grateful I muscled through the opposition and pursued it. Because now looking back, it’s like holy cow. Imagine if I wouldn’t have? What if I had given up or abandoned it? I would have missed out on this great opportunity to help other people and have this book shared throughout the world. I really am just blown away and I’m grateful that I didn’t listen to that little negative voice and just pushed through it.”

. . . .

Barron, who produced his own handwritten font for the book, said the project has blessed his family in many ways. Not only was it financially beneficial, it served to unify, encourage creativity and creation, and hopefully inspire courage to do hard things.

“My kids have seen that I’ve accomplished something difficult, along with the tangible results of that,” he said. “I hope it shows my kids in a really important way that if they work hard at something they can make something cool happen. It’s possible.”

Link to the rest at The Deseret News

As he read the OP and checked out the book’s Look Inside interior via Amazon (lots of pictures), PG was interested in the challenge of self-publishing a picture book.

He found the following from  Darcy Pattison via The Creative Penn about children’s picture books:

At some point, many successful writers want to try writing and publishing a children’s picture book. There are many reasons: their own children inspire a story, they fondly remember a childhood event, or their muse gives them a story that doesn’t seem right for their usual genre.

Writers often tell themselves that they are professionals and can switch to this new genre without problems.

. . . .

How Children’s Books are Similar to Publishing for Adults

The most common advice given to those writing for adults are these:

  • write a compelling story
  • get amazing cover art
  • know your audience
  • market as much as possible.

Children’s books are the same.

. . . .

Children’s stories are usually 500 words or less. In that space, the story sets up a problem and a character, puts obstacles in the character’s way, and finally solves the problem.

If you take the 32 pages and lay it out in a book, there are about 14 double-page spreads, which means the images spread across the opened page. Divide your story into fourteen sections.

Each section must:

  • Advance the story. If you remove this section it should destroy the story. Each section must be integral to the story. Something must happen that changes the story in some way.
  • Give the illustrators something to illustrate. Think action. Include action verbs that inspire amazing art from the illustrators. Variety of illustrations is important so be sure the story moves to different locations.
  • Make the reader want to turn the page. The story should pull the reader through the story.

After the story is written and each section works, think short. When I critique picture book manuscripts, I usually ask the author to cut the story in half. And then remove another 100 words. Picture books, like poetry, require very tight writing.

. . . .

Adult books demand amazing cover art that are genre appropriate. Likewise, children’s books need great cover art; but they also need great art on each of the 32 pages. This is, of course, one of the main differences between children’s books and other genres.

. . . .

Take the time to study the dual audience of children and adults for picture books. While you must appeal to the child, you must also catch the adult’s attention because they’ll be paying for the book.

. . . .

It’s strange though because you’ll advertise the ebook and find that that paperback will sell instead because many parents still prefer a print book for kids.

. . . .

If you plan to sell ebooks of your picture book, and you should, there’s one big caution: Amazon Kindle download fees can kill your profit.

Children’s picture book file sizes can be bloated because of the illustrations. If your files are over 7MB, you should opt for the 35% royalty, which doesn’t charge download fees.

I’ve written a long tutorial on how to reduce the files to a more reasonable and profitable 2-3 MB. Basically, reduce the image quality to medium, limit files to 1000 px wide, and strip out extra metadata.

Link to the rest at The Creative Penn and here’s a link Darcy Pattison’s website.

PG sees a lot of author websites, but was particularly impressed by Ms. Pattison’s. Her website also includes detailed information about best practices for Author Websites, including understandable explanations about technical topics such as WordPress themes and plugins, search engine optimization, etc.

2 thoughts on “Good Things Continue to Happen for BYU Grad Who Published His MBA Sketchnotes”

  1. Two reactions:

    (1) I have no personal familiarity with Kickstarter, so I honestly don’t know. Is it kosher to set up a Kickstarter campaign to publish a book, then use the surplus to go to Disneyland?

    (2) Indie publisher achieves modest success: goes trad pub. No discussion of this?

  2. Good questions.

    1 – KS doesn’t police what creators do with the money. Backers will throw a fit if they don’t get what they expected, but in this case he got 1000% of his goal so there’s probably enough to over-fulfill on the rewards and still do Disneyland afterward. Personally I would roll the extra $ back into the business and keep going, but I wouldn’t blame him for celebrating the unexpected windfall.

    2 – As noted in the second article, both POD and ebooks are much harder to turn a profit on when you have tons of high-res images. The margin on this guy’s indie picture book may not have been much better than what he’ll get from the trad publisher. By taking the deal, he gets a bajillion copies printed at a fraction of the price (on somebody else’s investment and supply chain), gets into bookstores, and probably ends up with a higher quality product. I think it makes sense to take the deal.

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