KALAPATI (part 1)

A year ago I was writing about what had recently happened with my life. I made notes and wrote everything on paper. Later in April I started working it all out on a computer. Around the same time I started looking for information about publishing and I came on the site of Amsterdam Publishers. It was purely by coincidence that I got there. And what a wonderful feeling when I read there was this writers contest. The circumstances were far from ideal during that period due to several reasons. In fact, that was what the book was all about. Just in time I could send a very rough manuscript. Life went on and I was editing and refining the content. A friend was more than willing to help and we searched for ways to upload the book for Amazon/Kindle. In August I got an email and the sender was pretty unknown to me. But since it was a publisher I did not delete the message immediately. Reading the content my mouth fell open and I could not help it shouting out loudly “I won! I won the writers contest!!” My friend did not even know about it so I had to explain him what had happened.

The price was a nice deal: Amsterdam Publishers was going to publish the book on Amazon and Kindle as e-book and as paperback. Now we did not have to bother about uploading anymore but we did need to design a cover. At the back of the house of my friend is this old wall. Once people started to give the white wall some color but they obviously ran out of paint. Maybe they lost even interest. So there was this half painted wall that through the years had gotten several touches of the elements as well. Frankly I simply love this kind of walls. They are stories without words. We tried hard to resize and crop the picture that I had taken of this wall and put the book title and my name in on it.

The first design of the front cover

 After we finished we both were very satisfied. But the publisher was not. The color we picked would simply vanish and the letters were too small. The explanation was that this cover was going to be seen on screens only. It would have the size of a stamp. That made sense. I told the publisher she could change is as she would see fit. Fortunately the picture was good enough. 

The cover as it is published

In October the Dutch book was published and man, how proud I was. It was just a special sensation to see it on Amazon and Kindle.

Many people in the Philippines were pretty disappointed to find out the book was printed in Dutch. This got me thinking of translating the book into English. Soon I found out that Google translate was not exactly doing the job right and truth must be known; I was not too keen to get started. But of course I knew I had to.

To be continued.