Someone in a kidmin Facebook group posted their fundraising idea and I adopted it. So now I’m on Amazon.
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I reimagined the nativity story into a poem and had our children illustrate it. I only wish I had a scanner (for better picture quality) and a lot more time to put it together, but I’m getting over my shyness and sharing it with you.
The link above and this link right here are Amazon affiliate links. That means, I get a commission if you purchase through those links and since I’m the author, I get royalties, too. All profits, royalties, affiliate commissions from the sale of this book goes to Kingdom Kids to help us run our ministry. That means money to help with our outreach and family events.
As far as fundraisers go, it’s a good one. It lives on Amazon so we’ll get royalties every time a copy sells. By buying author copies and selling them myself, we get a bigger profit. Writing the poem was easy enough. Getting the illustrations from the kids took longer. It took maybe 3 weeks to gather all the illustrations together.
If you want to do this fundraiser, here are some things I learned:
- Dedicate an entire Sunday for the kids to illustrate. Read the poem to them and have your volunteers (who you’ve prepared beforehand) to help kids brainstorm ideas for illustrations, give suggestions and guidelines, and explain the part of the poem they’re illustrating.
- Outline everything with markers. Fine line markers would work beautifully. Pencils just don’t show up well.
- Speaking of pencils, instruct kids to draw lightly. Some kids are heavy handed with pencils and those marks don’t always erase completely.
- Use high quality crayons, colored pencils, or markers to fill in the illustrations. This would most help with kids who are light-handed on coloring.
- Use a good scanner. I didn’t have one and had to use an app, losing the white background in the process of “scanning” the illustrations.
- Take time to learn, explore, and practice on CreateSpace, the site Amazon uses for print publishing. I pulled all-nighters figuring it out since I was under at time crunch. If you have someone who knows how and can do this part for you, even better!
- Ask someone else to edit your work. Again, since I was in a time crunch, I didn’t ask someone to look it over and I had some panic attacks over grammar and word choice.
- Make sure you include the necessary parts of a copyright page, especially if you used direct Bible verse quotes. Not all versions are public domain, and they all have different rules and copyright wording. Do your research and due diligence.
- Buy author copies and sell them directly to your congregation, especially the parents of the kids whose illustrations made it in the book.
- Have a book signing to make it exciting! Take backorders if you run out of copies. Buying author copies don’t give you royalties, but gives you more profit when you sell the copies yourself.
On Amazon, our book is priced at $14.99. This makes the royalties worth the time and effort we put in to create the book. In person, I sell the book for $10 and gives us more profit so if you know me IRL, skip the online shopping and buy a book from me please!
I also added family discussion questions in the book so parents can use this book to help kids dive deeper into the Bible and come up with practical ways to show the love of God to others.
Here’s the link once again: God’s Special Christmas Plan
