The word “venture” derives from the word “adventure,” and my wife and I went on one! It’s not your typical emprise. We didn’t explore a cavern we just discovered on our property or develop a new color or make Tex-Mex sushi—although … one of those is feasible.
We just published our first book. It’s a budget planner and we did it together. Over the course of a few days we came up with the plan, developed the basic design, chose and edited the stock art, and posted it on Amazon KDP. It’s our first foray into this kind of thing.
The design derives directly from a relative’s method of monthly budgeting, and we’ve done our best to make it as intuitive as possible. She has a system of color coding the different months and cutting off the corners to make the planner easily searchable. Taking her as our inspiration, we chose bright, happy, pastel colors in the general vein of what she likes, and staggered them in order to easily differentiate the months. We chose photos that she would enjoy, editing the colors in each photo to match its month.
I’ve used Pexels.com to find stock photos to beautify the pages. We sought out beautiful images that expressed the season and had elements close to the month’s color. Ideally, they held a peaceful, pleasant quality that will enhance the time that folks spend in our planner. We edited each photograph heavily to mesh with the month’s theme color and our design limitations. Me being the over-achiever, I digested around 250 images, but only chose 17 for inside the book. I composited the cover from 5 images, seeking to create a scene of sublime connection. I hope that as we created this together that it would inspire other couples to grapple with budgeting together too.
Shanna has been experimenting with Kindle Direct Publishing for a few months now under the pseudonym “Lydian Violet.” She shepherded this planner through that process and it is now available!
This budget planner is now the first book that we have done fully together. Shanna worked with me on the design process and I worked with her on the publishing process. We think it’s better than either of us would have done separately. Go ahead and peek inside it to see why we are so excited about it!
So, this venture is done…. What will our next one be? What will your next adventure be?
pictogifts.com 