The BlueHead Blog

Looking for Children's Book Illustrator

2011-04-13T09:12:00.000-07:00

BlueHead Publishing is looking for a talented illustrator to do the complete illustration for their upcoming children’s book, “You Throw Like A Girl.”

We are looking for a new gifted artist to take this exciting and powerful manuscript from being a charming and wonderful story to a beautiful and engaging illustration.

We would like to ask would-be candidates to provide the following:

Samples from their portfolio, specifically illustrations of people and/or children.
Provide a sample mockup of our main character, Chelsea standing on a molehill (in a park), preparing to pitch, based upon the following description and excerpt from the manuscript:

Character: 9 year old girl
Personality: determined, feminine, competitive, energetic, emotive
Description: brunette, average height, thin, ethnically neutral
Abilities: quick learner, athletic, pitcher
Accessories: baseball glove, ball
“Chelsea held the ball in her hand, grasping it firmly, just like Auntie Kim had shown her. She cocked her hand back and took a deep breath. Thinking about her Gram and Auntie Kim, she smiled, and with every bit of strength she had, she threw the ball.”

We are looking for an artist who is willing to work on a fee-for-service pay schedule where we will cover costs of materials, and a portion of the total fees upfront, with the final (and majority) payout based upon profits from book sales/sponsorships. We will also grant you co-rights to resale your work.

We are hoping to find a new artist who is as anxious as we are to promote their career, work, and professional aspirations on a national level.

Submission Deadline: Monday, June 27th

Please contact info@blueheadpublishing.com for more information.

"bookshop" - Where Ruby Meets DocBook

2011-03-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

We are very excited to announce the early release of "bookshop."

Summary:

bookShop is an open-source Ruby-based framework for DocBook toolchain happiness and sustainable productivity. The framework is optimized to help developers quickly ramp-up, allowing them to more rapidly jump in and develop their DocBook-to-Output flows, by favoring convention over configuration, setting them up with best practices from the get-go.

The Goal:

To go from zero to exporting(pdfs, epub or whatever) from your DocBook source files in under 10 minutes.

Here's the rubygems page: https://rubygems.org/gems/bookshop

And the source code: https://github.com/blueheadpublishing/bookshop

bookshop currently works on Mac OS X, but can also be used on any *nix OS. Windows support is coming in the next couple of weeks.

To install bookshop:
$> sudo gem install bookshop

To create a new bookshop application:
$> bookshop new new_app_name

You can edit your book in the new "book/" subfolder, starting with the book.xml file

To build a pdf format from your DocBook source:
(from within the root of your new_app folder)

$> bookshop build pdf

Your new pdf book will be located in the "build/pdf" subfolder

Start With A Book Summary

2011-01-28T09:35:00.000-08:00

One of the most challenging things for a writer? Getting started writing their book.

Often times a writer may have one main idea for their work, but a hundred ideas on how to write it. So getting to the point of putting pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard) can often feel overwhelming.

Probably one of the most useful exercises we have found to help authors write those first two chapters of their work is to write a basic summary of their book. Since all writings start with the basics (tense, person, genre, type, form, etc), we've found this basic template to be pretty useful (hey, simple is best):

[Title] is a [tense][person][genre/type] about [summary]. This work is written to [intention].

Here's an example summary from one of our Author's books, "Over Coffee," by D.a. Thompson:

"Over Coffee" is a past-tense, first-person narrative-fiction about a coffee-house conversation between the author and a small-town pastor concerning a gay church member who desires to be partnered in the church. This work is written to introduce the reader to a conservative, faith-based dialogue for providing room on the pew in today’s most conservative churches for gay partnered persons.

The point of writing the summary is to establish the construct, form, and structure. It's amazing to see how much easier the task of writing becomes, once these simple elements are laid. Well... easier may be an exageration. There's still the actual book to finish writing. (insert smiley face)

BlueHead Signs Author, Shelley Hayes.

2011-01-11T13:36:00.000-08:00

BlueHead Publishing is proud to announce the signing of author Shelley Hayes, and her book
YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL.

As a professional leadership & life coach, author Shelley Hayes has witnessed powerful transformations in individuals taught to change their thinking and reframe past messages of limitations. Such lessons are especially effective when experienced at a young age.

A mother of two active boys, Shelley recognizes first-hand the limiting and often damaging effects of coaches/instructors who flippantly use derogatory verbiage to motivate. Hayes’ book, YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL is a middle-grade, picture-book narrative written with the intent of shedding light on the power of words and perception. Infused with thought-provoking dialog and equally compelling illustrations, YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL demonstrates the positive effects of embracing who you are.

Hayes’ book, and her own compassionate work, inspires children, as well as caring adults who also believe in equality and in positively motivating young people. In a fun story about neighborhood friends, Hayes offers a sweet story that invites the reader to embrace gender and self-expression with pride and a true sense of equality.

Shelley Hayes holds a Masters degree in Business Administration and Management as well as a Bachelors degree in Sociology with a minor in Psychology. She is a Certified Professional Coach and received certification from the International Coach Academy.

YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL will be released mid-June 2011 due to BlueHead Publishing’s unique 6-month book-to-market trajectory.

For more information, go to: http://youthrowlikeagirlbook.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Press Contact: Jenée Arthur
206.588.1998
ja@jeneearthuragency.com

txt version

pdf version

Kindle eBook Design Resources for CodeMonkeys

2010-11-26T10:48:00.000-08:00

A few helpful links for those of you designing an eBook for Kindle. This is geared for those of you who want to work with the source code (as opposed to those who are looking to simply convert from InDesign or Word to .mobi without caring for geekish specifics)

A great introduction for techie people already familiar with web-design

http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/kindle-formatting-for-web-geeks

Site for Kindle Formatting Tips

http://kindleformatting.com/index.php

Kindle's Publishing Program Page with goodies like

KindleGen - a tool for generating .mobe (kindle) files from HTML, ePub, etc files
KindlePreviewer - a desktop virtual Kindle for testing your code in a 'live' kindle display

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621

The not-remotely-useful Kindle Publishing Guidelines Document from Amazon

s3.amazonaws.com/kindlegen/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf

A couple of nice web pages for cheatsheets on HTML and CSS compatibility:

http://www.ebookconversion.com/kindle-publishing-guidelines.htm

New Developer Hub & Upgrades

2010-10-29T10:45:00.000-07:00

We are excited to announce the New Developer Hub for those who are interested in seeing how we developed and are developing the BlueHead site, Author's Dashboard, and Fan Club Site. We use Github (of course) to manage it all and have chosen to make the repository a public repository so anyone can participate as a developer and contribute (we will credit them in the "CONTRIBUTORS" file of the source code).

New Dev Updates:

Upgraded system to Rails 3.0.1
Moved hosting to Heroku
Created sandbox branch for new feature adds

BlueHead switches to Highrise

2010-10-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

After spending a little time working in Highrise, a Customer Relationship Management tool by 37Signals, it was clear that their "Goodbye to bloat" tagline was inherently obvious.

Our initial concerns in dropping SugarCRM (our current CRM tool):

Would we miss all of the cool feature sets: detailed tracking for the entire customer pipeline from target to contact/deal, and crazy detailed reporting?

Frankly, we never used any of the functionality. In point of fact we found ourselves constantly going back and forth about how to enter a contact... "Are they a target...or a lead...oh wait!...do we enter them here...or here...what's our procedure again?...oh crap! where did I put that note about my phone call yesterday?...wait, what's the contact's name again?"

Would we miss the cool looking eye-candy of charts?

NEVER USED THEM ONCE

Sugar has been around forever and Highrise is relatively new

Translation: Highrise is built for today's web without complicated retrofits
Sugar charges an arm and a leg for all the web 2.0 stuff (that's right I said 2.0 as in 2.yesterday)

Anywho...

So it came down to one word: simplicity. As an independent, constantly-morphing publishing house living in a wonderfully evolving market, keeping it simple matters and we avoid the word "procedure" like the plague. If you need to wrap a procedure around complicated administrivia, it is just too complicated. At least, we try to keep that in mind.

AND, for all you tech-head types out there, they are a Ruby/onRails shop, so you know they are relevant!

BlueHead Aligns with Media Liaison, Jenée Arthur

2010-08-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

BlueHead Publishing is excited to announce its alignment with Relihann-Satterlee's Jenée Arthur for the promotion of its author, D.a. Thompson and his work, "Over Coffee: A Conversation For Gay Partnership & Conservative Faith."

"Over Coffee" is a narrative piece couched in a coffee-house conversation between the author and a small-town pastor concerning a gay church member who desires to be partnered in the church. D.a. warmly introduces the reader to a conservative, faith-based dialogue for providing room on the pew in today's most conservative churches for gay partnered persons.

Jenée Arthur, Rellihan-Satterlee

Jenée Arthur, with Rellihan-Satterlee, is a media liaison representing clients through a strong introductory voice to publishers, niche markets and the overall media.

The author, "D.a." Thompson, a Seattle Washington based writer, speaker, and musician is tackling some of the front burner issues of today through a unique and diverse world view. Raised in the conservative church and having studied to be a conservative minister, D.a. brings a discerning understanding of the conservative mind, faith, and framework. His full-spectrum engagement lends a trifecta of consideration and reflection even now igniting controversy. D.a. is expanding restrained horizons by mind, mouth, and music.

More information please contact BlueHead Publishing.

blueheadpublishing.com goes live!

2010-08-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

We are excited to launch our new website. Feel free to poke around and see what's new.

For those of you hackers out there... all of the source code for the site is available on github.com and open to the public. Yup! Completely open. You can check out the code and have fun with it (or even help us out by contributing back - we'll give ya props!!)

Click here for our source code repository.

We also have a ticket management site that is open to the public. Yup! Again, completely open. You see what we see...even our embarrassing mistakes (it's what happens at 2am). You can help us by letting us know what to fix, and seeing what is to come down the road!

Click here for our issue tracking.