Paper Doll Books -- Fairy Tale and Halloween

As many of you know, I self-publish some of my paper dolls in book form.  It's not the most profitable thing in the world and that's fine. I enjoy seeing my books in print -- they don't call it "vanity publishing" for nothing! I keep creating books specifically because I enjoy it.  One day I'll have a book published with a *real* publisher (I already sent a paper doll to Dover.  It might happen, it might not.... I'm not giving up yet!!) but in the meantime, I'll keep chugging along.

Having said that, sometimes mistakes are made when you're the artist, author, graphic designer, editor, proofreader, and publisher of a book.  And the reason I started this blog is to share my knowledge about creating paper dolls.  Sometimes you have to learn by making mistakes and I would be remiss if I didn't share the mistakes along with the successes.

Last year I put together a Halloween paper doll book: Ghoulish Girls:  A Halloween Paper Doll (not to be confused with Ghoulish Girls Paper Dolls, published by Dover, also in 2014, which in itself is a cute set).  I also completed a fairy tale book in February which is a compilation of my fairy tale fashion paper dolls. I don't always order a proof copy of these books immediately.  That's a bad habit I need to break because if I HAD ordered a proof copy months/years ago, I would have known there were mistakes in these books! Also, I can't sell them on Amazon or other venues without a proof copy so really, I should just do it.  Because there were errors, no one could get a copy of these books and I feel a bit silly about the simple mistakes that prevented that! In both books, there were unflattened transparencies.  No big deal when I'm making pdfs for myself, but a very big deal when I'm sending it to Lulu.com for publishing. And the worst part is, it's SUPER EASY to avoid!

So to any of you out there who would like to publish your own books, let me say this: first of all, do it.  It's not all that difficult and it's very satisfying.  Secondly, follow the rules!  I never even thought about the transparencies.  I won't forget that lesson now!

Anyway, here are the books.

Here are the covers.  They really printed beautifully.  One ting I need to keep in mind when printing dolls -- either at home or in print form -- is that the colors print darker than they appear on screen.

A better view of the Fairy Tales book.  There are two dolls on the front cover, and two more on the back cover.

These are two pages from the book -- the Snow Queen and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast.  I took each of the previous fairy tale paper dolls and added to the wardrobes with some exclusive costumes/characters in this book.

And the cover of Ghoulish Girls, featuring my three classic Halloween characters.

And two pages from this book.  Again, I have some exclusive content that's only available in the book.  The Mummy is one of my favorites.  It's all glam & gold, and a little retro '80s! Love it!

Since I had to make revisions to these books, I need to order another proof copy.  That means that they aren't available at Amazon, etc, yet.  But if you're just dying (heh, heh) to get your hands on the Ghoulish Girls before Halloween, you can grab it here.  And the Fairy Tale book is also available here.