NATIVE BOOK PUBLISHING - HOW THEY HELPED ME PUBLISH MY FIRST COMIC BOOK

. In June, 2024, I published my first comic book, 'Laughter, Love, and Legacy: Three Stories About Life', which as the title partly suggests, contains three self-contained stories focusing on certain aspects of life, be they comedic, romantic, or historical. But before I published my comic book, I had to write a script for these stories and work with several artists in order to bring each story to life. Then once I did that, afterwards, I checked everything we produced and hired a company to help me publish it. The company I hired is called, Native Book Publishing, and they're a professional team of specialists who help people publish and market their books on Amazon and many other platforms. Or can they? What now follows are some of the things I learned while working with Native Book Publishing.

Communication: In retrospect, I'd say everyone I spoke to associated with Native Book Publishing was kind and courteous, ranging from my initial point of contact, a salesman named Bruno, all the way to the polite guy who was assigned to be my project manager, Paul. At first, our communication was with the use of their online messaging service, which I used to find out what they had to offer, and then once I decided to hire them, it was a combination of WhatsApp messages and calls, regular phone calls, as well as the online project management software, Basecamp.

Admittedly, there were a couple of times our communication became a little bit muddled, mainly when Paul was trying to explain to me how his team had to resize my comic book so it would print correctly (via the Amazon KDP platform). But aside from that, I don't really have many complaints about their communication, except that Paul did have a tendency to call after 5pm, which for me, was sometimes inconvenient as I was generally tired from my day job.

Advice: What I found to be the most helpful thing about their service was what I learned about publishing books online. One evening, Paul told me about all of the different platforms that could possibly publish my comic book, such as Apple Books, Google Books, and Amazon, before explaining to me both the positive and negative aspects of each one. Well, did you know that Google Books has a larger reach than Amazon? Even though Amazon themselves are one of the largest online platforms that sell both digital and physical products. I didn't. Not until Paul told me, anyway, and for that, I am very grateful.

I likewise found their proofreading service to be very helpful too. Not only were they rather informative about the genre of my comic book, but on top of that, they also helped me avoid any potential legal issues regarding copyrighted images.

Implementation: I previously mentioned that the communication between me and Paul got a little bit muddled when he tried to explain how his team had to resize my comic book so it would print correctly (via the Amazon KDP platform). But why? Why was our conversation muddled? Was it because I overlooked the fact that certain sections of my text were aligned outside of the redefined margins? Or was it because Paul was unable to explain to me some of the terms associated with this procedure? Terms like bleed, trim, and other such terminology I've since forgotten.

Along similar lines, I'm not quite sure why my cover was misaligned upon its initial upload. Saying so because I designed the cover myself and sent it to Paul and his team in the dimensions and format they requested. In any event, regardless of these two minor problems, at the end of the day, everything was resolved to a satisfactory standard, and the only thing we lost was a little bit of time.

In conclusion, I'd say that I'm fairly pleased with the service provided by Native Book Publishing as they managed to digitize, layout, and publish my comic book, 'Laughter, Love, and Legacy: Three Stories About Life', on Amazon and Apple Books. So would I recommend them to someone else? Yes, I suppose I would. But in the same breath, I would also suggest checking out their official website to see what they have on offer.