Become a published author!

Dear Kristina,

The Outcome: Each student will have the opportunity to become a published author and have a professionally published book for sale on Amazon.com. The titles could all be setup under a SLOCA account so that all proceeds of book sales benefit SLOCA. You could also add links to all the books they publish to your website with affiliate links to benefit sloca.

In the fall, I'd like to propose a year-long program for up to 12 students, 4th grade and up, for the Friday enrichment.

I've been helping authors for 10 years publish books and am confident given the tools available today that I can help take youth through the process as well.

I am doing some testing via an iPad with a free app called Canva to create a book. But depending on the type of book, Google Docs should suffice as well. But, it may be to an advantage for the students to bring in a laptop if they have one accessible since ipads may pose some problems (If this is a successful program, I'd like to propose )

Can you remind me, a full year of SLOCA is two or three 8-week segments?

Part 1: Creating content

• Defining what's meaningful
• Different models of contents for books and story boarding.
• Why it's important to the reader.
• What cause might the book help?
• Acquiring Artwork

By the end of the first 8-week session, students should have the content for their book complete.

Part 2: Formatting, Publishing, and Cover Design

• Branding 101 (fonts, icons, and colors)
• Which format makes sense for their books? B&W, Full Color? Appropriate sizes.
• Cover Design
• Metadata (description, categories, keywords)
• Uploading the book files to Amazon and submitting files for approval.
• Ordering a proof.

Part 3: Promoting your work

You are proud of what you created, but if nobody knows about it, it's not making the impact it could! My focus will be on helping the kids see that promoting what is meaningful is very rewarding.

If your book is intended to draw attention to a specific cause, we'll talk about strategies to reach out to the media and organizations who would benefit from spreading the message.

We'll also work on press releases and how to contact the media. The goal will be to get featured on one of the local stations with our projects (collectively).

I'd like to invite Cindy Neuschwander in as a guest for a class or two as well. She is an instructor with me in the Cal Poly writers program we both teach in.

My best,
Brian Schwartz
805-225-1251

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