Dschibonka endlich auch bei Amazon

Ja, es hat eine Weile gedauert. Doch endlich kann man Dschibonka auch bei Amazon käuflich erwerben. Dem gehen ein paar Vormittag vor dem Computer voraus. Da Dschibonka eine ISBN-Nummer hat, war es schon im Amazon-Katalog vorhanden. Dummerweise ohne Abbildung. Und die haben wir vergeblich versucht, hinzuzufügen. Selbstredend dachten wir anfangs, wir wären schlicht und ergreifend zu doof, mit den modernen Errungenschaften der Technik locker-flockig umzugehen. Ein Mitarbeiter des Seller Centers von Amazon versicherte uns dann aber, dass es nicht an uns läge. Als schlichter Verkäufer eines Buches hat man nicht die Möglichkeit, eine Abbildung hochzuladen. Das dürfen nur Power Seller, die auch 39,90 € pro Monat zahlen dürfen. Glücklicherweise ist diese Option derzeit für drei Monate kostenfrei zu testen. Also, Angebot löschen, Power Seller werden, Produkt hinzufügen, Bilder laden, Fehlermeldung bekommen, Seller Center kontaktieren, lange mit einer Mitarbeiterin rätseln, warum es nicht klappt, bis es irgendwann doch geht.

Jetzt brauchen wir nur noch ein paar freundliche Rezensionen und…ja, auch Menschen, die unser nicht besonders dezent koloriertes Bilderbuch ihr eigen nennen wollen.

Total Control

To have control over what you’re doing sounds nice. As a team consisting of a draughtsman and a writer, we have complete control over “Jibonka”: we did the text, we did the artwork, we chose the type font (we even discussed to create our own for a while) we designed the look of every single page.

This, as I understand goes far beyond the degree of control one usually has when writing a children’s picture book and getting it published. Usually a writer submits a text, the publisher sends it to an illustrator, a designer does the look and so on.

Well, we finally have the opportunity to go through the process on our own. Not that we would have declined offers,but… Anyway, as I wrote earlier, we’ve now got the budget to go through with it – having a lot of control along the way. Alas, control does not mean you control little helpers who “do” all those things that need to be done.

We wanted to have an audio book version of “Jibonka”, so we got ourselves a decent microphone, a digital audio interface, a recording softwareand monitors, met for a week and recorded the German and English versions. We did all sorts of funny voices for our cast of cake loving monsters and once we left the well behaved, inhibited selves next to the coffee maker, it was great fun.

For the last 10 days I have been doing the job of a sound engineer, not that I am really qualified to do this. But cleaning the recordings up, cutting away everything that is just sonic junk, then mixing it in a way that makes sense, adding sounds, burning a CD to then notice all the mistakes and doing it all over again – a lot of control.

Meanwhile Jörg is blowing the pages up – well, enlarging them. This proved to be more complcated than expected, because he could not just scale them up. The final format will be 38 cm in height and 30,1 cm in width. This does not entirely correspond with A4, so there is some extra control in it.

Today, Jörg ordered the ISBN numbers, which made a few inter Adewani telephone conferences necessary. The business of comparing printer’s quotes and organizing transportation of the books from China to Germany – all a lot of control.

I guess it will feel quite nice to transfer the printing data to our printer and send the CD for replication. Because when this will be done, it will be out of our hands for a while. Unless somebody pays for a ticket to Hong Kong (I would then pay the train ride to Shenzhen myself) and we transform into printers – I would not rule it out.