To Cheer me up..

I am following one of the good rules now. A friend's sister, who I've done some favours for is a publisher - the MD of a new company that publishes literary fiction. Obviously she won't publish the kitten, but if I send her a copy she can give me an actual criticism, rather than the form letters you usually get. She could (although this is a slim hope) push it back outwards to agents who are approaching her.

I'm not listing her details because she almost certainly doesn't want to be bothered (not that anyone is reading this blog!!)

The other two copies that I have spare are also going to insiders. I know the marketing people at Harper Collins and Hodder. As they're not editorial there is almost no hope, but they can put it on the desk of someone.

I'll probably print another 3 sets at least so I'm going to have to be very choosey with who i Send them to. Much googling is obviously required. Who are recent kids authors like me, and who represents them?

printer setback

1) there's VAT on the £279 - adding about 50 quid.

2) on top of this I just printed 3 sets of books and all the toner warnings are on (except cyan which is 66% still - blue is my favorite colour at the moment!!!)

I'm hoping that it's just the cartidges that come with the printer, and also that the warning lights come on early. I'm going to print until there's no colour left - basically crash test the cartridges.

however, if these cartridges are the real deal, and are empty like they say it's a problem - the ink used for 3 sets is around £225 to replace.

I suppose what I've learnt is that big blocks of bold colour are great but expensive. Also, I'm guessing that I should use the process colours - i.e. if you use yellow you're only using one ink, but if you do orange you're using yellow and magenta to cover the same area.

We'll see how things pay out.

But at least I now have a total of 4 full samples of the kitten!!! I'm going to have to be very careful to get them sent back!!

this was the letter I sent by the way...

Dear

FLUFFY LITTLE KITTEN

I am writing to you because I have written a short series of children’ picture books. They are aimed at very young children. They feature Fluffy Little Kitten, who suffers minor mishaps, but then resolves them.

I appreciate that it’s very hard to get a children’s book published and that many people delude themselves with books that only they like. I didn’t want to fall into that trap so I put a number of “rough” copies of the book on Ebay to find out if they would be well-received by strangers. Out of 114 copies sold, I received 99 positive comments (many of these are attached to this letter.) This positive feedback led me to believe that a publisher might be interested.

There are 6 books initially with a number more in the pipeline. They’re a bit bulky in manuscript form so I thought I’d send this letter in advance to see if you’d be interested in receiving the whole package. If you want more of a flavour of the books, you should visit fluffylittlekitten.com – although bear in mind that the image quality on the website is poor compared to the books (grainy Jpegs rather than the high res PDFs I use for print)

You can contact me at the address above, or try my phone line (it’s a daytime number) or email me on f.l.kitten@gmail.com.

If you’re able to reply, I’d be very grateful if you could let me know how to progress.

Yours,







Robert Bassett





FeedBack from Ebay for Fluffy Little Kitten

(Punctuation and spelling – as per actual feedback)


Fab , what an imagination - who needs a pet when you have fluffy little kitten!
suitable for both children &adults
thank you kitten was a much enjoyed christmas present
Absolutely fantastic - Fluffy Little Kitten should be on tv.
Fluffy little kitten put a smile on all my family's face Thankyou
Really cute! Reminds me of a comic I used to read! Excellent, thanks! A+++++
Simple, silly (if u're that way inclined) fun, clean, any age. HIGHLY RECOMMEND
very funny, made me laugh out loud
I laughed, I went WOT...??? but enjoyed. bot as pressie 4 cat lovers...
i love f.l.k!so does my son who it was really for!look forward to the books!
brillian, bought for my neice, this is so good she loves it
FLK should be published,Funny,Clean,Daft,Cute,Mad. Cleverly simple for all age s
FLUFFY LITTLE KITTEN IS FANTASTIC!!!!! Absolute genius!
Hilarious...+ I'm thirty something!! A must have... Thanks so much..
Cute. Great for kids with severe & profound learning difficulties.
well worth the money, very funny
Absolute genius! Someone give this guy a publishing deal quick!
very funny, love fluffy little kitten!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the kitten is awesome!!
Fluffy kittle kitten is good for very young children
Fluffy Little Kitten is so cute. Loved it! Great, quick service. Would recommend
Brilliant! Bought for my niece but girlfriend & I were in stitches. More please!
Fluffy Little Kitten is wonderful - My children & Grandchildren will love it
I LOVE FLK!! This is one of the funniest things I've seen - its a must buy item.excellent ebayer
it doesn't get much better than fluffy little kitten - taking this to work LOL
Kitten top of the class! A must! And great Ebayer too! Many thanks!
fab storys,loved it should become a kids book my 4yr old loved it very tallented
very funny, great storys, will buy the 2nd one!!fast postage!!
Happy Birthday Kitten was extremely funny - a must to buy - very good value
very funny kids 10,8,6 and 4 thought it was brill can't wait for next one A+++++
Hooray for Fluffy Little Kitten! Can't wait until the next installment!
made me laugh!! how about some mice as well?!?!?
great
very funny... a great e-bayer... with thanks
very funny, liked the stories, made me smile. eveyone should have their own kitt
Kitten made the journey and arrived safe and sound.very happy in Australia
loving fluffy little kitten's adventures. Great ebayer. Thanks!
Very cute CD! Well worth it, I love British humor.
AAAA+++Great little cd, quick delivery too...
Entertaining and original - Should be on TV
Beautiful Kitten and FLK's Birthday are the best!Keep up da cute work!A++++
original, certainly twisted, definately worth a loko at the right price.
deffinately... everyone should have one! So funny!
Great seller, fast delivery, highly recommended, soooooooper
Very Funny! Everyone Should Have One!
Yey! FLK is great, i like Fluffy Little kitten falls over the best. RECOMENDED
Ha ha - I liked the fancy dress kitten best! Nice item, sent quickly & safely.
very unusual and interesting, quite funny, thanks!
Brightened up my day - FLK all spotty is hilarious!! Can't wait for next 1! A+
FLK...GENIUS! Well packaged and promptly sent. Thanking You : )
I LOVE FLK !!!! Can't wait for further adventures!!! FLK RULES !!!! * * * * * *
This man speaks to the fluffy little kitten in all of us. Fantastic transaction!
Aarh very sweet - I'd be interested to see how the kitten develops!
The kitten has enriched my life. And it arrived quickly too.
fluffy little kitten is amazing!everyone must have a copy!hollywood watchout!
Im 23 and found this funny. Good luck, email me when youve done the next episode
Great item - Very very funny fluffy little kitten!!!
FLK- V. amusing, kids (age 9, 7 &4)laughed too. ( due to inherited wierd genes!)
Can't wait 'til the next series of fluffy little kitten!!
laughed out loud !!!!!!!! Twice !!! A+++++++++++++=
Fluffy little kitten is fab! I wish you every sucess with it! Whens the next one
Very funny. Buy this! it's great :)
great stuff, little kitten! should be on TV!
brill great laugh. easy to install, great gift very funny
Great cd, verry cute great ebayer
my teenage girls thought it was very funny , well done, A1++++
Very cute!
I loved it!The Fluffy Little Kitten with spots made me giggle!
Gr8 little story. I Love it!!!!!! Purrrrrrfect :0) Many thanks.
Children did enjoy fluffy little kitten. v.fast good ebayer +++++
Very funny, can't wait till the next episode(s), good luck FLK!!!
Absolutely hilarious! This is the best children's book I've ever read!
funny - 'cultish' for my 14 year old - suit little kids for sensible purposes
just gets more and more humerous. Thankyou
Yay! It's so cute, and hey, fluffy! Arrived fast, seller friendly too, thanks!
Good
Awww, gotta love the kitten :)
brilliant FLK is a joy to watch! its a ray of sunshine in a dull world!

self printing samples begins

this seems to be working well - I've just done 3 copies of the 1st book in 30 mins with only about 10 misprinted sheets. The printer is coping very well - it's just I'm feeding the paper wrong accordingly.

I reckon I'm going to do 3 copies of two books a day for three days. I only bought 500 sheets of paper this time so I can only really do three complete sets this week. I'll buy more paper for next weekend.

here's a picture of the manufacture!

Blog is now real-time

that's all I've done so far. From now on, the blog'll update when i've done a new thing.

for instance this afternoon I'm going to start printing the samples with the new laser printer.

publishing - first rejections

at this point (about 2 months later) I have only had contact from 3 organisations - only one of which is a genuine rejection of the kitten

David Higham said they didn't have sufficient enthusiasm for the project

Egmont say they don't accept direct submissions

The Agency say they have too many clients at the moment.

I've kept my rejections - here are the pictures.

my first list of agents/publishers

I sent to the following

Egmont Publishers - mr men and miffy
David Higham Associates
Elaine Greene Ltd
The Agency
Eddison Pearson
Juvenilia Avington
Eunice McMullen Children's Agent
Elizabeth Roy
Rosemary Sandberg
Caroline Sheldon

just look them up on google

publishing - getting an agent/publisher

by far the best way to get published is to aquire an agent. very few people get published these days without an agent.

my plan was to find the agents of other kids book authors and target them. Check out the bookshops and review pages and news items. Find books like your own and then google their author's name and "agent"

When you send stuff to agents there's almost an industry standard.

If it's a novel send a first chapter, synopsis of the whole novel, details of the main characters and a cv about yourself. Don't bind, staple or clip your manuscript (they hate that) and make sure your details are clearly marked on all the pages of the manuscript.

With a kids book, send the whole manuscript.

of course, being a cleverclogs I haven't practiced what I preach. As we know from before, printing is expensive so I just came up with my list and posted something else to them. I wrote a covering letter and added three pages of my "reviews" from ebay. I requested they look at the website, and contact me for more info.

I also sent to a couple of publishers direct.

self publishing - ISBNs and barcodes

if you're going to publish yourself you have to have an isbn and a barcode. If you don't have these you can only really sell direct. All on and offline retailers insist on this.

luckily it's pretty easy to sort this.
http://www.nbdrs.com/isbn_sernew.htm

you get 10 isbn's for 98.70 (it's cheaper for more)
you have to email them for an application form and you'll need to give them a little bit of information and some cover images.

once you have your isbns barcodes can be generated quite easily - here's a website I've just found

http://www.barcodesinc.com/generator/

you'll probably have to talk to your eventual printer to make sure they can reproduce the barcode clearly - remember this because if you mess up your barcode you'll have a lot of useless books!

oooh - protecting your ideas!

not much to worry about here. In english law you pretty much get copyright automatically. If you can prove you wrote something at a given time (easy in my case cos of the ebay stuff and the domain name registration) no-one can steal your stories. People don't often try.

the real issue is trademarking. They won't steal your story but they will print t-shirts of your character.

This is a massive issue for self publishers because trade marks are expensive and you have to register for loads of categories. I'm slightly lucky becuase all of my characters are essentially the same drawing in different colours - I can trademark a black and white outline of them (different colours are extra). Even so just to protect T-shirts and stationery (my guess for the two biggest money spinners) would be £250 for the UK alone! Being a realist, as a UK self publisher if you're worrying about the japanese merchanise market you're probably getting ahead of yoursel, but it's worth keeping an eye on things in case your stuff becomes popular quickly. Try to know about it.

see this link for details
http://www.ukpats.org.uk/applytm.pdf

The Internet

you've got to be on the web!!!

I know little about the technical side of the internet (even now when I work on the internet) so I didn't know what to do.

However I went on holiday to mexico (won it as a prize - lucky me!) The time difference is big and I don't really get jetlag but lucy does. As such I was waking at 8 in the morning and she was getting up at 2pm. I consoled myself initially by having beer breakfasts and watching premiership football on cable whilst she slept. There was also a PC in the hotel so I started emailing and surfing. Then I saw a spanish language TV commercial for register.com I don't speak spanish but it seemed to be an idiots etch a sketch level internet thingy. I bought the names fluffylittlekitten.com and fluffylittlekitten.co.uk (later buying the same for furrylittlekitten - I'll explain why later) and bought the most basic web builder platform. The whole lot cost me less than 50 quid for a couple of year. The website was born. More recently (obviously) I've started this blog which is amazingly easy to do and free. I still wanted to own my domain names though so I'm glade i registered and paid for them.

I have another proper website as well and I do that through 1and1.co.uk which i reckon is a bit cheaper. It's still really easy.

www.register.com
www.1and1.co.uk

Printing small quantities

whether you're publishing or self publishing you're going to need to print some short runs of your books - either as samples or to show to publishers and agents.

If you're writing a novel, you're laughing. Not only will you almost certainly have easy access to a black and white printer, there are also loads of digital book printers (just google digital print or short run print or self publishing)

if, like the kitten stories you need a lot of colour, brace yourself.

The first 6 kitten books have 48 pages (I'll talk a little more later about why 48 - it's a print thing) that means a sample set of books will involve just under 300 pages. I really checked hard and the lowest quote I got was at KallKwik. They would offer me the super, account, industry bulk rate of 25p a copy. The drawback - to get bulk I'd have to print ten sets (3000 pages!) The cheapest quote I got for just 300 was almost double. It looked a bit gloomy - £750 of print for a reasonable quantity of samples or £150 for one set!

I had a real moment at this stage - it's all well and good wasting your evenings and weekends on a silly pipe dream but £750 makes you an idiot. I know you should be commited to your work but still...

luckily my friend Jon came up with the solution - it actually works out cheaper if you buy a laser printer of your own. I agonised for a while and spent a lot of time researching. I now think the best option for my type of project is a Lexmark c530dn. It cost £280 with a set of toner cartridges but they are actually doing a £75 cashback deal until april. It should give me 4000 pages at 5% cover so with my colour density I reckon I'll be able to do about 6 sets of the books before I need new toner. A full set of new toner will set me back £240 (I know, it's mad isn't it!!) and would do me around another six sets. I will let this blog know how many it actually does but I'm hoping that I'll get my samples for a total of £400 and I'll still own the printer (surely worth £100 on ebay? maybe not)

A warning though - it's huge - about a metre square.

there's a link to it here.

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=49WQ&SearchType=1&SearchTerms=lexmark+c530dn&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=0

I know I've still spent at least £200 quid but that's not quite so mad and at least I have something to show for it. I do love my printer.

A problem common to both publishing and self publishing

Whatever method you use, you need a good product. In the Kitten's case it was apparent that in the end, I couldn't sell people Powerpoint presentations. When you look at the original stories you'll see that they contain very few different images and they are of a low quality. You've got to have something with high production values or you're attempting to cheat the customer.

I had two major problems
1) I had to increase the quality of the drawings
2) I had to increase the quantity and variety of the drawings

Paint and powerpoint had to go!!

The major issue with paint is that the graphics it outputs are bitmaps (made out of lots of dots) this means that when you alter or increase the size of the drawings they go pixelated and grainy.

The major issue with powerpoint is you just can't supply powerpoint slides to any type of printer at all.

the solution for me came with one particular software package - Adobe Illustrator. It uses vector graphics - when you draw an image, it's not made up of dots, it's made up of co-ordinates with lines between them (this may be an oversimplification) The main thing is that the images maintain their quality whatever you do to them - a foot high kitten looks the same as a one inch high kitten.

Illustrator is pricey though - so until you get published you'll have to do what I do. I used a 30 day trial version from the front of a magazine - I think you can download a trial from the adobe site as well. Then I found a designer who I knew at work and used his computer. I learned the very basic skills I needed as quickly as possible and then knocked out the pages quickly by doing all the drawings on one page and then copy and pasting them multiple times. It doesn't matter too much after a while if you don't have access to illustrator, because it outputs files as PDFs - which you can view on any computer and print without paying any money.

Printers of all kinds accept PDFs.

Transfering the images from paint to illustrator was a bit beyond me - I have no training. So i bought a pen and tablet, cellotaped a picture of the kitten to it and traced it. Not really van gogh I know, but it did the job.

If you're drawing free hand, make your images as large as you possibly can - it's easy to reduce images, but not to expand them. You're going to need to scan those images before print at some stage.

i've done a link to adobe and to dabs where I bought the tablet.

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3NH8&SearchType=1&CategorySelectedId=11016&SearchTerms=tablet&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=11016

Warning 3

Think really think hard about how people buy books. A good trick is to imagine your book in an actual bookshop. What does it look like? How is it displayed? Where abouts is it shelved? What is it next to?

It has to be saleable!

Fluffy Little Kitten is a "problem" in this respect. In theory it appeals to kids and their parents - double the opportunity? Unfortunately no! It's tricky to work out where to shelve it, and there aren't many books like it that you can put it next to.

You're much better off with something that fits a category snugly - get whacky later when you're already a success.

This is another reason why I'm not building my hopes up about my Kitten Stories too much.

If you think you're being clever because you've found a gap in the market, remember the market has being going for centuries. If it hasn't been published yet, chances are it never will!!!

WARNING 2

all of the difficulties for writers are massively increased for children's writers.

Like screenplays, children's books (especially for young children) are seen as an easy option.

because they're generally short, it's hard to differentiate between the good ones, and the very good ones (and of course the plain average ones)

From a self publishing route you have to ask yourself,
"why would someone pick my book up rather than someone else's" and,
"why would a bookseller stock my book over someone else's"

From a publishing route
"why would i take a risk on a new author with an untried product when there are so many safer options."
Would you publish Madonna or Ricky Gervais' kids books or Rob Bassett's?

I'm not complaining - that's the way it is. It's a business.

WARNING AND DISCLAIMER (1)

If you get into the world of writing you need to be aware of a few things

1) most likely is that the stuff you have written is rubbish
2) your friends and family will either lie or associate the stories with you and so like them even if they are rubbish
3) probably someone has done the same stuff as you before
4) even if you are good, the liklihood is you won't get published - I would guess that around 99.999999% of books aren't published
5) even if you do get published, there's a 99% chance that you will not make enough money to be able to give up your job.

My own stuff is probably rubbish and likely to fail. I work on the principle that it's something I enjoy doing - you've got to have a hobby! However, I do take my hobbies seriously - this thing won't fail for want of effort on my part.

so - I'd recommend two books - On Writing by Stephen King and From Pitch to Publication by Carole Blake
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pitch-Publication-Everything-Novel-Published/dp/0333714350/sr=8-1/qid=1171130918/ref=pd_ka_1/026-5618255-4622817?ie=UTF8&s=books

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Stephen-King/dp/0340820462/sr=1-1/qid=1171130996/ref=sr_1_1/026-5618255-4622817?ie=UTF8&s=books

for the record I think Stephen King is harsh on adverbs, but I don't use them either because my stories have around 7 words a page!!!

I don't think you need any more than this.

One thing I have which you might not is that I've sold ads to the publishing industry in the UK for about 7 years. I know a lot of people from publishing companies and if you talk to them you get a really good feel for how astonishingly hard it is to get successfully published and what you might have to do to acheive your goals.

100!

would you believe it? if you don't - have a look http://feedback.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedbackFromBuyers&userid=fluffylittlekitten&items=-1&item=-1&de=off

I sold 114 discs and got the 100 - I'm guessing that the other 14 either didn't like it but were too nice to leave a neg or just they don't leave feedback. But even if you take the pessimistic view that's still around 90% approval.

So now there were two possible routes - self publish or find a publisher. The blog now splits into stuff that I needed to do no matter what, stuff for publishing and stuff for self publishing.

Meanwhile I had been coming up with new stories

If you're doing kids books, you might as well have a big series of them.
The first 6 were

Too many kittens
FLK buys cat food
FLK falls down
FLK's birthday
Beautiful kitten
Fancy Kitten

subsequent to these I now have in various formats

A fluffy little christmas
Foreign Fluffy
Stormy Kitten
Fluffy Family
Fluffy Weekend
Fluffy Kitten Sees Someone Being Teased
Fluffy Goes to School

the quest for 100

So what now? I decided that I would give the kitten a go for the sake of it - mostly because of the great feedback I'd got.

Notable amongst this was feedback from one of my customers. She was a supply teacher in the area of special needs and learning difficulties. She said a few things about the stories which made me feel I was onto something. The first was that she had to read a lot of quite basic stories to the children and young adults in her care and that it was nice to read something that she really liked as well. She also said that older children with lower reading ages really liked it when they had a story whose language was basic but had a sophisticated sortof sense of humour.

It also appeared that by having a kitten who suffers a lot of minor frustrations I was mirroring a lot of the concerns of little kids. I don't have kids, but I've been told that at lot of the tantrums you see from little ones are to do with their powerlessness. I'd also apparently got some good repetition and a lot of tricks of kids authors use into the stories without knowing it. I read a really large quantity of books and have done since a little kiddie - probably I'd been unconsciously mimicing stuff from all the stories I'd absorbed over the years.

I had a think and decided that taking all the above into consideration I would pursue the kitten stories when I got over a 100 positive feedback from strangers.

Ebay adventures end

long story short - ebay's reshuffle effectively meant that if you don't have an MBA, you don't get a job. No disrespect to people with MBAs but if I wanted to spend 3 years of my life studying again I'd do something useful!! I've spent a good quantity of my life in the world of "business" but I'm not a big fan of it. (I am a history graduate from Sheffield by the way - great town, well worth a visit. Although not born there, I spent almost all of my childhood in Solihull just south of Birmingham and went to school at King Edward's - alma mater to such literary greats as JRR Tolkein, Bill Oddie, Philip Larkin's Dad and Jonatan Coe - he wrote the Rotters Club which is pretty much an exact description of life at King Edwards, albeit 7 or 8 years before I joined)

I was sat there with a positive feedback of around 80 and no further plans - I was stuck working for the newspaper still.

Ebay Adventures continued...

...I wanted to see if you could make money selling the stories yourself. The answer is "maybe" but I think you'd have to workin far greater volumes than I did. I had to buy recordable cds, jewel cases and the stationary for the cd sleeve and envelopes. Even when using odds and ends of paper and recycled envelopes the overheads were quite high. The cheapest I could manufacture the actual disc case and sleeve was around 25p for the disc (got them from the now defunct Jungle.com) and 20p each for the jewel cases. Even if the paper and ink (ink becomes very important to you when you start home printing in earnest - see later) and envelope was free. Ebay fees are also quite high for low value items as a proportion of the sales price. Postage was about 70p. All in all, if I could sell the discs for over a pound, with postage and packing of £1.50, I'd be making something. In all honesty, i reckon the average sales price of the discs was about 50 or 60p.

I was so keen to sell them that I put to many on ebay at the same time - if someone was bidding on one disc, you could always find another one to bid on so there was very rarely a bidding war. I tried to get scientific, listing in different places in different ways and using buy it now occasionally but there appeared to be no pattern. In the end I conceded that in its current format, the kitten stories would have to be a loss leader.

Of course the customers didn't know this - they were forking out a couple fo quid for what was quite a basic product. I'm still amazed that so many of them bought the discs, and that so many liked them. The system I'd come up with was working and I was looking forward to showing off at interview...

Ebay adventures

I put the stories on ebay - i wanted to be careful not to abuse the ebay system and so I couldn't;
a) sell an email of the files
b) list the stories in an incorrect category

so mostly they went into the weird collectables section of the site - where traffic is higher than the kids book section. I was wary of using the books section lest I got complained about by people selling actual books. Plus I didn't want my idea stolen. All seems a bit ridiculous now.

I got about 10 feedback really quickly - all surpisingly favorable (and even one from New York, which was a surprise) I wasn't expecting the stories to be so well liked, I was just trying to demonstrate my ebay idea in principle. Unfortunately before my interview was due, ebayhad a major reshuffle and they told me they wouldn't be hiring for 6 months. I decided to keep selling the kitten discs until I got an interview - for a more impressive case study....

the kitten goes public

i had 6 stories on powerpoint and thought no more of it. However I had applied for a job at the internet auction house ebay. It was for music, movies and books category manager. I thought I had a good chance because I'd worked on the commercial side of the NME, Melody Maker, Uncut, Loaded and most recently I'd sold all the movie, music and book ads in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. I still work for Associated Newspapers but I work across over 100 websites selling adverts - the internet is the future you know!!

Anyway, I knew that I was a good candidate for the job, but I wanted to come up with something special for the interview. Music and DVD are big categories on ebay and the site is really well suited to selling them, but the auction structure doesn't lend itself well to the selling of books (you really need a huge inventory available all the time) I thought you could beef up the books category on ebay if you gave it a real point of difference.

My idea was to set ebay up as a place for people who write as well as read. Budding authors could sell their books as word documents, with the first chapter posted in lieu of an item description. Customers would read the first chapter, and if interested could bid to get a disc with the file on it. Then they could leave feedback (positive, neutral etc) like it was a mini review. In time, the good writers would get large positive feedback scores and they could make the decision to use their success either to get a publishing deal or just continue selling on ebay (even as a properly published author you only get about a quid a book anyway - more of which later)

good idea in principle, but all talk. I wasn't prepared to write a novel to prove my point (although I do have the first 10,000 words of a novel i've been writing for about 7 years!) but I did have the kitten stories so I came up with an attractive package (pictured) to sell on ebay.

http://www.ebay.co.uk

What's the basic premise behind Fluffy Little Kitten

The stories all have the same basic pattern. FLK is having a good time when he suffers a minor setback, which causes him to cry. With help from both the readers, his parents and his friends his difficulties are sorted and things turn out alright in the end. Even though they are supposed to appeal to adults as well as children, there is no swearing, sex, vulgarity, violence or anything off colour. I'm not sure how to describe how they work but i suppose they're silly and I try to layer in some visual gags.

let's go through the history

How did the kitten come about? I wrote the first story for my girlfriend Lucy when i had a sick day, to amuse her and also just to see how hard or otherwise it would be to write something. I wanted the books to have a flavour of the mister men books and miffy. The other thing I wanted was to write something that could amuse an adult and also be good for the kiddies.

I drew the original drawing with a normal PC mouse using microsoft paint (that comes with your computer) then I pasted them into powerpoint (you needd to have microsoft office for this, but a little later I found out about open office, which is effectively a free version of the microsoft stuff. This was significant because it meant that I could send anyone with a pc the stories and they'd be able to view them for nothing.

Powerpoint worked really well because you could set up the pages as a slide show and run through by tapping the space bar.

Both lucy and a few friends and work colleagues thought the stories were quite jolly. You can actually download the original 6 powerpoint versions from fluffylittlekitten.com (sound's professional doesn't it? well it's not - more of which later.)

Lucy liked the stories and so did a few friends and colleagues

http://www.openoffice.org

http://www.fluffylittlekitten.com

Introduction

This is the kitten blog. I have written a small series of childrens' books about a character called Fluffy Little Kitten. This will be about what I've done to get the things onto the shelves. Hopefully it'll be a useful record for me and for anyone else wanting to have a go at it.

rob

f.l.kitten@gmail.com

http://www.fluffylittlekitten.com