- Do you want to know how to write, illustrate,
and publish a children's book?
Make sure you stay tuned to today's video.
(cymbals crashing)
This is Self Publishing with Dale
where you learn how to publish books that sell
and build an unstoppable author brand.
Quick question.
Do you think that publishing children's books are worth it?
Have you had some good success in publishing kids books?
I definitely would love to hear your candid thoughts
in the comments down below.
Also, stick around to the end.
For those of you that are looking for some free images,
I actually have a resource guide
I'd like to put into your hands if you just stay with me.
Now, I understand that we could be here all day and night
if I talk to you about how to write, illustrate,
and publish a children's book.
So, what I'm gonna do is gonna give you some basic tips
in an overview of what you should be doing.
Identify your target audience.
Yep, that's right.
This is the old advice I've given
to every single other type of niche.
Whether it's children's books or self help books,
fiction books or non-fiction books,
you must study your audience.
You must know who you're writing for.
You can't write for everyone.
Not all kids books are created equal.
You're not gonna have
the same type of book for a one year old
that you're gonna have for a ten year old.
There's a huge difference.
So you need to identify your target audience,
and more importantly,
let's address the elephant in the room,
hello, the parents.
The one's who are gonna purchase the book
for their kids, hopefully.
So you're gonna wanna make sure that you know your audience,
and their parents, so that way you know what you need to do
in order to make this whole thing work.
Study the niche.
So before you start
to put all of your hard earned time, energy
and money into this kids book,
you need to study your niche.
You need to study the market
and you're looking for commonalities
between full color pages to black and white,
or maybe images, no images, cartoons, realistic pictures.
You're gonna wanna make sure
you get down to the nitty gritty,
even the price point, the size of the book
to the number of pages.
This all makes a huge difference
in trying to meet the market demand.
Where they're at is where you're gonna wanna be.
And as you're studying in the niche,
you're gonna wanna make sure
that you're scraping common keywords and phrases
because those keywords, phrases,
and categories more importantly,
are gonna be really optimal in using
within your book's metadata.
Also like your title, your subscription, your series name.
The seven key words in your KDP dashboard
if you're utilizing that,
as well as your book description.
So if you're saying precisely what the other books
are saying within your niche,
then chances are you're gonna show up.
Now, I'm not telling you to plagiarize someone's content.
I'm not telling you to do swipe someone's title
and use it for your own,
I'm just merely saying,
study what has been working for the successful,
and chances are likely,
if you can say exactly what makes them discoverable
through your target audience,
then that target audience will hopefully find you in turn.
Develop the concept.
Okay, this is where I'm just kinda glossing over
a large portion of this.
As I was putting together my own children's book series
as kind of an example over on twitch.tv/selfpublish,
I had a general idea.
I wanted to have a good life lesson book
that's going to be for kids
between say the ages of say, three to five,
and it was a very basic book.
I wanted to kinda have something
that was very Doctor Seussish.
To where it had a little bit of a rhyming scheme to it.
It had lovable cartoon monkey characters,
and I love monkeys.
I wanna be able to work with something that's enjoyable.
So, when it comes to you developing your concept,
think about what resonates with you.
If you've got children,
I'm sure you probably know what resonates with them,
and you're gonna know exactly what is gonna make sense
for your concept in the long term.
Write the story.
Okay, this one's a given.
Yes, we gotta write the story, we gotta put it together.
If you happen to be doing,
like say for instance, a picture book,
that's probably gonna be a little bit different.
In some picture books do have a little bit of wording in it,
but, I'm just gonna go ahead
and just address the one's with actual content within them.
Be it something like a Dr. Seuss book of some sort,
or even like a Dora the Explorer type thing.
You gonna wanna make sure that you're refining your content,
and write it like you would a horrible book,
but just make sure you're doing it for your audience,
'cause you don't wanna have something
that is a Steven King reading level for a six year old.
It just doesn't make sense.
So, similar to what you are gonna be doing
for any normal books,
be it self help, non-fiction, fiction,
children's books are pretty much the same.
You're going to write your first draft,
you're going to go through and have it edited,
and hopefully professionally edited.
Believe it or not, there are editors out there
that work with children's books,
to make sure that the tone is perfect
for the age that you're working with.
And then, next thing is, getting it formatted and proofed,
to make sure that everything is on point.
Now, in the event that you're wanting
to really go deep on the illustrations,
and that's what we're gonna be talking about
within this video.
There are a variety of ways of getting things illustrated.
Before you do the illustration,
whether you're doing it as an artist
or you're hiring out an artist,
you're gonna need to put together a storyboard.
Now this is essentially
it works out almost like they do inside the movies.
If you ever seen any kind of storyboards,
what it's gonna do
is it's gonna set up each one of the scenes.
And you wanna have a basic description
of what it's following along inside the storyline.
You don't need to make it sexy,
it doesn't need to be perfect,
you can do stick figures and just rub sketches,
just so you understand where you're going to be going
from one page to the next.
Storyboards are a way for you to gather your thoughts
and know what ultimately your layout's gonna look like
when it's printed.
And now, illustrate the work.
Okay, so this is where I always recommend people go to
is hire a professional.
If somebody is a professional, and they're an artist,
and they know what to do,
then you're gonna wanna make sure you go to the resource.
Be ready to pony up some pretty good expenses
when it comes to getting your illustrations.
It is not cheap by any means.
You can spend hundreds of dollars
on a single children's book.
Now, I know that James Ranson, a good friend of mine,
and a friend here of the channel,
loses his mind when I bring up sites like this,
but there are freelance platforms
that actually utilize good illustrators.
That includes Fiverr, Upwork,
or any number of those type of resources.
And they could come either bargain basement,
or they could be at a high premium.
Just make sure
that if you use any type of freelance platforms,
that you see the person's portfolio
before you make any purchases.
And also, make sure that they're on the up and up.
I always take a look at their reviews,
and I try to keep an open dialogue
with any time that I use a freelance platform.
You just wanna make sure
that they're not just stealing someone's artwork,
handing it off to you, collecting your money,
and you're going, "Ahh!".
Yeah, 'cause believe it or not, it's still plagiarism.
It's still copyright theft
if you're purchasing something from a freelance artist.
Because, they could just go ahead and steal the stuff
and send it on over to you.
So you wanna make sure that you check out your resources.
And as per usual, if you do hire out,
be it through a freelance platform,
or one of my preferred ways, which is referrals.
Because if you got friends,
they hopefully will know someone
that's a good artist that you could utilize,
but, you're gonna wanna make sure
that you're not spending more than you can afford to lose.
Let's repeat this again,
and I know this is a common theme inside this channel.
Don't pony up the expenses if you can't afford to lose it,
because, the artist has nothing to lose.
As soon as they've done the work for you
and you've approved of that,
and you've sent the money their way,
it's no longer in their hands.
It's your responsibility
to make sure that this children's book is a success.
It does not fall on the artist's hands.
But then there's do-it-yourself.
If you are an artist,
or you're willing to take a stab at it,
then this might be the avenue for you.
Now, there's gonna be some exceptions to the rule.
If you're not very good and you know it,
then chances are pretty likely
you're not gonna succeed in illustrating your own book.
There is some graphic design software out there
including the likes of Photoshop,
or even the free, open source software called Gimp,
that you can utilize, and you can create things within that.
But, fair warning, again,
it comes down to looking very amateurish.
If your audience wants amateur, that's fine,
but, I think you'll know if it's a success
or it's a complete dud when you put it out into the market
and people are going and giving you one star reviews,
like I could tell this person made it in Microsoft paint.
Now, my preference is graphic design software.
I've actually used it,
and I did that for my Grumpy Gus series,
and I was able to get some of the image licensing for that.
And I was able to Frankenstein some of those images
and get it to where it was unique,
and I was able to put my own spin on it.
But I've spent hours upon hours
in working with graphic design software
to create characters like that,
and I have the patience to work through it
because it's something that's a passion of mine.
Now, for those of you out there though,
that are kind of wondering,
"Okay, what do I do with this when I have it done?"
Good friend of mine,
and also legendary animator and cartoon artist,
John Celestri, actually was able to share
just a little bit of 411.
And hopefully here very soon
I'll get him back onto the channel
to speak a little bit more on it.
John was interviewed here on this channel,
you may remember such cartoons
as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe,
or Dragon's Liar, the video game from back in the eighties.
And he was a big part of the animation
of those particular series.
So, with that being said, I actually reached out to John
and had him drop a little bit of 411 on me.
So I'm gonna paraphrase some of the information
that he was able to share with me.
So of course, you're gonna draw the content yourself.
Let's just assume that graphic design software aside,
you're drawing it and you're hand drawing all this stuff.
What do you do after you have drawn your pictures?
It's a rather simple process,
and it doesn't require a lot of fancy software
or hardware for your computer.
Believe it or not,
you can use something as simple as what John did.
He said it was a cheap
Epson model printer scanner type model.
And what he does is he goes in and he scans it.
He shots for a 400 DPI resolution or greater.
So you don't wanna go real low resolution,
because it becomes a bit pixilated if you do.
So make sure that it's a lossless quality of some sorts,
that way you're getting as fine a detail as you can,
and you're not missing out
on any of the intricacies of your artwork.
When you scan it, scan it to gray,
so that way you could go in
to any kind of graphic design software
and clean up and harden those lines,
and kick up the contrast
to where it goes into a darker color.
And then, last but not least,
if this is your intentions, you wanna have it full color,
you can colorize those pictures.
Again, you're gonna probably have to use
some type of graphic design software.
And again, you could probably be
a good illustrator of some sort,
but you're not really good with the software,
so there's gonna be a bit of a learning curve,
or, hire a professional.
All right, so now, what do we do
that we've got the illustrated content,
how do we publish it?
One of the simplest ways I'm gonna recommend
is the Kindle Kids Book Creator.
Before I mention the software,
you can hire out professional book designers,
people that are able to go in
and fix the formatting so that it looks clean and perfect.
But I've found zero issues
in using the Kindle Kids Book Creator.
And that's 100% free,
it also has other tutorials available through Amazon KDP
that you can follow
and it's a very intuitive walkthrough
when you actually use their program.
In fact, I talked a little bit about how to use
the Kindle Kids Book Creator program in this previous video
about how to publish a children's book on Amazon.
The really cool thing is, the Kindle Kids Book Creator
will make an ebook version of it,
and if you've done all of your work correctly,
when it comes to formatting,
you can also put it through KDP print
and just publish it through
the Kindle Direct Publishing platform.
I actually talked a little bit about the quality
when it comes to full color books on the KDP print
and Kindle Direct Publishing platform altogether.
But, that's for another video for another day.
I told you before,
I was gonna give you a free image resources guide,
and I'm gonna go ahead and deliver it.
If you just go ahead and meet me on over
at selfpublishingwithdale.com/image.
Hey, so before you jump off and go grab that guide,
what I'm gonna get you to do
is let's go take a look at that old video
about how to publish children's books on Amazon
so you can get a better idea
of what you need to do going forward.
I'll see you on over there.
Now that I'm an experienced self publisher,
I'm happy to share,
I've crossed one item off my life goals list,
publishing a children's picture book.