5 Year Old Publishes on the iBookstore

My son has published his first story on the iBookstore. This story was his idea based on playing at the local river in our housing complex in Indonesia. John likes to play at the river (with adult supervision) and in this story he tells about catching fish using a plastic cup. My son told me this story and I suggested that we make it into a book. We used the app Book Creator to make the story directly on the iPad. I like that we can stretch the photos so that they either fill one page or go over the page fold slightly to make the layout more interesting.

John is only 5 and is only just beginning to type up words. For this story he came up with the sentences but I typed in the words for him. I took the photos as well.
We began one morning. I walked and he rode his bike to the river. I asked him to stop along the way for photos.

After he had finished I downloaded the photos from my iPhone to my iPad. I worked with John to choose which ones to use to tell the story. The finished book is 50 pages long. John then recorded each page by reading directly on the app.

After we had finished and were happy with the results we took the book to school and presented it to his Kindergarten class for feedback. I was easily able to share the book to 6 iPads. Here is John proudly sharing his book with his class.



We had such a great reaction to this book so I decided to publish it on the iBookstore. I am already a member of iTunes Connect having already published an iBook. I am well aware of how to get a book published.

I uploaded the book and was very happy that there were no errors. I am impressed with this app Book Creator as it is easy to use and produces a format that is inline with the requirements from the iBookstore.

After 2 weeks I sent a message inquiring about this book. It took a couple of days to get an answer which was a standard one telling me that my book needed to pass the content check. After another week had passed I sent another message and then a few days later I sent another message again. I think that there must be a lot of books under consideration in the iBookstore. When I published my first iBook that I made with iBooks Author, the whole process only took 2 weeks. A month passed with this one with very little response.

Finally whilst I was on term break, I got an email telling me that this book 'Little Fish' had been published. My advice to anyone wishing to publish with the iBookstore is to be patient. I'm sure that they get a lot of books to consider. I am currently working with a parent to help them publish a fantastic book created by one of my students.

This book is for free, you can get your copy here Little Fish.