Diary

Diary

Introduction: In this blog post I plan on keeping a diary based on my experience completing my book.

My aim is to be as honest as possible sharing my development including my strengths, weaknesses,

and interests.

19/04/21:

I began my process of making this book. I started by brainstorming for ideas on what I wanted this book to include. It took a while for me to actually sit down and figure out what I wanted to do. Micheal gave us the option and freedom to write about or put anything we wanted in this book, this included poems, novels, scripts, short stories, or even a combination of all our previous work.

Finally, when I got the chance to look through my old work, I found a short story I wrote a while back that caught my interest. (I have previously written a character study post on one of the main characters in the story) This story is a tale about a young teenage fictional character who is being forced into an unwanted marriage. It is based in the 18th century and because of the fact that I’m really into historical fiction at the moment, I thought it would be great to recycle this short story. 

20/04/21:

Today in class Micheal showed us the brief on how he wanted the layout to look like. We were told that the book should have a front and back cover, author bio and portrait, introduction, inner title page, and an inside cover for both the front and back cover. This was all to be done using the formatting options on a word document.

All was good until we were asked to insert the page numbers starting from the introduction which

was on the third page, this would have been easier if Microsoft word had a single button that allowed

you to do so. I found this part really difficult and frustrating. I spend a lot of time researching and

watching videos to try and figure it out. (I’m not very good with technical stuff so that didn’t help my case at all). However, in the end, I was able to find a very good video that talked me through everything and all was good.

22/04/21:

Today I started by writing and editing my introduction and author information. I spend a long time doing

this as I was clueless on how it should be written and what type of information would be appropriate to

add. This required me to do a lot of research and look through the introduction and author information

of other books to get an idea. I was also able to find a decent portrait of myself and add it to the author

information section. Although this was optional I also wanted to add a copyright page (I found a template on www. self-publishing school.com

where you can edit it using your own information). Because of the fact that my short story is a bit long,

I decided to cut it into parts and add a context page.

23/04/21

I started gathering ideas for my book cover today. I knew I wanted something plain and simple, I didn’t want the cover page to betoo packed or over the top as I felt like it wouldn’t go with the theme of the story. At first, I wanted something like a plainbackground with maybe a character (the main character), and then just the title at the top. Google images had very few options soI found some difficulty finding a character that somewhat matched what I had in mind. Even though I was having a great timelooking at all the different types of artwork and animations, I realized I was spending way too much time on it. I ended up savinga bunch of images,  Pinterest especially had a large variety of cool designs.

24/04/21

Now that I had some images to work from, I needed to actually start designing my book cover. Micheal recommended that we both

Pixlr or Canva because they are both free, however, I choose to stick to Canva as I felt like it was easier to navigate. Youtube helpedme a lot by showing me all the different fonts, effects, and designs I would use. I also discovered Remove.bgwhich automatically removes the background from images without you manually picking pixels. I was able to come up with 10

different front cover designs, however, I realized that I needed to also make a back cover, inside back cover, and an inside front

cover. For the back covers, I just simply used plain covers for the background. I was going for a lilac, purple, white, and brown theme

as those were the color palettes on the images from the front covers, and then I added the synopsis and a barcode I found on google.

As for the inside back and front covers, I just found city art paintings of Croatia (that’s where my story is based). I put them in a circle

frame and then used the same color scheme used for the back cover.

25/04/21

Final Piece

Today I completed my Assignment for my book. Although it took a lot of tears and frustration to get it completed, I actually really

enjoyed making it. Designing is a really big hobby, so getting the opportunity to do so whilst learning new things was amazing.

The only issue I had was Word. I found it incredibly difficult to do anything, I even had a hard time trying to transfer my book

covers from Canva onto Word without it ruining everything else, like the page numbers. I believe it would have been easier if wewere doing this in the college so that not only do we have Michael’s help and support but each other. There was only so much

Micheal could do on zoom. I would also like to go back and change the final front book cover I have chosen for my book. My storyhas a lot of adventure themes in it so I felt like one of the other book covers I designed would have suited it better as the one

I’ve chosen was a bit too plain. But other than that I’m satisfied with the final result.