How to Sustain Your Art with Craft

When I was five, I created a book. It was all done by hand with pictures drawn by me and words describing the action. I’d recently learned my alphabet, got help on the words, and wrote it in a single day. I had it bound and ready to share before my afternoon snack.

I remember this event because the fun and excitement of creating a book was burned into memory through the emotions of the moment. I can still picture my mother fussing over the tiny “book.” Thinking back, of course she was proud, and probably amused at how awful was my little ten-page tape-bound edition.

I recently learned a few tricks on creating a book and had an equally exciting bit of fun. That’s about a 55-year gap, and it still isn’t old for me.

That new trick is really part of the oldest trick in the book: we were made to be makers. Making stuff makes us happy.

I write books. About ten years ago, when I decided to self-publish, I learned how to format and publish.

I used LibreWrite, the open-source word processor to do the book interior layout. To learn how, I searched around the internet and found an article detailing one way to do it. A couple of hours later I had the first version of my book’s interior.

I enjoy learning things, and I’ve been doing stuff like that on computers for decades, so it wasn’t a stretch to learn this particular skill.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to publishing a book. The book cover—arguably the most important part of a book—has to be good. The book’s front cover makes the sale. You need a strong sense of marketing, graphics, photography, and illustration design to make a great book cover.

The craft skills needed to make a good cover are more than can be learned in a couple of hours, so I use a professional for the front cover. It’s money well-spent.

Once I have the front cover, though, I create the layout for the printed book, designing the spine and the back cover. I’m basically following the template generated by the publishing sites (Amazon KDP and Ingram Spark) so it was within my abilities to figure out.

I use Scrivener to compose my novels. One of its features is to “compile” a book from the contents. It handles ebooks and print book layouts with equal skill. However, print book layouts are more demanding than ebooks.

It took a few days of research, trial, and error, but I figured out how to create a print book layout with:

• Publisher’s title page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Frontispiece
• Title page
• Numbered chapters
• Back matter of Acknowledgments, About the Author, Request for Reviews

A lot of the needed work is built-in—a testament to the power of Scrivener—but it required customization. Again, it was fun to learn all the techniques and to see the work generated.

I feel empowered, now, because I can go directly from the Scrivener composition and generate ebooks and print books with the click of a button. This streamlines a major portion of my creative process.

Previously, I needed to use intermediate tools for both ebooks and print layout. Editing the story after I published was a source of dread: I knew that any change I made would mean a couple of hours to get the updates in the published formats.

I’m looking forward to writing more books and publishing them myself.

I used to want a publisher if only to free myself from the work of the publishing process. Suddenly, with this new process, I can’t wait until I have a book ready to go.

Which is soon.

Whatever your chosen genre of art, take some time to consider the parts you dread, and look around for ways to streamline the process.

One of the most fulfilling aspects of doing your art is sharing it with the world. The final production often relies on craft skills, and you can learn, practice, and improve your abilities.

Don’t let a difficult process keep you from sharing your art. The world needs to see your ideas, and gaining mastery over the production methods may bring you as much joy as doing your art.

That’s what creativity does for you: it makes life fun and exciting. Or at least interesting.