Originally, Rennie had created these Wee Jimmy Stories for his youngest daughter, but over the years, he began telling them in classes at his local primary school near Falkirk here in Scotland. The children loved them and would often stop him in the street to tell him how much they enjoyed his stories. They often asked him for a book. This got Rennie thinking that there maybe something to publishing the stories.

Like with any of my one-to-on clients, Rennie and I first had a phone call whereby he explained what he had done so far. He told me of his hopes and intentions for the books.

Since all the books that I tend to help people create are designed in Canva (both the interior manuscript and the cover), I suggested he take one of my webinars to learn now to use it. He did. Then I knew he was going to be proficient enough to get on with publishing his series.

The cost of my helping varies slightly depending on how much help someone needs. Rennie had already written his short stories in Microsoft Word so we needed to get them into Canva, and allow him to add all his hand drawn sketches into his books. Thankfully each book was under 100 pages. That’s the maximum you can create in Canva. If he had a bigger book we’d have needed to use a tool to merge his PDF documents. Rennie wanted his cover of the Wee Jimmy Stories to be the same across the whole series – simply changing the colour and sketches – across each volume. So the covers were made in just a few minutes. His sketches through out the book are meant to appear as though Jimmy himself drew them. I think Rennie achieved his intention.

I am chuffed to bits to see what Rennie has achieved in less than two months. Some people put off publishing even one book and Rennie has published an entire series of the Wee Jimmy Stories. They are available on Amazon websites all over the globe. Find the Wee Jimmy Stories books on Amazon UK and the Amazon US page here. (Hopefully the links will work, if not just search the title).

If you want help publishing a book feel free to reach out. Here is a post discussing self-publishing a book with KDP and shows some of my former clients!

Now that my big, new Branding/Canva webinar has been presented for the first time (it’s been all-consuming for the past six weeks), I guess I need to follow Rennie’s lead and get back to my book projects. One is about my father and the other is an updated version of my Essential ’80s Pop Quiz trivia book. I’ll finish the blog on that eighties project soon.

And the other thing I am collaborating on is a Ted Lasso conference called #LassoCon. If you’re a Ted Head, too, then follow the Twitter profile to learn more. A blog will be live in the next few days about that too. Maybe I’ll just do a podcast and talk about all of this stuff so you can just listen instead of read? Who knows? All I know is I need to take some time off. As I often say Self-care is the new health care. Until next time, I’m Thea, saying see-ya.