Jester and Friends™ Book Series Is Full of Vibrant Colors and Nurturing Themes
- Jason Kurtz
- Jul 31
- 3 min read
Jester and Friends™ Book Series
Started As a Bedtime Story
It all started thirty years ago, when I was trying to get my kids to go to sleep. If you're a parent, you know how impossible this can be at times. Well, Disney's Lion King came out around this time and my boys loved it. So, I made up a tale about Jester the Giraffe and it worked! It put them to sleep. For a while. But you know kids, always wanting more, more, more! Being the good dad that I am, I indulged them by adding to the story as time went on, introducing new characters, and even drawing a scene from the story.
Amazing Artwork
However, as you can see, art is not my forte and I needed a whole lot of pictures. For one, I don't have time to pump out 20-30 drawings. And two, I didn't want my crappy drawings to shine a negative light on what is otherwise, a good story. I wanted the animals to look expressive and appealling to young children, but not too "cartoon-y", if you know what I mean. So, I outsourced the artwork to ai, and I must say, "we" did a marvelous job! Thank God for ai, is all I have to say about that!
AI Art Apps Used
OpenArt- I used OpenArt for most of the artwork in these books because it was the best app for creating consistant characters.
Ideogram- Ideogram is a great app for general subjects and excels in converting text accurately. This is a great app for book covers, album covers, and anything with text.
Night Cafe- Night Cafe is a fun one because they give free tokens daily (if you create one random free image every day) and they have fun contests. Like the other two text-to-image apps, Night Cafe offers all the latest and greatest machines, i.e. Flux, GoogleImagen, DALL-E, Dreamshaper, etc.
The Five Themes
Sharing- In Sharing Is Fun, Chase and Chelsea Cheetah learn to share.
Patience- See who wins The Waiting Game, hosted by Jester Giraffe
Kindness- Zip Zebra teases Heidi Hippo in The Golden Rule.
Honesty- Ernie Elephant lies to his mom in Ernie Stays Home.
Cleanliness- One Clean Monkey is a story about good hygiene.
Amazon—A Love/Hate Relationship
Everything has pros and cons and Amazon is no different. The company makes publishing a book fairly simple, but after your book is published, they don't do anything to help promote and sell it.
Love
KDP- Kindle Direct Publishing makes it easy to self-publish a book, or a lot of books, with Kindle Create and KDP has a Cover Creator built in.
Print On Demand- Amazon won't charge anything unless a book is sold. When you set up the pricing for your book in KDP, it forces the price to be greater than the printing cost, so you'll never have to pay for printing out of pocket.
Author Copies- As soon as your book is approved for publication, you can buy Author Copies of your book at the printing cost.
Hate
Limited Marketing- KDP has some marketing tools, like Price Promotions and Amazon Ads, but these have not helped me much.
Low Royalty Payouts- Amazon recently lowered the maximum royalty percentage from 70% to 60%. That may sound high, but after printing and shipping costs, it's not very much. I want to make 100% of the profit after printing costs.
I Need Your Support
It's a Jungle Out There
As with any business, the book writing and publishing market is flooded with authors like myself, just trying to get their foot in the door. Yes, the right type of advertising in the right places could be productive, but I don't believe there is a guaranteed formula for success. And to get my books in front of the audience they are intended for, is proving to be quite a challenge.
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