Digital book dummy question

jbleau

@smceccarelli Great advice! I really appreciate the flipbook link it is a wonderful concept, great art and characters. I will look for more of your work on line, thanks for posting!

RHirsch

@smceccarelli I work with Photoshop CS5, will it work for that? I'll have to look into it.
Thank you for sharing your work, it is safe with me. And oh, gosh - I love it!!

smceccarelli

@rhirsch Aha, thank you! It's nice to get some positivity: my agent does not like it that much
I think you need CC to be able to publish flipbooks online - because you need access to the Adobe cloud...but I may be wrong: it's worth googling it.

RHirsch

@smceccarelli I will. And I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with your agent. The illustrations are fun, the flow is good from page to page. But then, I am as of yet unpublished so I can just give you my opinion, one artist to another. I think it has good energy.

smceccarelli

@rhirsch Thank you! To be correct, she thinks it has „potential“ but needs more work with pacing and story point (which I agree). For the time being, she suggests working on something else that hinges more on character, so I am looking into other things.
Maybe it’s interesting to share that having a literary agent does not mean that he/she will happily go and try to sell everything you make...

evilrobot

@smceccarelli that looks amazing. I guess I need to do a refresher for InDesign I haven't used it since I worked at the news paper about million years ago. I opened it up a few months back and just thought "this doesn't look anything like I remember" then promptly decided it wasn't worth the hassle to relearn.....

smceccarelli

@evilrobot Ah ah, that was exactly my reaction the first time I opened it! But I have the great luck of spending some of my day hours with friends/colleagues who are fabulous designers.
They do not let me slack on anything.
So when they discovered that I had no clue how to use InDesign, they gave me a crash course and then they heaped a bunch of layout projects on me - simple super-boring stuff like trifold brochures, table tents and flyers. I could only get rid of the trainee stuff after I could demonstrate at least a basic competence
It comes in very useful to layout business cards, tear sheets and book dummies...

RHirsch

@smceccarelli Maybe she wants a problem/ resolution sort of thing. Like maybe the ball pops?
Your illustration style is enviable. I shall try not to turn several shades of green over here.

smceccarelli

@rhirsch Yes, she suggests inserting a story arch/problem and she thinks the ending is unclear (which, after a few weeks in the drawer, I had to completely agree with). She also mentioned several times that concept books (alphabet, numbers or word-based, like this one) are really really difficult to sell.
I have thought of an alternative story arch that uses at least half of the illustrations already done, but after discussing with her, we agreed to explore some character-based manuscripts instead.

RHirsch

Well, for those who are interested it is possible to make a digital book dummy in Photoshop CS5 using the Bridge. Here's a link to the page I found explaining how, it went together quite smoothly: http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1661131