Bye Bye Boomer

Well, the months of swine hibernation are over- Olympig is hoofing its way to New York as we speak!

Lots of people ask me how I deliver my art to my publisher. The answer is pretty easy- I pack it up, and I ship it! Well, I guess a LITTLE more goes into it. I cover each piece with tissue paper (as seen above), and if I have any comments for the art director I'll write those on a sticky note. I also make sure to number each page, to generally note where the crop marks are, and to write my name & contact info on the back of each page.

It seems crazy that this little stack of paper took up so much of my time and attention over the past few months!
As I am a nervous nellie who usually goes back inside at least once before leaving the house- to make sure the oven is turned off, the back door is locked, etc.- you can imagine that it is pretty hard for me to FINALLY admit that everything is done and it's time to wrap things up. Also as a nervous nellie, I wrapped the package in 3 layers of plastic (I DO live in Oregon- what if the package gets rained on?)- then some bubble wrap, and then in a final outer packaging.

One other thing you might notice in the picture above- I included a CD of digital images of all of the pieces. This isn't totally necessary- the publisher will send the original art to China (most likely) to be scanned. However, before doing so the book designer will usually create low-resolution scans (called "fpo"- "for placement only" scans) to make a working copy of the book (called a mechanical) to use in-house for text editing, etc. Since I had already scanned all of the pieces for my own use, I decided to send those files along- to save my publisher some time. And I know it takes a long time, because at Greenwillow I was often the one who created all of the fpo scans for our picture books.

Then a cute little envelope drawing...

... a hefty chunk of change dropped at FedEx, and he's on his way. *Sigh*. I'll admit to feeling some pangs of postpartum depression- my studio looks so empty now. In the coming months I'll talk about what happens between now and the book's actual publication date... but for now, I think I'll sit for a while, staring at the empty walls and remembering The Way Things Were.