{"id":921,"date":"2026-07-05T08:58:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T08:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/?p=921"},"modified":"2026-07-05T08:59:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T08:59:46","slug":"921","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/?p=921","title":{"rendered":"When a cat makes you publish you’re first picture book"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I ship software for a living. Backlogs, pipelines, the occasional 2 a.m. rollback. So the last thing I expected to hold in my hands this year was a children\u2019s picture book<\/strong> with my name on the cover. Yet here we are \u2014 my first book is out, in four languages, and a cat is entirely to blame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It started as a joke<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The idea was almost too silly to say out loud: what if a cat jumped straight into a famous painting?<\/em> Not a poster. The actual canvas. One curious tuxedo cat, one leap, and suddenly she\u2019s standing in the middle of Bruegel\u2019s village square while two kids dive in after her. Twelve masterpieces, arranged from Bruegel to Matisse, so the book quietly turns into a first little tour of art history without ever admitting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about it. And when a software person can\u2019t stop thinking about something, they do the reasonable thing: they start building it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Falling into Van Gogh<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Building a book like it\u2019s a product<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Turns out a picture book has a build pipeline too. Every spread became a little system: one big art idea, a read-aloud story, a fun fact, a \u201ctry it yourself\u201d, and an original illustration painted in that master\u2019s own technique \u2014 AI-assisted, art-directed by hand, never a reproduction. Text and art were composed with HTML and CSS and rendered straight to print-ready PDF. It felt suspiciously like front-end work, except the \u201cbrowser\u201d was a printing press and there was no hotfix after release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And oh, the print details. Bleed is 3.175 mm, not 3. Text has to stay a quarter inch from the trim or the previewer politely refuses to let you continue. Full-bleed spreads that cross the spine look \u201cwrong\u201d in preview and perfectly fine in print. I learned all of this the way I learn everything \u2014 by getting it wrong first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One cat, four names<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Then I got greedy and made it multilingual. Because a good cat travels, she changed her name at every border: Nel<\/strong> in Dutch, Felix<\/strong> in English, Filou<\/strong> in French, Mimi<\/strong> in German \u2014 the kids got local names too. Same adventure, four editions, four times the proofreading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The four language editions side by side<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The final boss: KDP<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Publishing on Amazon KDP is its own little dungeon. Trim sizes, premium colour, category trees that somehow don\u2019t have an \u201cart\u201d box for a children\u2019s art book, an AI-content disclosure, a proof copy, and that last, very deliberate click on Publish<\/em>. I did Dutch first as a pilot, checked a printed proof, and then let the other three follow. Eight products \u2014 paperback and Kindle \u00d7 four languages \u2014 went live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shipping software gives you a dashboard and a green checkmark. Shipping a book gives you a small cardboard box on your doorstep, a real object that a four-year-old can hold upside down. I\u2019ll be honest: the box wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What it taught me<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Mostly this: the discipline that ships software also ships stories. Break it into systems, sweat the boring specs, keep a locked style, review ruthlessly, and don\u2019t be afraid to press publish. The tools were new; the mindset was the same one I use every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is out now on Amazon as paperback and Kindle, in all four languages. Flip through a free preview and pick your edition on the\u00a0Children Books<\/a>\u00a0page. And if you spot the cat hiding on every spread \u2014 that was always the whole point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I ship software for a living. Backlogs, pipelines, the occasional 2 a.m. rollback. So the last thing I expected to hold in my hands this year was a children\u2019s picture book with my name on the cover. Yet here we are \u2014 my first book is out, in four languages, and a cat is entirely to blame. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":924,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=921"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":928,"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921\/revisions\/928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mityjohn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}