Recently, I self-published my own book with the title ‘Into The Multiverse’. It is a 20-page 6”x 6” high quality hard cover book with a collection of 21 (including cover) of my selected artworks from #ramadhansketchchallenge2017 on Instagram + some extra that has never been posted before.
This effort was to show my appreciation to my followers that have been requesting to make my cartoons into a collection. So I have decided to print the books to only a limited amount. I was not confident of my market at that time so 50 was just enough for me to get started. Or so I thought.
Upon the launch (of an Instagram post), I received an overwhelming feedback and orders of the book! To keep track, I assigned each and every one who is interested to the number 1-50 under a first-come-first-served basis.
My Instagram post opening for orders
The first wave was about 12 people; some are my close friends, some are my random followers and some are from my friends who I haven’t talked to in a while but are on Instagram enough for us to know that each other still exists. The next day, I posted the same thing on my Facebook. The orders kept coming from my family, friends, and two of my lecturers back in my university days. I am flattered by the support because I didn’t know the book would get that much hit.
For the past few weeks I have been delivering the books to the buyers, like I said in my post, I prefer to do it by hand whenever it’s possible so that I can thank each and every one personally. For those who are outside the state, I arranged them to be posted batch by batch.
The journey of meeting all of the buyers were the sole reason I’m doing this at the first place. I got to meet my long lost friends, do a lot of catching up - and some actually open doors to new opportunities. For example, I met one of my school friends who’s about to get married soon, and she actually decided to hire me as her photographer!
Some of the proud owners of the book!
For me, the most precious moment is when they tell me they really like what I’m doing because I’m good at it. For an amateur artist, that really means the a lot to me. Those were the moments that kept me going all this while. Even after the books have sold out, I am still receiving enquiries on how to get them, but unfortunately I have to turn them down.
People asked me whether if I’m printing a second batch. For now, I have no intention to do so because that would not be fair to those 50 limited edition owners. Perhaps IF I were to change my mind, I will do it differently; maybe making it into soft cover instead. But my next target is to go into a real publication (I actually already had some offers to get published!) but I need to work on new contents which would take a lot of work, so it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
