The book, Kitty-Kitty is complete, published and available for purchase on www.Amazon.com.

Writing this book with my friend, Vicki, was a great adventure.  The biggest challenge was the photography.  Neither one of us has that skill and my cameras are not the quality required to capture fast action “cat moves.” But we made the executive decision to keep the costs down and to do the photography ourselves – admittedly with less-than-stunning results at times.

When the camera on my Android didn’t result in sufficient quality, I tried taking pictures with several Sony Cyber-Shot digital cameras.  We took some photos at Vicki’s house and some at mine, wanting to spare our kitties any travel or disruption in their routines (kitties hate disruption!).  As you can imagine, depending on the time of day, weather and other factors, the lighting, shading and distortions were way too varied and uncontrollable.  I did my best to adjust things in Photoshop, and many times we had to re-take the photos.  Capturing the same or similar “poses” or actions was almost impossible at that point.  So this was a huge frustration.

I used Amazon “www.CreateSpace.com” to publish the book, mainly because www.LULU.com, which is the program I used in the past, has restrictions on book size for square books and we had settled on that size. The manufacturing cost is very low at under $5 per book, so that is a big plus for our personal budgets. The lower the cost, the more books we can afford to buy for friends and relatives.

However, I am disappointed in the print quality from that source.  So after publishing on CreateSpace, I scoured the internet for other options and ran across www.MIXBOOK.com. Here I was able to create the same book in glossy, hardcover 8.5″ x 8.5″ size for a manufacturing cost of $37 (using a limited time only 50% discount offer). I am waiting for that book to be delivered.  Right now, I’m not offering that book for sale, but if it looks marvelous, I’ll consider offering it on my website for sale.  So stay tuned.

But after all, this is a personal project, not a commercial venture, and our goal was to honor our pets with something cute.  Mission accomplished.  I think the CreateSpace version of the book will be fun and nice-looking.