I'm so excited to announce my new site.  Textsetlibrary.com.   This is going to be a website where teachers can browse for and search for books focused around a specific topic or theme.  Teachers can also share their text sets on this site.

If you are a fellow teaching blogger if you submit your text set to the library you can also upload a button to your blog and will get a new dofollow link.  

Each text set that you submit must have at least 3 books in the set.  You must also leave a comment about the text set that you are submitting.  

To go and submit your text sets go to the Submit page.  

Two weeks ago I had my first children's book published on Amazon, for the kindle.  Thanks to one of my followers I learned about a company where you can get print versions of you books and also have them available on Amazon.  So I had to do it.  

I needed to reformat my images to a different size, and a few days after I submitted my files I got this proof in the mail.  At first I thought it's perfect I love it, but when I looked closer I realized that there were a few things that needed to be fixed.  

First of all,  although you can't tell in the picture above,  the b looks closer to purple than to blue,  and d looks a bit orange when he is supposed to be red.  This wouldn't be that big of deal except that the letter b really should be blue.  

Second,  on this page with the balloons.  Again the balloon is purple.  When I purposely made that balloon different so that the b would have more of an impact.  

And thirdly,  b's eye's are squished together.  So I knew that I still had some work to do before I started selling them.

 

It took me a while to figure out why my colors were shifting, but it turns out that it has to do with rgb and cmyk.  RGB stands for Red, green, and blue.  It is the color system that computers use.  While CMYK stands for Cyan, magenta, yellow, and Key (which actually means black).   This is the color system that the majority of printers use.  

So when the printer what trying to convert my rgb colors into cmyk colors that is when they shifted.  Apparently rgb has a much bigger range of colors than cmyk.  So the colors that I was using couldn't the printer couldn't actually duplicate, and when it tried to pick a similar color the colors shifted.

So what I needed to do was to change my illustrations into cmyk. That way I could see what colors I was going to get and make the necessary changes before I sent the book off to the printer.  Oh, that sounds so much easier than it actually was.  The problem is that most programs that can actually accomplish this are really expensive.   I mean I think I would just keep a purple looking blue rather than dishing out $500 or more on the professional version's of Adobe's Photoshop.  

So I went off in search of a free alternative.  The usually answer to this is of course gimp.  So I checked and no gimp doesn't do cmyk.  After a lot more search I discovered that there was a plug in to gimp that could. Seperate+ So I was all excited that I was going to find a solution.  

Four hours later after trying to install this said plug-in, I discovered that the problem wasn't with the plug-in or the instructions on how to install it,  it was just not going to work with the current version of gimp that I had installed.  So I installed a back version and finally was able to convert my images.  

As of today I've ordered another proof, and cross my fingers hopefully this one will be the final version.  

So after finishing all of that I got a brilliant idea.  I have so many teaching material products online.  I think it would be great if some of them were in print as well.  I thought about it for a while and decided that I was going to start with my Pirate Word Ladders.   I've created a brand new cover.   The new cover is on the left.  You can see the improvement over the old cover that I had before below.  I'm quite proud of my new cover.   

I'm still in the process of converting the word ladders to the proper format for create space but soon instead of printing out a bunch of copies you can buy a book with them already printed out for you.  

So it has been forever since I've updated my free stuff page.  I make tons of free stuff and post them on the blog but I always forget to add these great freebies to my free stuff page.  I decided that it was time,  and made a serious update to the page.   I've more than tripled what's on the page so go and check it out.  Just click on the button below.

Don't forget my teacher's notebook store is currently having a back to school sale so stop on by.  

Everything in my Teacher's Notebook store is 15% off until Saturday, August 17.  So now's the time to purchase the product that you've had your eye on.  

So its another Pinterest Finds Day.  Check out some of these amazing ideas.

There are so many other great ideas in this book and I've enjoyed my time reading it.  To finish off my discussion of this book I'm going to leave you with one final quote from Donalyn Miller, about what she tells students about their summer reading.

One of the most common ways for teaching b and d is the bed method,  but this doesn't always work for each child.  While thinking about this I realized that the best way I learn is if something is in a story form.  I know that this is true for many kids out there as well,  so I made this book with that in mind. 

The book is only available for Kindle Fire devices, you can also read it in on a desktop kindle reader,  which would be a great way to share the book with a whole class.  If your a Kindle Prime member you can borrow the book for free, otherwise the book is $7.50.  

So the last few days I've been busy working to get my children's book, b and d are buddies, available on amazon for the kindle.  I have previously made a version of the book and had it available on Teachers pay Teachers it has been so far my best selling item.  Since it has been 3 years since making this version my computer arts skill have improved "a lot," and I mean a lot, a lot.  Take a gander at the difference of the pages below and you'll see what I mean.  

So since I've improved so much I wanted to redo all of the images for the book, and I'm so happy with how it has turned out.  

Oh and let me tell you getting the book into the correct format that Amazon wanted for the book was no simple task.  I mean seriously it shouldn't take longer to format the book then to write it and do the illustrations, right?

Here is a short list of what had to be done to get it ready, and this really is only part of the process.

• Each page of the book needed to be formatted into a web page.  
  
• I needed a separate styling page or css that contained all of the picture files and font placement for the book.
  
• I then needed to create another file called and opf file which had a completely new computer language. 
  
• Don't even get me started about the cover page.
  

So the result is that after a lot of frustration and headaches it's finally completed and I've accomplished a goal that has been knocking around in my head for the last few years.   

I have my fingers crossed that there won't be any problems when Amazon reviews the book.  When it's made available I'll post a link to the book on Amazon.  

And one more thing,  since I'm enrolling the book in KDP select which we'll make the book available for free for Amazon Prime members I'm not going to be selling the book anymore on Teachers pay Teachers.  

Here are three of my Pinterest finds today.  If you want to see more great pins check out my Pinterest boards.