Picture Book Masterclass: Write, Illustrate, and Publish Your Story

1. Class Trailer: Hi, I'm Christine Nisiama, author, illustrator, and artist at Mike Good Studios. I've taught over 25 online art classes with more than 125,000 students. Two of my earliest skill share classes are also my most popular. Picture books one, write your story, and picture books two Illustrate your story. These two classes were originally created in 2014 and taken by over 14,000 students. They have now been revised, updated, and combined into this class picture book master class. Write, Illustrate and publish your story. I wanted to remake my two most popular online classes because I made those classes almost ten years ago, and a lot has changed since then. Not only is the audio and video quality of those two classes poor compared to today's standards, but I've also learned an enormous amount since then. I've published eight books with four of those published by Scholastic. This new master class has been updated and expanded with everything I've learned, including brand new information on publishing and self publishing. Using my picture book, we are fun guy as an example. I'll show you how to mold your story idea into a completed picture book. Everything from writing your story idea, refining your manuscript, designing your characters, drawing your storyboards, crafting a book dummy, and creating the final art. From there, I'll show you how to finish your book, whether you want to focus on traditional publishing by submitting your book dummy to publishers or self publishing by designing, distributing and promoting your own indie book. Plus, there's a bonus Resources PDF download that includes all the links and digital files referenced in this class, including the further reading list and storyboard templates. And one last thing. The content from this class is also available as a printed book and eBook. You can search Mike Could Make a book on Skillshare or Amazon and find links to both products in the class description and Resources PDF. Either would be a great addition to refer to as you go through this course. By the end of this class, you'll have everything you need to write, illustrate, and publish your own picture book. So, come on, let's jump right in. 2. Intro to Picture Books: Intro to picture books. What is a picture book? Let's start at the beginning and define some terms. A picture book combines words and pictures in a book format to tell a story to young children. The target audience is children from ages two to eight. Picture books versus illustrated books. A picture book is different than an illustrated book such as a middle grade chapter book. In a picture book, the illustrations are vital to the story and a text cannot be fully understood without them. In an illustrated book, the illustrations are supplemental to a text that can stand on its own. Wildwood by Colin Malloy and Carson Ellis is an example of an illustrated book. It's structured like a chapter book. The illustrations are not necessarily on every page and are sometimes small spot illustrations. Where the Wild Things are by Maurice Sendak is an example of a picture book. In this book, there is less text and the illustrations partner with the words to help tell the full story instead of just reiterating the story. What's the purpose of children's books? Picture books are the first stage of learning to read for children. They are intended to be read together, one person who can read and one person who cannot read. As the parent or older reader reads the words, the younger child can read the pictures while listening to the words, learning the meaning of words and language. Early reader picture books can also help a child learn to read on their own. Picture books place value on rich storytelling and the joy of reading. They can be fun, silly, educational, deep, and thought provoking. What is not the purpose of children's books? A picture book should not aim to overtly teach lessons or morals. Children understand more than adults typically give them credit for. Rich stories inherently deal with values and character. It isn't necessary to blatantly state a moral at the end, and then little Johnny knew that sharing his toys was the right thing to do. If you want to make a picture book, your job is to be a writer and illustrator, not a teacher. Don't begin this process with the intention of teaching a lesson. Start with the intention of telling a good story. Quality storytelling leaves room for readers to piece together and interpret the story's meaning themselves. Picture book audiences. Child and adult readers. Your primary picture book audience is a child 2-8. But the person reading the book to that child could be a parent, grandparent, teacher, librarian, any adult or older child who can read. The adults are the ones buying your book, so it's wise to make the book appealing to them as well. Readability. A picture book should be fairly easy to read out loud. This doesn't necessarily mean simple. It's more about rhythm, flow, and how the words sound out loud. We'll cover more of this in Module six and seven. For now, your goal should be to write a story an adult won't mind reading again and again. Words and pictures working together. The most important aspect of a picture book is how the words and pictures work together. The example here shows how the words and pictures can work together to tell a complete story. In my book, We Are fungi, the written text tells one part of the story, the scientific non fiction side, while the illustrations tell another part of the story, a more fictional magical side. Together, the words and pictures tell one complete story that could not be fully understood without both working together. This partnership allows the adult child and book to all be active participants in the storytelling. Types of children's books. Now that we've gone over the basics of picture books, let's look at the eight different types of children's books. As you read through, think about which type of book your story may be best suited for. Board books. The target audience is zero to 2-years-old. An example is Mu B, la, la, la by Sandra Boyton. And the average word count is less than 30 words. Board books are written for very young children who can't yet read. They are made out of thick cardboard pages to withstand the heavy handling and chewing of babies and young toddlers. Concept books. The target audience is ages two to 5-years-old. The average word count is less than 300. An example is quiet loud by Leslie Petrocelli. Concept books introduce children to a theme such as letters, numbers, or shapes. Sometimes they tell a story and sometimes they simply list items within the concept. Picture books. The target audience are ages two to eight. Average word count is 400 to 1,000 words, and an example is Lama Lama red pajama by Anna Dowdy. The narrative story becomes more important in picture books. A picture book combines words and pictures to tell a story together. The pictures are necessary for the full story to be understood. A child can read the pictures as their parent teacher reads the words, learning the meaning of words and language. Non fiction picture books. The target audience is three to 12-years-old. Average word count is four to 1,000 words. And an example is the big book of bugs by Yvel Zomer. These books introduce children to new educational concepts in a fun and easy to understand way. They lean towards the informational, but also often include some sort of narrative story as well. Wordless picture books. Target audience is two to 12-years-old. Average word count is zero. An example is journey by Aaron Becker. These stories are told completely by illustrations. There are no words. The lack of written text allows the child to expand and interpret the full story in their mind to go along with the pictures. It also allows children who can't yet read to read a book entirely on their own. Early readers, target audience is five to 8-years-old. Average word count is 2000 and an example is green eggs and ham by doctor Seuss. Also known as easy readers or beginner books, these books help children learn to read on their own, growing their confidence and abilities. These books have more text and are often longer than picture books, but still have illustrations on every page. Early reader graphic novels. The target audience is five plus years. Average word count is 2000, and an example is Nar WA Unicorn of the Sea by Ben Clayton. These books are told in comic form with pages broken up into panels and dialogue often in speech bubbles. They help children learn to read on their own. It's perfect for more visual minded children and reluctant readers. And finally, we have chapter books. Target audience is seven to ten years. Average word count is 4,000 to 12,000, and an example is Ivy and bean by Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall. Chapter books are structured in paragraphs and chapters similar to adult novels. There are illustrations throughout the book, though not necessarily on every page. The illustrations can be full page, half page, or small spots. The pictures mainly reiterate what is communicated in the text. 3. Elements of a Picture Book: Elements of a picture book. Picture book standards, page size. The size of a picture book varies widely depending on the book type, age range, and how much money you or your publisher are willing to spend. The important thing to consider is that if you plan on submitting your book to publishers or self publishing and selling your book through an online marketplace like Amazon Ingram, you'll have to adhere to the standards they accept. You don't have to decide on the final size of your book until you begin making the sample spreads covered in Module 18. For now, you can begin thinking about whether you want your book to be formatted as landscape, meaning horizontal, portrait, meaning vertical or square. Start paying attention to how existing books are oriented. Page count. A picture book is typically 32 pages long. This is standard because in offset printing, the pages are printed in multiples of four called a signature, and then folded and bound together into a book. If your books page is not a multiple of four, meaning 28, 32, or 36, for example, blank pages are added until it is a multiple of four. This is why you often see blank pages in books, even adult novels, they're filling out the signatures. This multiple afore rule goes for all types of books, except for board books or spiral bound books, which are not printed in signatures. What happens if you create a book not following this rule? It's not a huge deal. You'll just have an extra 1-3 blank pages in the front or back of your book. Also keep in mind, especially if self publishing, more pages means more expensive printing. Some picture books are longer than 32 pages, but most fit within this guideline. Word count. Word count varies greatly depending on what type of children's book you're making. But here are some general guidelines. A board book is less than 300 words. Concept books are less than 300. Picture books are 400 to 1,000. Early readers are around 2000 and chapter books are 4,000 to 12,000. Picture book anatomy. Now let's look at the parts of a picture book. I'm going to use a storyboard layout so you can see all the elements of the book in one flat image. Front Matter. First, we have the front matter. This includes everything in the book before the actual story starts, which is usually around page four or six. The front matter can include any or all of the following, full title, half title, author, illustrator, dedication, publisher, copyright info, editor, art director, and publication date. Pages. This is a single page. As I mentioned before, there are typically 32 pages in a picture book. Spreads. Two pages together form a spread as seen here. The number of spreads in a book can vary depending on how the front matter is laid out and how many pages are necessary. A book with 12 to 16 spreads is normal, but it can be more or less. Gutter. The gutter is the place in the middle of each spread where the two pages meet the binding. When illustrating a picture book, the gutter has to be taken into consideration to avoid things getting clipped or lost in the gutter. Back matter. The back matter includes the author's notes if there are any. Usually, non fiction picture books will have an author's note to further explain some of the material or history in the book or how the author researched the subject. End papers. The end papers are the two pages in the front and back of the book, usually glued to the binding. In papers can be solid colored paper or have patterns or illustrations printed on them. Artistic influences. All artists are influenced by other artists. It's helpful to be aware of who or what you are influenced by both broadly as an artist and specifically with this book that you're working on right now. Throughout the process when you feel stuck or lost, which will happen. You'll have your list of influential books and artists to return to. They'll help jog your memory of what your original idea was, spark your imagination for what to do, and inspire new ideas and paths forward. Not sure who or what your artistic influences are. Think back to the books you loved as a kid. What was your favorite book to read as a child? What memories of books do you have? Why do you remember them? The illustrations, the story, the words. Revisit and read those stories again if you can, and add them to your list. You can also find a list of award winning and timeless picture books at the end of this course if you need somewhere to start. This influence list doesn't have to just include children's picture bookmakers. I often include painters, graphic novelists, and musicians as well. Creating a music playlist that fits the mood I'm shooting for with a book has been especially helpful for me with my most recent book. Listening to it while I make the final art helps remind me of the essence of the book. As you're making your book, add any songs you hear that feel like your book to this playlist. It will continue to grow and evolve as your book does. 4. Illustration Terminology: Illustration terminology. Before we jump into the first steps of crafting your story, there are some illustration terms and concepts you should know about. Decage an example is cockatoo by Quentin Blake. Decage means the disparity between word and image, meaning the words say one thing while the pictures say another. Here in cockatoo, a man is looking for his birds. The words on this spread say he climbed a ladder and flashed his torch around the attic. They weren't there. But the reader can clearly see that there are six cockatoos behind the suitcases. Children love to be able to point out the difference between reading the true story with the pictures and the false words in the story. Composition. An example is found in Mina by Matthew Forsythe. Composition refers to how the different elements of a picture book spread are arranged in relation to each other. In general, the illustrations in a picture book should lead you through the book from left to right on each spread and from page to page. This can be done subtly by organizing the elements in your composition from left to right. Or it can be done more obviously by having a character run across the page from left to right, for example. In this spread from Mina, almost every element is composed to guide the reader's eyes from left to right. We'll talk about how to do that more in Module 16. Color and whitespace. An example is Belly button Book by Sandra Boyton. Color and white space can quickly communicate emotion and mood. Whitespace is also a way to focus the reader's attention on a specific element. In Belly button Book, pastel colors set a fun, light hearted mood, while the use of white space calls out the little Hippo right when his time to speak comes. Typography. An example is Bob the Artist by Marian Ducharz. Because the combination of words and pictures is the essence of picture books, typography is a vital element of their design and can communicate a great deal about the story. The text can be typeset in traditional stanzas like poetry, or it can be more fluidly aligned with the illustrations, becoming part of the picture itself. In Bob the artist, the typography is all hand painted, integrating it into the overall artwork and adding an extra punch of emotion. Perspective. Example, they all saw a cat by Brendan Wenzel. The chosen perspective or point of view of an illustration can also communicate important pieces of the story. If the reader looks down on a character, that character is perceived as timid, doubtful, or scared. If the reader looks up at a character, the character is perceived as brave, excited, or determined. Cropping the artwork to a close shot or zooming out to a wide shot also affect the mood. The book, They All Saw a cat is all about perspective shifts and each spread shows the cat from a different animal's point of view. Here in this example, you can see an overhead shot of the cat from a bird's perspective. Style. An example is Oh, no George by Chris Hatton. Picture books exist in every style imaginable. The art can be realistic or abstract, silly, or serious, and everything in between. There is no best style for a picture book, and I have a very firm belief that there is no right way to make a piece of art. It's all completely subjective, and all you can do is make the art that feels good to you. The spread here from Oh no George shows a bold graphic style using bright, solid colors and strong shapes. Don't go too deep into personal artistic style in this class. But if you find yourself getting hung up on how to draw in your own way, I'd recommend checking out my other skill share class, sketchbook to style. I go much deeper there into what makes up on an artistic style and how to develop your own. Mediums. An example is Hank finds and egg by Rebecca Dudley. Just like style, there is no required medium in picture books. You can use whatever art materials you like to create your illustrations. Picture books commonly use pencil, pen, ink, watercolor, oil, acrylics, collage. Almost all picture books use digital mediums like Photoshop, whether for setting, type, art editing or painting, the whole thing digitally. There's no need to just choose one medium. Many picture books use a combination of different mediums. Some books really think outside the box like Hank finds an egg. In this book, the artwork was all created by hand using felt, textiles and other physical materials. The scene was then photographed as flat illustrations and printed as spreads in a book. There are no rules. 5. Plot Structure: Plot structure. The three act plot structure. The three act plot is the most common plot structure for any type of story, whether a book, movie or TV show. This structure has a beginning, middle, and end called acts. In Act one, the characters and conflict are introduced. In Act two, the action begins. The main character reaches their low point and the action or tension reaches its climax. Finally, in Act three, there is a resolution where the tension is somewhat resolved and loose ends are wrapped up. Picture book plot structures. The three act plot is commonly used in picture books, but there are a number of other plot structures that are often used instead of the three act plot or in combination with it. Let's look at some of those now. Classic. This is the common three act plot with a clear beginning, middle, and end. A very basic and common three plot picture book story goes something like this. The story's main character has a problem. They encounter three obstacles or attempt three times to solve the problem. The character is demoralized and hits their low point, which leads to one final attempt to solve the problem. Then they successfully solve the problem and the story resolves. The word problem here could also be replaced with desire or want. As the character strives to fill that desire. Every character must want something. A 32 page picture book, the story's resolution usually happens on pages 30 through 31 with a final wrap up on page 32. A good example of this classic plot structure is where the wild things are by Maurice Sendak. In Act one, Max causes trouble at home and is sent to bed without supper. This is the introduction. This leads to Act two when Max's room shifts, and he is now in the magical island of monsters called Wild Things. Soon Max becomes king, this is the rising action, lets the power go to his head and sends the wild things to bed without supper. Max then enters his low point and feels lonely. He decides to go home, but the wild things won't let him go and throw tantrums. This is the climax. In Act three, Max sails home, slips into his bedroom and finds his hot supper waiting for him. This is the resolution. Secular. A secular plot structure begins and ends at the same place. This can be achieved in many different ways and can be overt or subtle. It could be that the story begins and ends in the same setting after a journey in between, or a character could look the same at the beginning and end with changes in between, or the book could begin and end with the same sentence. A good example of circular plot structure is, if you give a mouse a cookie by Laura Numerov and Felicia Bond, the story begins by giving a cookie to a mouse. The mouse asks for a glass of milk to drink with it and then keeps requesting more and more things as the story goes on. By the end of the story, the mouse asks for a glass of milk and then finally a cookie to go with it, coming full circle back to where the story began. Concept. A concept plot prioritizes the introduction of exploration of a topic or category to children. These books can have a narrative story or can be mostly informational. A great example of a concept book is Shapes Trilogy by Mac Barnett and John lassen, including triangle, circle and square. These three books each have a narrative story, but their focus is on teaching young kids about concepts of shapes, triangles, circles and squares, and the concept of size, small, medium, and large. Cumulative. In a cumulative plot, each time a new event occurs, the previous events in the story are repeated. This leads to a very predictable book, which young readers love as they can guess what comes next. But the author usually adds a twist at the end to break the repetition and add surprise. A good example of a cumulative book is the napping House by Audrey Wood and Don Wood. The story begins with a house where everyone is sleeping. Then a bed, a granny, a child, a dog, and on and on repeating where everyone is sleeping as each sleeping thing, person, or animal is added. Eventually, a flea who is not sleeping is added, breaking the pattern and waking everyone up. The pattern then reverses and the story takes us back through each cumulative thing. Mirror. In a mirror plot, the second half of the story echoes what occurred in the first half of the story. An example of a mirror book is a sick day for Amos Magee by Philip C Stead and Aaron E Stead. The story details Amos Magee's typical day working at the zoo as he visits the elephant first, then the tortoise, the penguin, the rhino, and lastly, the owl. But one day, Amos wakes up sick and can't go to the zoo. So the animals board the bus and visit Amos in the same order as before. Elephant, tortoise, penguin, rhino, and owl. Mirroring the first half of the book, parallel. In a parallel plot, two story lines take place at the same time. This is sometimes called a dual narrative. Usually, the story lines are related or similar and often come together somehow in the end. A good example of a parallel plot is Was Mommy by Beverly DonoFrio and Barbara McClintock. This book follows the two story lines of a girl and mouse searching for their mother at bedtime. They are both in their separate bedrooms and begin looking in corresponding rooms for their mothers. The girl looks in the human kitchen while the mouse looks in the mouse kitchen and so on. The artwork shows these story lines happen simultaneously on the same page. Reversal. In a reversal plot, the character and or plot is portrayed in a way that is opposite from what you would expect. It flips some common concept on its head and considers what the reversal would be like. A great example of a reversal book is children make terrible pets by Peter Bram. A normal picture book about pets would be the story of a child having an animal for a pet. But this book shows the reverse a story of an animal having a child for a pet. In this case, a bear attempts to bring a little boy home and keep it as a pet. Experimenting with your plot structure. Once you begin writing your story, it can be helpful to look back at these plot structures and try reorganizing your story in different ways to see what works best. One story can be told in any number of plot structures, and experimenting is the best way to find the one or combination that fits your story. You also don't have to follow any of these plot structures, or you can follow one very loosely. These structures don't have to be cages for your story. You might find they offer nice, tidy scaffolds for your story. But if it's not working, remember, you can always break free and do something completely new. But 6. Storyboarding Your Plot: How to storyboard your plot? You can use a storyboard format to help you expand your story idea out into a full plot or test your existing plot to see if it fits in a typical picture book format. It works best if you work in a sketchbook, notebook, or piece of paper. First, draw a chart with 16 squares, four across and four down, like in this example. Each of these boxes represent one spread in your book. Remember, 16 spreads equals 32 pages. Now in each box, write out a simple plot point from your story. Something short like Oni walked to the dog park. Do this for each plot point in your story, filling out the story to fit in these 16 boxes. Don't expect to get this right on the first try. It takes a lot of experimenting and moving things around to find the right order and paste for a story. Take your time and be patient. Make as many plot storyboards as you need to mold your story into the picture book format. Another helpful exercise is to cut up your plot storyboard and move around the spreads on your desk, allowing you to try new arrangements and make small adjustments without redrawing the whole storyboard. After you've gotten a grasp on the order and pace of your plot, you can begin to refine the outline by expanding the content in each box. Take your most recent storyboard plot and redraw it. But this time, write a little more detail about what happens instead of just a plot point. This is a great way to begin the actual writing process because it helps you plan and focus on the plot rather than on the individual words or specifics. It also feels low pressure and not as daunting as starting on a blank page. Example, plot storyboard. If you're struggling with expanding and pacing out your story, it can be helpful to look at a typical plot outline of a picture book and think about how the pieces of your story could fit together. I've created a sample picture book plot storyboard below with the pieces of a classic plot structure. But please keep in mind, your story does not have to fit into this structure. This is just an example and is one of many, many options. These are not rules, and not every picture book will or should fit into this outline. But this is a good place to start if it's your first time writing a picture book. Try making a new plot storyboard, fitting your plot points into my version of the plot structure above. Does this help you pace out your story? How could you rearrange or change the structure to better work with your story? What would happen if you tried out one of the other plot structures? If you had only one obstacle in mind, what could two other obstacles be? Or if you have three, what would happen if you only had one? Experiment, experiment, experiment. And remember, writing a story takes time. It's not going to all fall into place without you putting in the time and effort to get there. Enjoy the ride, be curious and see what happens. 7. Point of View: Point of view. Point of view has a major impact on how your story is told, and a change of point of view can drastically change your story. As you are working on writing your story, a good exercise is to rewrite it in a different point of view, just to see what changes. You might be surprised. Let's take a look at the three most common types of point of view. Third person single point of view. Third person single is the most common point of view in picture books. Here, an outside narrator, meaning not a character in the story, tells the story from one character's perspective. The narrator only knows what that character already knows as it happens. If we were writing a story about a dog named One, an example of third person single point of view could be One looked out into the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. The narrator is an outside voice and is simply describing what Oni sees or does. Third person omniscient point of view. I third person omniscient, an outside narrator, not a character in the story, tells the story. But this narrator knows the story from multiple or all characters perspectives. Using our dog story, an example could be Oni looked out into the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. His friend Lucy was hiding behind the bushes. See how this narrator can see more than the main character can? This narrator knows and can tell us that Lucy is hiding in the bushes, even though Oni does not know that she is there. The narrator can see everything and knows everything. First person point of view. In First person, the narrator is an active character in the story and uses the word I and we in telling the story. This allows us to write more deeply about the emotion of the character, but also limits us to only write about what is experienced by that particular character. Using our dog story, an example could be, I Looked out into the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. Now One is our main character and the narrator. The story is told from Onie's perspective in his own voice. Second person point of view. Second person is the most rare point of view. Here, the narrator addresses the reader of the book, using the word. This draws the reader into the story as a participant or even a character. It can be difficult to tell a story in second person and is almost always paired with another point of view. But it's an interesting experiment to try. Using our dogs story, here are a few different examples. You looked out into the beautiful mountains and saw One. I looked out into the beautiful mountains and saw you. One looked out into the beautiful mountains and saw you. One looked out into the beautiful mountains but did not see you. Now the reader is involved in the story and integrated into the action and events. Experimenting with point of view. All of those examples tell the same plot point quite differently. Some point of views feel factual and straightforward. So feel emotional and individual, and some feel kind of creepy. Try rewriting your story using a different point of view and see how it changes the way your story is told or how it feels. Which fits your story best? You never know until you try. 8. Rhythm + Rhyme: Rhythm and rhyme. You don't have to rhyme. During lectures while attending Society of children's book writers and Illustrators conferences, I heard over and over from editors that they decline almost all rhyming manuscripts they receive. They reported this wasn't because rhyming books are unpopular or unwanted. Everyone loves rhyming books. It's because rhyming is hard, and most people are really bad at it. I'm still studying and learning the elements of rhyming, so I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on it. But these editors shared with us the big problem with rhyme. If you haven't deeply studied rhyme, it's easy to get caught up in finding words that rhyme and changing your story or sentence to fit the rhyme instead of using rhyme to enhance your story. Then you have a book that rhymes, but a story that is bland or awkward to read. My suggestion if you are new to making picture books and have not already studied rhyming, would be to not try to write your first book in Rhyme. Instead, you can focus on learning all the other elements of writing a successful story. Then once you have a grasp on that, you can move on to studying Rhyme and work on that with your next book. This is just my personal suggestion, though. If you feel you can make a rhyming book or you just want to give it a try, then go for it. Just be sure you prioritize telling a good story first. Either way, rhythm is still important. Whether you're rhyming or not, you still need to think about rhythm when writing your story. Here's a tip from the Rhythm king, doctor Seuss. Shorten paragraphs and sentences, then shorten words. Use verbs, let the kids fill in the adjectives. Okay. Let's go over some of the elements of terminology of rhythm and rhyme. Beats. As you're writing, think about the beats of your sentences. A beat is a heavily stressed syllable. Beats are more emphasized and when spoken aloud, they are naturally pronounced louder for longer. Unstressed or lightly stressed syllables fall between the beats. Here's an example. The heavy beats here are shown in bulb. The dog ran down the stairs. Rhythm and mood. The number of syllables between beats is what gives a sentence its rhythm. Different rhythms have different moods. Shorter sentences with fewer syllables between beats create a quicker rhythm. This implies a fun, energetic mood. Longer sentences with more syllables between beats create a slower rhythm. This implies a more relaxed, sleepy mood. Rhythm Patterns. Let's take a quick look at the four most common rhythm patterns, ambic, Trochi dactyl and nipest. Iambic. This rhythm pattern is a light stress followed by a heavy stress. It sounds like da dum da dum da dum. An example would be a piece of cake, Trochi. This rhythm pattern is a heavy stress followed by a light stress. It sounds like dum da, TamdaTamda. An example would be double trouble. Dactyl. This rhythm pattern is a heavy stress followed by two light stresses. It sounds like dumb, data, dumb, data, dumb data. An example would be hicory diory. And lastly, napst. This rhythm pattern is two light stresses, followed by a heavy stress. It sounds like da da dum, da da dum, da da dum. An example is Twas the night. Poetry techniques. Writing a picture book can be similar to writing poetry. Even if you aren't rhyming your story, you can still utilize poetry techniques. I'm going to go through and explain some of the most common techniques. You probably already know most of these but may not have thought to consciously put them into your writing. Using these poetry techniques can make reading more fun for both the adult and the child. Children also enjoy the repetition and repeating it themselves. Ana manipa a word that represents a sound. Examples are lang, bang, swoosh, or buzz, Alliteration. The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words. The tiny turtle stared at the terrestrial tortoise. Assonance the repetition of vowel sounds. The cat in the hat swung a bat. Consonant. The repetition of consonant sounds in the middle or end of words, the pitter patter of ring. Personification, giving human characteristics and personality traits to an animal or inanimate object. The fire alarm screamed at my burnt cookies. Metaphor. A comparison between two things gives a visual image. An example would be, life is a merry go round with ups and downs. Simile, a comparison between two things using the word like or as. An example would be his bones rattled like a wind chime. Using rhythm and rhyme. Try incorporating some of these poetic techniques and rhythm patterns into your manuscript. You certainly don't have to use any of these styles of writing, but it's worth experimenting with them to see if you enjoy writing this way or how it may improve how your story reads out loud. If you'd like to learn more about rhyming, I recommend reading and studying children's poetry anthologies. You can see some examples at the end of this course. 9. Character Design (Writing): Character design grading. Now let's focus on developing the main character in your story. Designing a character involves more than just choosing what type of clothing they wear or how they style their hair. As a picture book creator, you need to develop the character fully outside and inside. There are a few characteristics that are present in all well developed main characters. First, they should be relatable, meaning they have flaws just like real people do. Readers can relate much more easily to a flawed, I E, realistic character than a perfect character, and this makes the character feel more believable. So consider for all the good traits your character may have, what flaws do they have? How do they tend to slip up or make mistakes sometimes? For a children's picture book, the main character is most often a child or an animal. Children can't relate as well to an adult main character. Typically, the main character is a tiny bit older than the age range of the story, allowing the child reader to look up to them while still being able to relate to them. The main character should also be somewhat independent and strong, although they won't necessarily start the story that way or find it easy to be that way. But almost all main characters have a story arc of solving their own problem, achieving their own desire, or coming to some important insight on their own. This doesn't mean they don't have help, but by declaring the character independent, we are saying that they are not dependent on parents, adults, or anyone else to solve the conflict of their own story. As the main character, they are the hero and they are the one to solve the problem. Your main character should want something. Perhaps the most important aspect of a main character is that they want something. This sounds basic and simple, but it can be a vital tool in creating an interesting character and a story with depth. Your character's desire can also be a guiding star for your book, a phrase you can keep in mind when making decisions about what happens in your story. In other words, your character's desire provides the entire basis, motivation, and conflict of your book. So what is it that your main character wants? Why do they want it? What is their goal? What do they have to overcome to get there? How would achieving that goal change them? Thinking through and answering these questions will help you develop a main character that is relatable, believable, independent, strong, and unique. It will make them into a character that can fuel an entire book. 10. Book Title + Blurb: Book title and Blurb. Stuck and stumped. At this point in the process of making We are fun guy, I was frustrated. I was at that stage when you don't really know what book you're trying to make and you're trying to figure everything out, and you want to make the book so bad, but it just won't come out, and either everything you write is terrible or you can't write anything at all. It's a terrible feeling. When I get stumped on where a book is going, especially in the beginning stages, I find it helpful to think about book blurbs and titles. It forces me to distill the book down into overarching themes and feelings instead of getting caught up in the words and details. Thinking this way can help reorient and guide me on where to go with the manuscript. For me, the manuscript and the blurb, which is like a quick introduction to the book and title all develop together instead of one at a time, going back and forth between the three pieces. As a reminder, these beginning stages of making a book are the hardest and most frustrating parts. Get through these first few steps of planning and writing, and then you're in production mode. It's the creation part, the pulling something out of nothing that is so hard. At first, you have no idea what that something is. You just have to keep your hands moving and keep making, and then eventually, like a magician, something brand new will appear. Believe in yourself, your ideas, and your book. You can do it. Elements of a successful title. As you begin to think about the title of your book, here are some general guidelines to help you craft a title that captures the essence of your book. Your book title should be relatively short or easily shortened, so it will be easy to remember. It should also be fun to say. Try using some of the poetry techniques, refer back to Module seven. It should be original, as in there should not already be another book with the same title. Try searching your title idea on the Internet to see what comes up. It should somewhat allude to the core idea of your book. You want it to give the reader an idea of what the book is about. It should also set the tone of the overall book. Is this a funny book, bedtime book, silly book? Your title should reflect that. It should be easy to pronounce. You want people, especially a child, to be able to say it without much trouble. It could be a line from your book, your character's name, or a more abstract word or phrase that represents the book. Example of a great title. One of my favorite picture book titles is The Adventures of Beakle the Un Imaginary Friend by Dan Santet. In conversation, most people shorten this title to simply say Beakle. So the title is long, but it can be easily shortened. The made up word Beakle is very original and quirky, which makes the title memorable and easily found on the Internet. The longer title lets us assume that the story will be about an imaginary friend named Beakle, but makes us wonder what an unimaginary friend is. The made up words and the phrase Adventures of tell us this will be a slightly silly, imaginative, upbeat and exciting story. Writing a Blurb. A Blurb is a summary of the book that's printed on the back cover or inside flap and also included on the sales page wherever the book is sold online. Writing the Burb before the book is finished encourages you to zoom out and remember the core of your book. It helps guide the story and keep it on track. Here's the blurb on the back cover of my book, We Are fungi. A picture book for kids ages four to eight. Enter our world, the world of fungi, the most mysterious and misunderstood kingdom on the planet. We are not plants. We are not animals. So what are we? From veiled ladies to bleeding teeth. Learn how we eat, live and control a part of the world you rarely even notice. Peek beneath the crispy leaves, peer inside your old lunchbox and poke between your smelly toes. We're here, we're growing. And even when you think you can't see us, we can always see you. 11. Making a Writer's Dummy: Making a writer's dummy. What's a writers dummy? A dummy is a small mockup book made from folded paper. Usually book dummies are made towards the end of the bookmaking process and includes your final manuscript, sample spreads of final art, and refined sketches of all other spreads. This is what you submit to agents or publishers as an author illustrator. More on all that in Module 19. But making a writers dummy early in the process with just your written story is a fantastic exercise that can help you take your manuscript to the next level. This is a good thing to try after you've written at least a few versions and revisions of your manuscript. Making the dummy won't help you write better sentences or plot lines, but it can help you refine the pacing and see how your page turns work or don't. The dummy also gives you the experience of reading your story as a book instead of just as a flat piece of paper or computer screen. This can help you reorganize based on how the book reads. It's different than reading a two page manuscript and often reveals if you have too much text on each spread or in the whole book. The point is, you should give it a try with your manuscript. How to make a writer's dummy. First, cut eight strips of paper about the size of $1 bill, fold the pieces in half and nest them together. Now you've got a booklet with 16 spreads and 32 pages. Label your front matter on the first couple pages, or however you've designed it. Maybe the half title, copyright or dedication. Then print out your manuscript teeny, tiny and cut out each paragraph, stanza, or sentence based on what will go on each page. Lightly tape the paragraphs onto the appropriate pages. You may need to do some rearranging to figure out how to break up or paste the story, and that is what this dummy is for. Once you think it's okay, it's time to analyze. Analyzing your writer's dummy. Read through your dummy out loud and consider the following. Do you have leftover pages that weren't used? Maybe you need to consider spacing out your text more. Do you have a lot of text on each page or many pages? Maybe you need to cut words out of your manuscript or break up the text more. Try moving some paragraphs or other pages. Does the reader know what the story is about within the first three pages, not including the front matter? You need to get to the story quickly. The action should begin by page three. If your book dummy doesn't do that, try reorganizing or cutting from your manuscript and read through it again to see how it feels. Is there tension in the story that makes you want to turn the page? When you read the last sentence on a page, the reader should want to turn the page. It's overkill to have a cliffhanger on every single page, but it's good to have some sort of motivation or encouragement to turn the page. How can you add more tension or curiosity at your page turns? Does your climax happen too early or too late in the book? Notice when the peak of your action happens. Is the resolution on the second to last or last spread? Try rearranging the climax and resolution and see how it feels when you read through again. And lastly, do you have a good last line on page 32? The last line is perhaps the hardest line to write, or is it the first? Don't worry. That's what we're going to cover next. 12. The First Page: The first page. The purpose of the first page. I can't decide if I think the first page and therefore the first line of a story is the most important. Or if the last page and therefore the last line is both carry heavy weights. Both have near infinite possibilities, and both are extremely hard to write. So now that you've written lots of versions of your manuscript, you should have at least five versions by now and have refined the order and pacing of your story with your writer's dummy. Let's focus on writing or rewriting that formidable first line. First page guidelines. The first page and or the first few lines in your story should make a few things clear immediately. Who is the main character? What do they want? I E, what is the conflict? What is the setting? What kind of story is this? Why should I keep reading? Example of a successful first page. Does that sound like too much for one page to accomplish? Well, let's look at an example of a lovely opening page from the book, Don't Let Pigeon Drive the bus from Mo Willems. Hi, I'm the bus driver. Listen, I've got to leave for a little while. So can you watch things for me until I get back? Thanks. Oh, and remember, don't let Pigeon drive the bus. Now, let's compare this opening page to our guidelines from above. Do we know who the main character is? The bus driver is the first to speak, but I'd guess that pigeon is the main character, since the bus driver is also leaving the story on the first page. What does the main character want? Well, Pigeon wants to drive the bus, of course. What is the setting? This one is a little tricky. This book really has no setting. It's just a pigeon, a driver, and a bus on a solid color background. In that case, it does show us the setting, or at least tells us the setting is unimportant to the story. What kind of story is this going to be? The casual conversational dialogue implies a quirky, fun story. Also, it's talking about a pigeon driving a bus right out of the gate, so we can expect it to be funny as well. Does it hook the reader? Yes. The thought of a pigeon driving a bus is absurd. So why would the driver ask us to watch his bus and then give us such a weird warning? The first page makes us want to find out why the pigeon shouldn't drive the bus, if the pigeon will drive the bus and how the pigeon will drive the bus. It makes us want to turn the page. All in all, a highly successful first page of a picture book, don't you think? Mo Willems knows what he's doing. But I'd be willing to bet he had to write lots and lots of quite terrible first pages before he came up with this brilliant one. So get to it. 13. The Last Page: The last page. The purpose of the last page. So you've got a decent first page and opening lines of your story now, huh? Well, how does it end? How are you going to wrap everything up in a tidy little one liner that makes the reader immediately smile or laugh or weep? How are you going to write an ending that is satisfying and believable but not predictable? Before we get into the nitty gritty, here's a tip. Your ending does not have to wrap up every single loose end, answer every question or resolve every plot point. It's okay to leave some mystery. In fact, your story will be more powerful and leave more of a lasting imprint on your reader if you don't reveal everything. This goes back to our chat about the purpose of a picture book. You don't need to spell out your message to the reader on the last page. Eave some room for the reader to insert themselves into the story and interpret it in their own way. Give them the dots you think are important, but let the reader connect them. Ending guidelines. Here are some questions to ask yourself about the ending of your story as you work on refining it. Depending on where your resolution ends, these could apply to the last page or the last two to three pages of your story. Often the resolution occurs on pages 30 to 31, and the wrap up is on page 32. Is your ending predictable? Does it solve the problem conflict posed in the beginning? Is the main character the one who solved the problem or resolved the conflict? Did your main character go through a transformation or change to get to this ending? Does the ending seem a little too convenient? Was the main character given the easy way out? Does the ending blatantly state a message? Remember, you should leave it up to the reader to interpret the message. And is the reader left with something? What does the reader feel at the end, and do they feel anything at all? Example of a successful ending. There's a lot of pressure on the last page of a picture book, I know. So before you go swinging around in the dark, let's look at an example of a wonderful ending from the book Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. After visiting the Island of Wild Things, Max said goodbye, got in his boat, and sailed for what felt like years. The book says and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot. As a note, the first sentence of this ending and end to the night is on the second to last page. And the last line, and it was still hot is on the last page of this book. Now let's compare this story ending to our guidelines from above. Is the ending predictable? No, we may have expected Max to come home, but I don't think many expected him to come home to his still warm supper. Is the conflict overcome or the problem solved? Yes. Max wants to be a wild thing, and he allows himself to feel his emotions and experience his inner wild thing. Did the main character solve the problem? Yes. Max came to his realizations on his own. Is the main character transformed? Yes. By becoming a true wild thing, he learns how to stand up to and master his own inner wild thing. I E, his inner turmoil. Is the ending convenient? No. He has to sail for what feels to him like years to return to his home and reality. Is there a blatant message? No, there definitely is a message, but it doesn't state on the last page. And then Max came home and was no longer angry at his mom, and his mom was also not angry because she is still his mom and loves him no matter what he does. Wouldn't that be boring? Wouldn't it be better for you, the reader, to fill in the gaps with your own struggles with emotions? Is the reader left with something? Yes, the reader feels Max's emotions of relief, love, and comfort. It's a tall order to create a story ending that can do all that. Try refining your own ending with these questions and see what happens. 14. Refining a Weak Manuscript: Refining a weak manuscript. If you've been working on your manuscript, but it still feels like it's not quite there or is weak in certain parts, here are a few tips and techniques to try. Make your main character face three obstacles instead of just one. The repetition of three obstacles or attempts to solve a problem is extremely common in stories, especially picture books. If your manuscript currently has your main character facing their conflict once or twice, try adding in another final attempt to find the solution. Usually, the three obstacles are related or even just variations of the same obstacle. Experiment with breaking your conflict out into three separate obstacles and see how that feels. Make sure your action is dependent on prior action. One action or plot point should clearly lead to the next. One obstacle or attempt should build on the previous actions and decisions. This also means you don't want to have coincidences popping up that appear random or too good to be true. The story should follow cause and effect. Think it through. Why is this plot point happening? What caused it to happen? If you can't answer that question, you may need to add in prior action or detail. Escalate your plot in order. Whatever number of obstacles or action plot points you have, be sure your character tackles them in order from easiest to hardest or least exciting to most exciting. The hardest obstacle with the most tension or drama will then be your climax. Increase the suspense. If your manuscript feels flat, try adding extra tension by making the reader worry if the character will overcome the obstacles. How you break up your action and page turns can especially help with this. You have to entice the reader to keep reading by hooking them into the story, which often happens at a page turn. Try out one of these techniques at a page turn and see how it feels. Ask a question. Unfinished sentence. Show extra tension. Begin a confrontation or introduce excitement. Avoid writing visual descriptions. Another technique that can help strengthen your manuscript is to avoid writing visual descriptions. As the writer, you should focus on crafting the action and dialogue. The visual descriptions should be communicated by the illustrator. For example, you don't need to write that your character is wearing a red dress unless that fact is vital to the story for some reason. Things like clothing and most physical features will be shown in the illustrations and don't need to be repeated in the words. If you are the writer and the illustrator, it's still good to avoid writing the visual descriptions. You can focus on the visuals once you begin drawing. Let the words do what they do best and the pictures do what they do best. If you are not the illustrator, trust in your future Illustrator to use the creativity to best create the visual characters and story. Making a picture book with two people is a partnership and the illustrator needs room to imagine with their own vision too. Don't write summaries. Show, don't tell. Descriptive language is tricky. We're writing a picture book, not a novel, so we have to be careful with word count. Another tip for strengthening your writing is don't write a summary of a scene, write the scene. For example, instead of writing, Max was bored. Try writing. Max flopped down onto the couch and stared at the ceiling. Both sentences communicate boredom, but the second option is stronger because it shows what the character does rather than tells a statement of feeling. This way of writing involves the reader and forces them to interact with and think about the story more. The reader has to interpret what is shown and come to their own conclusion that Max is bored. This exchange between writer and reader makes a story much more powerful. Both options could work in different situations. But in general, a solid rule is writing to show, not tell. Reduce your word count. This can be one of the quickest ways to improve your manuscript. Your manuscript should be 0-700 words. Each writer, editor, or art director has their own preference, but less than 700 is standard. Writing a picture book is similar to writing poetry. You want to use just the words you need and no more. It's natural to overwrite your first drafts. As you refine your manuscript, you can cut out what's unnecessary or redundant. The more you write, the better you'll get at editing and writing with brevity. Here are some techniques to reduce your word count. Delete descriptions. We talked about this earlier, but deleting descriptions is a great way to lower your word count. Remember, most descriptions will be shown in the pictures, so you don't need to waste precious words on them. Dilly adjectives. Adjectives are words that describe the qualities of nouns. Words like big, funny, green, or boring. Sometimes adjectives are good and strengthen the story, but sometimes they are unnecessary. Look at the adjectives in your manuscript and see if there are any that do not add much value to the story. For example, instead of writing, the tall girl fed the cat try writing. The girl fed the cat. Is the girl's height related to the action of feeding a cat or something relevant and important to the story? The illustrator can show that the girl is tall, so most likely the word tall is unnecessary in this sentence. That's one less word in your manuscript. One word may not seem like much, but if you apply this and other techniques throughout your manuscript, they begin to add up. Not all adjectives should be removed, but try to think about which ones are strengthening your writing and which may be weakening the writing. Each word should hold value and carry its weight. Delete adverbs. Adverbs are words that modify or describe a verb, adjective or sentence. Adverbs often end in L Y. They include words like badly, warmly or hastily. Instead of writing, he ate his food quickly. Try writing, he gobbled his food. Rather than writing a verb, ate and an adverb quickly, you can communicate the same thing by writing a more specific verb, gobbled. This is a more specific and stronger word and also allows you to delete another word from your manuscript. Use the active, not passive voice. Active and passive voice are two different grammatical voices. In the active voice, the subject is performing an action. In the passive voice, the actions target is the focus on the sentence. The subject is now being acted on by the verb, meaning the subject is passive. This makes more sense when we look at an example. Instead of writing, the cake is being eaten by the boy. This is a passive example. Try writing an active version. The boy eats the cake. In the example of active voice above, the boy who's the subject is performing the action, who is eating on the target of the action, the cake. In the example of passive voice above, the target of the action, the cake is the focus of the sentence. The subject becomes passive. Instead of acting, the subject is now being acted upon by the verb. Writing in this way in the passive voice makes the sentence longer, indirect and cumbersome. Writing in the active voice is much more direct, clear and concise. Go through your manuscript and see if you use the passive voice anywhere. Try rewriting those sentences in active voice and you'll probably be able to cut out a few more words. Delete qualifying words. Qualifying words are words that are added to another word to its meaning either by limiting or enhancing it. Qualifying words affect the level of certainty in a sentence. Some qualifying words include really almost just somewhat, sometimes usually and most. Here are a few examples of qualifying words. Instead of writing, she was very interested in lizards. Try writing. She was obsessed with lizards. Instead of her hair looked very nice. Try, her hair looked exquisite. Instead of, he was feeling sort of worried. Try, he was anxious. Sometimes qualifying words are necessary, but often they make the writing sound hesitant, doubtful, or lazy. Try replacing qualifying words with more descriptive or confident word choice. Delete extra words. There are some words that we all use in conversation and casual writing. But when writing a picture book, these words just take up unnecessary space. Try deleting these words from your manuscript. There were there was, it was. So instead of writing, there was a girl twirling on the table. Try writing a girl twirled on the table. He saw, he looked, he heard. Instead of Sarah heard her parents shouting in the kitchen. Try Sarah's parents shouted in the kitchen. Which was, which is. Instead of the plane which was powerful took off. Try the powerful plane took off. Who was, who is? Instead of the dog who was well trained, pointed at the cat, try the well trained dog pointed at the cat. Lastly, skip unimportant parts of the story. If something is unimportant, get rid of it. For example, if it isn't important how the student got to school, you don't have to write about that. You only have so many words to use, so choose wisely. 15. Character Design (Drawing): Character design drawing. In Module eight, we talked about character design from the writing perspective. If you plan on writing and illustrating your book, now is a good time to start thinking about character design from the illustration perspective. Similarly to the writing side, good character design is all about making a unique, well rounded, believable character. It's not just about what color hair they have or whether they wear it down or in braids. We're talking full character development here. So let's look at how to communicate a character's personality through how you design and draw them. Three criteria for a successful character. Particularities. As an illustrator, you are developing a whole little person with quirks, flaws, and personality. You need to show their personality by how they're drawn, what their proportions are, what they wear, how they smile, how they walk, everything. A good example is to ask yourself, what makes this girl, boy, or animal different? How is this a unique character we care about and not just another generic girl, boy, or animal? Particularities also make the character unique so they can be identified by the reader immediately. This could be anything from a hairstyle like a short bob or a particular accessory like a red striped shirt. But your choices here shouldn't be random. They should be conscious decisions. What does a short bob say about a personality? These little particularities can be obvious like giving your character messy hair to show their wild nature, but they can also be more subtle, and it's often these subtle touches that instill personality and realism into your characters. Likely, your reader will not consciously think. Oh, this character has messy hair, so they must be a little wild. But our eyes are trained to soak in details like that, and readers will absorb it even if they don't totally realize it. So remember, don't rely on words to say your character is timid or messy or shy or outgoing. Show it. Possibilities. Your character should also have many possibilities, meaning they should be able to express a variety of emotions and poses and perform in any necessary situation in your story. For example, you may not want your character to wear a hat that covers their eyes. That would make their range of expressions much more limited and difficult to show. You should also keep in mind when designing your character that you're going to be drawing this character over and over. That doesn't necessarily mean you should draw a simple character to make life easy for you, but you do need to be able to recreate this same character recognizably and consistently throughout the book. For example, if your main character is a dragon, think about how you'll draw his scales. Is it feasible or necessary to draw every single scale on his body every time? Maybe it is, or maybe there's another way to visually represent the scales that would be a tad simpler. There's no right answer, and everyone will draw a dragon in their own way with their own preferred level of detail. It's just worth keeping in mind that you need to be able to keep the character consistent throughout the book. Appealing. A character doesn't have to be likable to be a great character, but they do need to be appealing. A main character can begin the story unlikable, but they should be fairly likable by the end of the story, even if it takes the whole story to show a transformation that makes them likable. This way, the reader cares about what happens in the end. Not every character has to be likable, though. Consider Carella Devil. You aren't supposed to like her, but she's an amazing character. Appealing means your character should be realistic, original, and flawed. No one is perfect and no one wants to read about a perfect character. It would be boring and no one can relate to perfection. So your character needs flaws just like a real person. Elements of character design, body proportions. A character's proportions can communicate a lot right away about who they are, and certain stories call for certain proportions. A more serious story might call for more realistic proportions, while a quirky story can utilize more offbeat proportions like large heads and big eyes. Younger characters typically have larger heads and larger eyes that are lower on their face. Older characters typically have smaller heads and smaller eyes that are higher on their face. These are just generalities, though, not rules. Forget them and ignore them if you are. Clothing. Just like real people, how a character is dressed can quickly communicate a lot about their personality and identity. Clothing choice is a form of expression from all of us, and what you wear says something about who you are or how you're feeling that day. It's no different for your characters. What your character wears can easily tell the reader if your character is messy or tidy, eccentric or trendy, just to name a few. Expressive emotions. A character's face is often the best tool for displaying emotion. No person or character expresses the same emotion in the same way. When looking at your characters, think about some of these aspects in terms of emotions. How big is their mouth? Do they have a big, toothy smile or a small smirk? Where are their eyes? How big are they? Do they usually keep them open wide, curious and excited, or do they keep them half closed, cool, and relaxed? What about eyebrows? Poses and movement. In a picture book, it's usually not that imperative to draw your characters completely anatomically correct, but you do want them to be recognizable and believable. So try to make your poses somewhat based on reality, even if your character proportions are not. Focus on the gesture of the pose instead of getting all the body parts correct. Exaggerating the pose a bit will also help to bring more emotion and excitement into the drawing. Sub characters. Sub characters can add interest to your story, as well as a secondary mini narrative that is only in the pictures and not in the words. This also gives the child a special narrative that they can follow on their own before learning to read words. For example, there is a mouse character with his own little story in every scene of the book Good night Gorilla, but he is never mentioned in the words of the story. My daughter loves to follow along with the mouse's part in the story through the pictures and point him out on every page. You can see more of my character design drawings for We Are Fungi at the end of this course. For more specific drawing techniques and more on drawing in your own artistic style, see my class sketch book to style. 16. Types of PB Illustrations: Types of picture book illustrations. Not every illustration in a picture book is a full spread piece of artwork. Utilizing a variety of sizes and types of illustrations is key to creating a quality picture book. Mixing it up sets the pace of your book, creates rhythm, and allows your art and text to breathe. So let's look at different types of illustrations commonly used in picture books. Boxed illustrations. An example is the art lesson by Tomi Da Palo. Boxed illustrations have defined edges, often a border or frame and do not extend to the edges of the page. Not all boxed illustrations are fully contained within their borders, though. Rules can always be broken. Another example is in the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. Here you can see elements of the artwork breaking out of the box, a foot, a hat, a spoon, a speech bubble. This is still technically a boxed illustration because it doesn't bleed to the edge of the page and has a border. But Sendak has made the decision to cross some elements over the border, creating more depth and dimension. Both are successful in their own way. Vignettes. An example is the tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. Vignettes have edges that fade into the white space of the page. There is no defined edge or border. Beatrix Potter is a master of vignettes and she uses their soft nature fantastically in all of her books. Spot Illustrations. An example is the great paper caper by Oliver Jeffers. A spot illustration is a small free floating illustration. It differs from a vignette because it usually has no background. Full bleed. An example is in the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. Full bleed illustrations run off the edges of the page. These illustrations can be full bleed across one page or across the entire spread. Full bleed spreads are often used to heighten drama and are frequently used at the climax of the story. And finally, combinations. Utilizing and combining the different types of illustrations adds interest and rhythm to your story. Here's the full spread from the great paper caper by Oliver Jeffers that we looked at earlier. Jeffers placed his spot illustration opposite a full bleed page illustration. The two work together to move the story, time, and the reader's eye along. 17. Drawing a Storyboard: Drawing a storyboard. What's a storyboard? A storyboard is a visual thumbnail layout of your entire book. It's a tool to help you think through and plan your book. Storyboarding is a process of trial and error, and you'll need to make many different storyboards to see what works. Creating a storyboard allows you to see how the story will progress. See the book as a whole, create a rhythm with your pictures, focus on overall design and composition instead of details. Create movement from page to page and spread to spread. Balance busy and quiet pictures, Balance types of illustrations, and see repetition and similarities. How to storyboard your book? You can find and use my storyboard templates at the end of this course. There are three basic page layout options, landscape, portrait, or square. The page layout choice is up to you, and it's worth experimenting with different ones. You can always change this later on if you change your mind. Step one, block off the front matter. The first one to four pages in a picture book are usually reserved for the front matter. This is the half title, publisher, copyright, and dedication. So block off the first few pages for now and begin drawing your story on pages 3, four or five. You can always change this in a future storyboard once you start moving things around. Step two, lay out the visual story. Our initial goal is to lock in which parts of the story, go on each page and decide what to draw and what not to draw. Don't try to draw nice, pretty pictures right now. Just sketch rough shapes and don't get bogged down with details. Choose what to draw. On each page, what you don't draw is just as important as what you do draw. You have to choose what is most important. Remember, if the picture can say at all, then no words are needed, and vice versa. Step three, refine composition. Once you've gotten your story broken up, you can begin to refine your spreads. Composition. Consider how you are using full bleed, vignettes and spot illustrations. Do you need more illustration types? Refer back to Module 15. Consider the text and how it is incorporated in the composition. Rhythm. A good exercise to refine your rhythm is to redraw your storyboard with only the large elements. This lets you concentrate on the overall design and composition rather than characters and details. Rhythm and pacing is often determined by the size of the pictures. So look at the use of vignettes, spots or full bleed illustrations in your storyboard. Imagine each illustration is a beat. You need to space them out so they flow together in harmony. Viewpoint. When drawing, it can be helpful to think of each spread as a movie frame you're viewing through camera lens. Should you be looking down on the character? Up at them, close up, far away? Viewpoints can communicate emotion and drama quickly. Gutter. Remember to be aware of the gutter on each spread as you draw. You don't want to place important elements in the gutter of the page because a little bit of each page will be sucked into the spine and not visible once the book is bound. You can certainly have full spread illustrations that cross the gutter. Just avoid putting your main character's face or important action in the center. Create movement. Now focus on the movement within pages and throughout the book as a whole. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you analyze your storyboard. Do your storyboard compositions pull your eye through the page from left to right? Do the spreads look somewhat unified and flow together as a whole? Are the illustrations dynamic or static? Movement and pacing help the story and characters feel alive, but they also move the story along and push the reader from page to page. Here are some ways to refine the movement in your book. Movement in page spread. The composition of each page and spread should create movement, pulling the reader from left to right, through the page and to the next page. Individual elements in your drawing like setting or characters can also add movement. For example, your character could be leaping into the air. A hawk could be soaring through the sky or rain could be falling slowly to the right. All of these things will create movement in your spread and make it more dynamic. Think about what lines of movement you've made. Movement in the book, Page turns. Each spread needs to entice the reader to turn the page. Movement through the composition within a spread towards the bottom right is one way to entice the reader by leading the eye straight to the page corners where they physically turn the page. Another way to create strong page turns is by ending spreads with a moment of tension or uncertainty, so the reader is tempted to turn the page. For example, zoomed in shots are often used at moments of high emotion or action, such as elation or fear, and distant shots are usually used during low points of emotion, such as doubt or embarrassment. Subplots. Integrating a subplot into your book is another way to create movement throughout your book. You can drop visual clues throughout the story to add extra meaning to the story or even set up another visual narrative to run parallel with the main text. Clues like these entice the reader to turn the page to keep the story moving along and give the reader and give the child a deeper interaction with the book, as they can read the secondary story on their own without words. In my book We Are fungi, there is a substantial subplot of the girl being followed by little fungi creepies and the girl turning into a mushroom. Neither of these stories is mentioned in the words, but they pull the reader along and can be read through the pictures. Step five, analyze for repetition. Just like in the text of a picture book, there should be rhythm to your illustrations as well. Repetition of certain images or design layouts can help emphasize rhythm. This helps the reader follow and enjoy the story and makes the moments when you break from the repetition all the more powerful and exciting. Ask yourself these questions about repetition in your storyboard. Is there repetition in your page compositions? Are there too many of the same types of illustration? Is there variety in how your characters are posed? Is there repetition and variety of viewpoints? Do you have a good balance between loud, busy images and quiet still ones? Continue drying more and more variations of your storyboard, if you find there are not enough or too much repetition of any elements. Feeling stuck and confused. If you're having a hard time with your storyboard, a helpful exercise is to storyboard an existing picture book. Choose a book you admire and redraw it as a storyboard. Go through it page by page, drawing a quick sketch of each spread on your storyboard template. Don't try to recreate the style or actual artwork. Focus on the shapes, illustration types, text placement, and general composition. Think through these questions as you study the book. How many pages is it? How many words do they put on a page? What elements are in the front matter? On what page does the story begin? How many spreads for the story? Do any pictures get caught in the gutter? How do they combine illustration types? How do they inject movement in pages and spreads? And how are the end papers treated? This exercise helps you see how an experienced illustrator uses a variety of compositions and repetition to create rhythm and pacing in their book. It's a great learning tool and taught me a great deal about how to storyboard, so I recommend trying it out. 18. Refining a Storyboard: Refining a storyboard. Now that you've got your story broken up into spreads, paste well, and the general composition and typography laid out, we can start refining and adding details. In the next few pages, I'll share the three steps I took to refine my storyboard for we are fungi. To see these pages in larger and in more color, you can visit the resources webpage for this class. Step one, draw a more detailed storyboard. It's time to finally start drawing our characters in the story and fleshing out the visual details. Our goal now is to redraw the storyboard with our character designs, drawing more refined illustrations than our loose sketches before. At this stage, I like to draw digitally so I can zoom in and draw more details while still using the storyboard format. I draw on my iPad with an Apple Pencil. If I'm just sketching, like here, I use the Procreate app directly on the iPad. As I get further in this process and need more digital tools and a higher resolution with more layers, I use Photoshop on my computer and mirror the screen onto my iPad using Astropad. You certainly don't have to do any of that, though, and you can just choose to remain on paper. It's up to you and how you draw best. As you draw, remember that this is still our storyboard. Try not to get to swept up in one spread and take it too far. We want to balance working on all our spreads at the same speed, so it all develops as a unified book. One exception to this could be the spread you think of as the climax of your book. It's reasonable to spend a little more time and detail getting that page where it needs to be, as it is one of the most important. In my storyboard here, the climax is on page 30 to 31, and you can see I drew a bit more detail there than in the other spreads. Just like the other storyboarding steps, you'll most likely need to make multiple storyboards at this step until you're happy with it. Be patient and try not to rush through this stage. It's one of the most fun. Step two, add color to your storyboard. Once you're content with your refined sketches and the storyboard, you can begin adding in color. I like to do this digitally as well, so I can quickly edit and try out different color schemes. To do that, I bring my storyboard into Photoshop or Procreate and loosely paint in colors. Sometimes the color palette works right away, and sometimes I need to fiddle with it a long time to get it to feel just how I want it to. Just as with our composition design stage, we want to think about repetition and balance with color, using it to lead the eye and create unity throughout the book. That's why planning your colors in the storyboard stage is so helpful. It lets you quickly see how the colors are repeated throughout the whole book, creating a consistent, unified feel. Step three, add any other details to finalize your storyboard. You may be done with your storyboard after deciding on colors, or you may have other details you want to experiment with here in the storyboard stage before you move on. For my book We Are Fungi, I wanted the color palette to shift over the course of the book, evoking the sun setting and night coming on. So in my storyboard, I played with some digital editing, mostly hues, layer adjustments, textures, opacities, and more of that like until I captured the mood I was going for. The numbers written on the storyboard are notes to myself about what opacity level I was using for the adjustment layers. It's much easier to play with these types of things here in the storyboard than on separate spreads and files later on. You can always come back to the stage if necessary. 19. Creating Sample Spreads: Creating sample spreads. Taking two spreads to final lets you explore and nail down the style of your book without having to do the book over and over as you discover the style. Also, if you plan on submitting your book to publishers, this is part of what they'll want to see. That's right. You don't have to illustrate the whole book before you submit to publishers. Editors or agents just want to see a couple of examples of what the final art will look like to get the idea. If you submit an entirely completed book, it gives the impression that you think it's finished and perfect and that you won't be open to revisions, which is a major turn off for them. I'll talk more about all of that in Module 19. When choosing two spreads, you're going to take to final. Try to choose two that will give the best impression of the entire book. This may mean you choose one spread from the beginning and one towards the end, or one spread with spot illustrations and another with a full spread illustration. Try to represent a range. How to create a sample spread. This process will vary wildly depending on how you plan on illustrating your book. I'm going to show you my process of creating a final spread for my book We Are Fungi. But please keep in mind that this is just an example and is only one way of illustrating. You can and should do this in your own way. There are endless possibilities, and the choices are all up to you. Step one, blow up the sketch. First, I grabbed the sketch from my storyboard, opened it up as its own document in Procreate on my iPad, and blew it up to full size. This book was going to be 8 " by 10 ", so I blew my sketch up to full spread slides, adding a quarter inch bleed. That brought the document to 16 and a quarter inches by ten and a quarter inches at 300 DPI. Including bleed on your final artwork means your illustration will stretch beyond the final size of the book. When printed, the bleed will be cut off. But this bleeding past the edge ensures that the cut will be correct and not include any blank white paper in your book. A quarter inch bleed is standard. Step two, draw linework and color. Next, I set the original sketch to a low opacity. On a new layer on top of the sketch, I draw out the final linework and color. Step three, digital editing. Then I exported that as a Photoshop file and brought it into Photoshop for further digital editing. I played around with the color, adjustment layers, and textures until I finally got it right. But then I realized that the all digital production was a bit flat and didn't have the depth and organic feel that I wanted. So I decided to pivot a bit and try creating many of the elements by hand with pen and ink. See? This is why we create sample spreads to find these things out early on. Step four hand drawn textures. I printed out my linework and traced over it using a light table onto bristol board paper with a tombow dual tip pen. Then I filled the shapes with a loose pen texture that is a cornerstone of my personal style and something I really enjoy doing. Step five, final book design file. Then I created my design file for the whole book spread at the final size. The final artwork was created in Adobe Photoshop and I used Adobe in Design to lay out the book. Here are the books in design file specifications. Number of pages, 42 at facing pages. Each page is 8 " by ten inch. The bleed is 1.25 inch on each side, which adds up to a quarter inch total. Top, bottom, and outside margin is 0.5 ". The inside margin is 0.375 ", and the gutter is 0.125 ". Step six, place artwork and add typography. For this book, I used a custom font that I made previously based on my own handwriting. I set the main text to a font size of 20 point over 34 point letting, but that's just what worked for this font and this book. It's hard to say what a common font size is for a children's book because every font is so different. Hora, now the sample spread is den. I hope seeing this example helps get you started on your own sample spread. You definitely do not need to follow this as instructions. You should make your book in whatever way suits you and your art and your book best. 20. Submitting to Publishers: Submitting your book to publishers. Before you even begin to think about submitting your book to publishers, it should already have gone through rounds and rounds of revision and be as close to Golden as you can get it. Publishers get hundreds and thousands of submissions, so you need to make sure your book shines. Show your book with sample spreads to other artists or readers and kids to see how they respond. Consider their feedback and make any changes you think would make your book stronger. Do the work. If you think your book is ready, let's dive into the steps of submitting your book to traditional publishers. Note, if you are not interested in traditional publishing and wish to self publish instead, you can skip this module and move on to Module 20. Step one, make your book dummy. As I mentioned before, you shouldn't submit a fully finalized book to publishers. They want to see what's called a book dummy, which is a mock up of what your final book will look like. If you are submitting to publishers digitally, this will be a PDF file. If you are attending a conference, you can bring your dummy as a printed booklet. Your book dummy should include all 32 pages of your book, including front and back matter. Two to three sample spreads in full color showing how the final artwork will look. Se Module 18. All other art should be drawn as refined sketches in gray scale. You can see an example of a refined sketch from my We are fungi book Dummy above. How refined you make your sketches is up to you, but you are to make them clear enough that the publisher gets a good feel of the artwork. The book should be full size. See Module 21 for more guidance on setting up your book design file. The text of your story should be typeset alongside the artwork. If you're not a designer, just do your best. Don't worry too much about the typography. The publishers will mostly be looking at your story, writing, and artwork. You can see my full we are fungi book dummy at the end of this class. Step two, research publishers. You shouldn't just blindly submit to any publisher you can find. Each imprint has its own preferences, and many only publish certain types of books, IE, only novels or only non fiction. So don't waste your time submitting to one who doesn't publish a book like yours. Spend some time digging around on the Internet to find out which publishers publish what? You can also go to the library or bookstore and look at the publisher info for any picture books you think are similar in age, tone, or style to yours. There are many different types of publishers, as well, including traditional trade, mass market, small press, and educational. You'll need to decide which is the right type of publisher for a good fit for your book. The so called big five publishers are Penguin Random House, MacMillan, Harper Collins, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster. Submissions to these publishers are highly competitive, but there are lots of smaller publishers, too. Step three, make your submission list. Make a spreadsheet or list of the publishers you think would be interested in your book. When considering a publisher, be sure that they are open to unsolicited submissions. Many publishers only accept submissions they have requested or submissions from agents. Most editors at the Society of Children's Book writers and Illustrators conferences will open up their submissions to attendees after the event. This allows you to submit where you wouldn't have regularly been able to and gives you the chance to make a face to face connection with the editor you're submitting to. Many publishers prefer to be submitted to exclusively, meaning you only submit to one publisher at a time and don't submit to anyone else until you've received a reply from them. If you decide to submit exclusively, you should tell them so in your cover letter. Common question, do I need an agent? The short answer is that you don't need one, but many authors find it helpful to have one. An agent can submit to more places than you as just an author can, including the major publishers. Part of their job is to make connections with editors and art directors so they know what individual editors and publishers like. So they can send your manuscript to the right person. Having an agent also makes you more reputable as their reputation reflects on you. In exchange for all this, you will pay the agent 15% to 20% of what you earn. However, you only pay the agent once you get a book deal. An agent should never ask you for money before you sign a deal with the publisher. They don't make money until you make money, and if they say otherwise, they are trying to take advantage of you and are not behaving as a professional agent should. Having an agent or not is a personal decision. Many authors have agents, and many don't. If you decide to submit to agents, the process is very similar to submitting to publishers. Research good fits, make a spreadsheet, and start emailing your book dummy. Step four, follow submission guidelines. Above all else, follow the submission guidelines stated on the publisher's website. Almost all publishers accept submissions via email. If you're emailing your submission, you can send a PDF of your dummy in spread format. Be sure to name the file with your name and book title, such as Christine Nishiama titledumi dot PDF. Typically, a query letter, which is a letter to ask an editor if you can send them your manuscript, are generally not required for picture books. But check the publisher's guidelines and submit a query first if that's what they request. A query letter is very similar to a cover letter. Step five, write your cover letter. Part of your submission, most publishers expect to see a cover letter. Some people literally send a cover letter, but most treat their email as their cover letter. Keep your letter as brief as possible while still communicating everything you want. Address your letter to a specific editor's name, not to whom it may concern, and triple check that you spell their name right. Your letter should be professional but also friendly and should match the voice and tone of your writing. You can organize your letter into three paragraphs, intro, story, and bio. The intro paragraph should explain why you are submitting to this particular publisher or editor. Did they publish a book similar to yours? Name that book. Did you meet this editor at a conference? Remind them. The story paragraph should dive into describing your book. State the title of your story and include the estimated age group and type of picture book, board book, nonfiction, et cetera. Explain why you're the best person to have written this book. Then pitch the story in a short two sentence teaser. Don't explain the entire plot, excite them. Think of the pitch like a movie trailer. The bio paragraph should tell the editor a little about yourself. Keep the details professional. Don't list out superfluous information, but do include any expertise you have that's relevant to the topic. List any previously published work. No big deal if you don't have any, and include any pertinent degrees you may have like creative writing or something related to the subject of your book. If you don't have a relevant degree, don't worry. A degree is definitely not required or a deal breaker. You can also include any related professional organizations you belong to, like SCBWI. Finally, wrap up and thank them for their time. Step six, and then wait. Most publishers list a response time with their submission guidelines on their website. For example, if you don't hear back from us in six months, we have declined your manuscript. If they don't list a response time, the standard is to wait three months before following up. You can then send a polite email asking about your submission. I know three months seems like forever, and it's excruciating to wait. But that's just the way it is, unfortunately. The publishing industry moves very slowly, and the process of an editor reading your manuscript, considering it, and possibly showing it to other coworkers or the marketing team takes time. They also get a bazillion submissions a day, so it's a lot to handle. And that's on top of the editor working on their acquired in progress books. So give them time and try to be patient and optimistic. Step seven, don't stop making books. Book publishing is a tough business. The statistics are wild. Some claim that for every 10,000 picture book submissions, three get published. All you can do is try to make the best books you can and don't give up. A great piece of advice I've heard from many people over the years. Don't spend more time trying to get published than trying to become a better writer or illustrator. Send out your story, kiss it for good luck, and instead of staring at your inbox for a year, start making your next book. 21. Creating the Final Artwork: Creating the final artwork. Working with a traditional publisher is no longer the only option for writers and illustrators. If you wish, you can choose to bypass the entire process and self publish your book yourself. That's not to say it's any easier. In fact, I think self publishing is harder. If you don't have an editor, designer, or marketing team working with you, that means you have to do all that work yourself. Some find that liberating and exciting while others find it unappealing or daunting. The choice is yours. If you decide to self publish, the next modules will walk you through the remaining steps of creating your picture book. You may have more work to do as a self publisher, but you also have complete control over how the book is made, as well as making your own deadlines and working at your own pace. The first step is to create all the final artwork for your book. This process is just like the process of creating the sample spreads and will also vary wildly depending on how you plan on illustrating your book. I'll show you another example from my book. We are fungi here. But again, this is just one way of doing it. You do you. Step one, draw the final art. For this book, I hand drew most of the artwork on Bristleboard, using Tom Bow dual brush pens. I blew up my refined sketch, printed it out, and placed it on a light pad so I could draw the finalized version on Bristleboard on top. I drew each spread as large as possible so the detail and texture would be rich. Each original artwork was 11 " by 14 ". Some artists choose to draw at full size, and some choose to draw bigger. It's up to you. Even drawing smaller can work as long as you're able to get it high res enough to digitally blow it up to full book size. Then I took the drawings to a local printer and scanned them all at 600 DPI, so I had them as digital files. 300 DPI would be fine, but I figured it's better to have 600 DPI if you have the option. Step two, open a new Photoshop file. Next, I created a new Photoshop file with the dimensions of the final book with a quarter inch bleed. For this book, that ended up being 16.25 inch by 10.25 inch at 300 DPI. Step three, digital editing in Photoshop. Then I placed my final artwork into Photoshop. From there, it's a long process of trial and error, fiddling around with color, adjustment layers, and textures, and sometimes redrawing until it all feels good. This step takes the longest and is continuous experimentation. It's fun as long as you don't rush and remain open to the possibilities. Here is the final artwork for this spread. 22. Creating the Book Design File: Creating the book design file. Book design file size. You'll need to compile your book in a design program like design or something similar. This file should be sized for printing and include margins, bleed, and gutter. Here are the Indesign file specifications for my book We Are Fungi. Typography. There aren't many standards for typography when it comes to picture books. It's hard to say what a common font size for a picture book is because it depends on the font. For this book, I used a custom font that I had previously made based on my handwriting. I set the main text to font size 20 point over 34 point letting. Letting is the space between the lines of text. Your type size may end up being very different. One helpful exercise can be to take a photo of a published book and place that image into Photoshop. Then try to type on top of it to see what size and letting they may have used. It's not super accurate, but it gives you a general idea of size and spacing. You should also print out one or more of your final spreads at full size to see how the typography size and space between the lines looks and reads in real life. The screen can be deceptive. Front Matter. Half title. There are many ways to design a half title page, and some books don't have them at all. I like to design a simplified version of the cover for my half title. You can see the half title and copyright page for WAR Fungi here. Copyright. The first or last page of your book should include the books copyright and publishing information. Here is a template for copyright info that you are free to fill in and use for yourself. The copyright info should include your name or your business name, your address or an PO box that you use for your business, your website, the copyrighted year, the words all rights reserved, the edition of the book, it is ISBN number, which I'll talk about later, and some sort of description about how the book cannot be reproduced without your permission. Back Matter. Not every picture book has B matter, but most nonfiction books do. We are fungi is mostly non fiction, so I created a glossary, bibliography, about the author and a note about the group of artists that helped give me feedback. Be sure to have your website listed prominently so readers can find you and more of your books. You could also choose to design in papers for the back of your book, though this is more of a special design element and not as necessary for printing as it used to be. It is also usually not an option if you are doing print on demand. 23. Designing the Book Cover: Designing the book cover. Your book's cover should give readers a good idea of what your book is all about at a quick glance. What's the mood? Who are the main characters? What's the art style? You don't need to include everything from your book. Think about what is most important to your story or what makes it different from other books. Also consider about how the book cover will look as a small thumbnail image on a webpage or how it might stand out on a bookshelf. Look at some of your favorite books and see how they design their covers. What elements did they choose to highlight? How did they treat the typography? Does the cover accurately represent the mood, colors, and characters from inside? How does the cover entice readers to pick up and read the book? Elements on front cover. There are a few elements that you should be sure to include on the front cover of your book. The book title, obviously, and the subtitle, if you have one. The author and Illustrator's or author Illustrator's name. Most covers include the main character, though some choose not to if they have something more important to focus on. If you are self publishing, you may also choose to include a logo for yourself or your business or studio. You're technically a publisher now. Elements on Back Cover. On the B Cover, you can include more text and information about the book. You could include the blurb you wrote earlier that serves as a brief description of the book. You can add your business name and logo again, and you should also add your website. You can look at how publishers usually do this on their own covers. The other important thing about the back cover is to leave a blank space for the barcode. You'll need to look to your printer for more details on how to do this, as each printer will have different specifications. They will most likely have a downloadable print templates for different sizes of books that will show you exactly where to place the blank barcode space. Then they will place the actual barcode for you. Here are some examples of book covers from my books. 24. Marketing Your Book: Marketing your book. You may think you don't need to market your book until it's published, or that if you publish with a traditional publisher, you won't need to do any marketing work. Neither is true. It's smart to start promoting your book before it's even finished and definitely before it's published. And if you're working with a publisher, you'll still be expected to promote your own book. The difference is when you self publish, it's all up to you. There's no marketing team. While that means more work for you, it also means you get to decide how your book is promoted. You don't want to advertise on social media, then don't. You want to give away some books for free, then do that. You're the boss. Personally, I'm an introvert and have a hard time asking for things, so marketing does not come easily to me. But over the years, as an NDI artist, I've come to find my own way of doing it that feels good to me. So don't worry if you're starting to squirm in your seat a little thinking about asking people to buy your book. Let's do it the non spammy way, shall we? Email newsletter. An email newsletter is the most direct way to communicate to potential readers and build an audience for your books. It's never too late to start an email list, and over time, it will become your most valuable asset. Email platforms. I started my email newsletter in 2016 and have used Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and am now using Substack. My newsletter has shifted over the years from monthly updates about classes and products to personal essays and sharing my book process. Substack is an amazing new option for email newsletters, because it has a built in network and it's free. Other platforms like Mailchimp and ConvertKit charge you per subscriber. Substack has less marketing tools like segmenting and funnels, so your choice depends on what you're trying to achieve with your newsletter. For me, my Substack, I could do that, is a place to share my work, connect personally with my audience, and build my audience. I tell my newsletter subscribers first about any new books, classes, or projects. Sharing your process. My email newsletter is also where I share my bookmaking process, which is one of my primary ways of promoting my book. See, promotion can be just as simple as sharing the work as you make it and inviting others behind the scenes. Each time you share a process post, people are alerted and reminded that you have a new book coming out soon. And once the book is released, they'll be all the more interested and invested in the final product. Start your email newsletter now if you don't have one and start experimenting. See the resources web page for this class if you'd like to join my newsletter. Email launch sequence. So you have an email newsletter and you're sharing something about your book as you make it. But what will you say when the book is out? How will you convince people to give it a chance? Here's a snapshot of the emails I sent out to launch We R fungi. Email one, making of. I shared some behind the scenes process of how the book was made and announced the release date of the book. I sent something of this nature out about every other week through the entire time I was making the. Email two, Book trailer. The day before book launch day when the book is available for purchase, I sent an email with a link to the book trailer I made. Email three, book launch. I let them know that the book was now available to purchase, linked them to my sales page, and asked them to buy, share and review it. I also gave the EBok away for free to people who subscribe to my email list. Email four reviews response so far. A week after book launch, I thanked those who bought the book, recapped some of the reviews that had come in, and asked again for people to check out the book and share it with their friends. Book sales page. If you don't already have a website, you should make one now. It can just be one page with a photo, bio, and contact info if you want to keep it simple. You could also create a portfolio page if you are an Illustrator. I'm not going to go into a full web design tutorial here, but I use WordPress as my CMS to build the webpages and dream host to host my website. You can see the current homepage of my website at Mt hyphencud.com. Once you have a website, you can create a page on your website specifically for your new book. As an example, you can see a screenshot of my sales page for We AR Fungi here and the full page in the resources page of this class. Your sales page can be as simple or complex as you like. You can just include the image of the cover, the title, and a link to where they can buy the book. For my sales page, I included the cover image, blurb, reviews, book trailer, behind the scenes videos, and two activity sheets. Be sure to have an obvious button or link for them to go and buy the book at the top and bottom of the page. If you can, it's nice to include photos of the physical book once it's printed, and that can be updated after your printed proof comes in. Book trailer. I created a super simple book trailer to promote my book and sent it out to my email subscribers. I used I Movie to edit together the digital files of my book, zooming in on the artwork. I also recorded a friend's daughter reading the bookblur from the back cover and use that as audio for the trailer. You can share your book trailer everywhere where you're sharing your other promotional items. As an example, here's my book trailer for We Are fungi. Enter our world. The world of fungi, the most mysterious and misunderstood kingdom on the planet. We are not plants. We're not animals. So what are we? From veiled ladies to bleeding teeth. Learn how we eat, live, and control a part of the world you rarely even notice. Peep beneath the crispy leaves here inside your old lunch box and poke between your smelly toes. We're here. We're growing. And even when you think you can't see us, we can always see you. Activity guides. Librarians, teachers and parents love activity guides for children. So having one available to download on your sales page can be a great way to bring people in. I teamed up with a friend of mine who was an elementary teacher to create a special fun guy related science activity to go with the book. You can see that activity guide here. Social media. I quit all social media back in 2022, so I don't currently promote my books on Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, or whatever else people are using these days. I could write a whole book on how quitting social media reoriented my art practice and my life and how it was one of the best decisions I've made for myself. But that's not what we're talking about here, is it? If you want to read more about my thoughts on social media and how artists can share their art and connect without it, you can read my essay on my Substack called On quitting Social Media as an artist. With that said, when I self published We AR Fungi in 2017, I was still on Instagram and shared process shots and videos there. Some authors and illustrators choose to do whole marketing campaigns on social media. But my opinion is that it takes a whole lot of time for very minimal gains. The chance that someone is going to click on a link from your Instagram post and buy your book is very low. These days, the chance many people see your post at all is very low. Personally, I prefer to focus my promotion on my email list as my email subscribers have opted in, receive 100% of what I share and are invested in my work, and I have a direct link to them through their email inbox. Plus, I don't have to make dumb iPhone videos. Am I an old crank? Maybe so, but I'm a heck of a lot happier off social media, and that's worth a few potential lost bucks, isn't it? Amazon Author Central and Amazon sales page. If you're publishing through Amazon KDP, or if your book will be sold on Amazon, it's a good idea to set up your Amazon sales page for your book and author Central for you as the author. Amazon gives clear instructions on how to edit your sales page through Amazon KDP and connect it to your author's page. So I won't repeat that information here. More on choosing where to self publish in the next module. You can find a link to my Amazon pages in the class resource page. Good Reads author page. Similarly, you can set up an author page on Good Reads, the book reviewing website, so that you're connected to your books there as well. You may start to get reviews on Good Reads, and people can find you and your book there, too. You can also find my Good Reads on the resources page. 25. Self-Publishing Options: Self publishing options. Distributor or no. There are tons of options for selling an Indie book online. But the first thing you need to decide is whether you want to sell through a distributor or go at it alone. Using a distributor. Using a distributor means selling your book through an existing platform like Amazon or Ingram. The benefit of using a distributor is that they handle the distribution of your book. When a sale is made, you don't have to do anything. They handle the money, the printing, and the shipping. You then get paid based on what sales. The downside is that the distributor will take a cut of each sale. For example, Amazon KDP pays its authors a 60% royalty as of right now, meaning they take a 40% cut for themselves. Not using a distributor. If you don't use a distributor, you'll have to sell your book directly to your readers and handle the entire sales sequence. You will be responsible for processing payments, shipping books and any resulting customer service. This could be done through your website using a service like Shopify, Woo Commerce, or Gum Rob. The benefit to not using a distributor is that you have complete control and don't have to share cuts of the sales. Besides, small fees to the point of sale service you choose. More control means you can decide exactly how your book is presented, sold, and retired. As an example, books printed through an outside distributor and sold on Amazon are notoriously difficult to remove from Amazon if you ever wish to stop selling it. If you are the distributor and seller, you can make those kinds of decisions and actions yourself without having to call or email an unresponsive customer service. The downside to not using a distributor is each sale means more work for you. You have to handle the credit card payments, get the product in the hands of your customer, handle refunds and returns, et cetera. There are plenty of services to help you automate this, but there will always be some extra tasks for you to do. You also have to bring in all readers yourself. There is no platform discovery, like there might be on an existing platform like Amazon. My personal preference. My personal preference is to use a distributor. An absurd percentage of all books are sold on Amazon, so why fight against that? I prefer not to do heavy marketing, so I like being able to be discovered on an existing platform like Amazon. And I would rather focus my time on making my next book instead of customer service and product fulfillment. I'm willing to give up a little control and a slice of my profit for those benefits. You'll need to think about it and make your own decision. Printing options. There are two basic categories for printing a book, digital print on demand and offset printing. Digital print on demand. This method uses a printer similar to a home ink jet printer, albeit a very large one, where books are only printed as sales are made. Print on demand allows you to upload your digital book files and then be mostly hands off. When a sale is made, you don't have to do anything. The distributor handles the payment, production, and delivery. You get paid monthly royalties based on what is sold. Examples of print on demand printers include Amazon KDP, Lulu, and Ingram Spark. One benefit of print on demand is there's no upfront setup cost. It's free to upload your books to a print on demand printer, and neither of you makes any money or incurs any costs until a book sale is made. Another benefit is there is no minimum book order. No books are printed until a book is sold, so you don't have to place a large book order to get the books printed, as is the case in offset. And with that, you as the author, do not have to store a large book order of 300 or more books. That's a garage full of books. A drawback to print on demand is each book is more expensive to print. This means you will either need to raise the price of your book to give yourself a decent royalty or be content with a lower profit per book. Some print on demands also print at a lower quality for ink, color, and paper. This varies from printer to printer and is not always a deal breaker. Print on Demand also gives less specialty printing options. You most likely won't be able to include designed papers or spot gloss or embossing on the cover. Offset printing. This method uses a large printing press with printing plates to print a bulk book order. Offset printing gives you the highest quality book, but requires a bulk order, usually 300 or more books, and an upfront cost of thousands of dollars. An offset printer does not sell or distribute your books. They just print the entire book order and ship it to you. You must then store, sell, and ship the books yourself to your readers or use an additional service to do so. An example of an offset printer is print Ninja, Ingram, and local printers. You'll notice that Ingram does both offset and print on Demand. One benefit of offset printing is that they tend to produce higher quality books. They use premium inks, colors, and paper and have more options available for each. Because they print hundreds of books at once, instead of just one at a time, each book typically costs less to produce. However, that depends on the book. You also have more printing options with offset, including designed papers, paper choices, cover gloss, cover embossing, and more. A major drawback to offset printing is the expensive upfront cost to the author. You must place a bulk order of 300 or more books to print your book offset and you'll pay for them all at the time of the order, potentially before you've sold any books. You may or may not sell all the books you've ordered and you could potentially lose a lot of money. You'll also receive the entire book order at once and must have a way to store 300 books. That takes up a lot more space than you probably think. You could use Amazon warehouses, but that will cost you as well. Financial options for bulk orders. Print on Demand requires no upfront cost. You only pay per book sold. Offset printing requires a bulk order to be placed, leaving you with an expensive upfront cost and no guarantee that those books were sold. So if you want to print offset, what can you do besides sink your entire savings account into your book order? Please don't do that. Crowd funding. Instead of emptying your bank account, you could try crowd funding. This option allows you to test the waters for your book and receive funding for upfront offset printing costs. It's a way to take pre orders and guarantee you'll be able to make your money back before you pay for the bulk order of your books. However, crowdfunding is its own beast and can be very time consuming and challenging. If you're not careful, you can sink more money and time into something that won't work and something that ends up burning you out. To be honest, I've never run a successful crowdfunding campaign, so I don't have a ton of advice here. It is something I'm interested in experimenting with in the future. There are lots of guides and programs online with more guidance if you'd like to try crowdfunding. Examples include kick starter and IndiGo go. My personal choices. In my opinion, new authors should start with Print on Demand. It's not smart to sink your savings into a book that you don't know will sell. Plus, 300 books takes up a lot of space. My advice is to publish your first few books with Print on Demand until you have a good audience and you know people will buy your books. Then maybe you can upgrade. As for the distributor, I've used both Amazon KDP and Lulu, and my current preference is Amazon KDP. Their platform is easy to use has lots of promotional features and printing options and is continually adding new tools for self publishers. Their customer service is also extremely prompt and helpful. In contrast, Lulu has not updated their products significantly in years, does not have nearly as helpful promotional tools, and their customer service is, in my experience, extremely unresponsive. 26. Printing + Publishing Setup: Printing and publishing setup. Finalize your book files. We're in the final countdown now. Complete one last check that everything is just how you want it in your book file. Read through everything and get a fresh pair of eyes to take a look at it too, if you can. By your ISBN. Wait. What's ISBN? An ISBN, international standard book number is a number assigned to every published book. It includes information about the book like the title, publisher, and author and is how a book is identified and cataloged by stores, distributors, and libraries. Do I have to have an ISBN? You need to have an ISBN if you intend to sell your book through any kind of book distributor like Amazon, Lulu, or Ingram. Readers will also view your book as more professional if you have an ISBN. If you are working with a publisher, you don't have to worry about this. But if you're self publishing, you are responsible for the ISBN. If you want to go full Indy and sell directly to your customers with no ISBN, perhaps selling at craft shows, local events, Gum Road or your website, you can totally do that. Just know that without an ISBN, you won't be able to sell your book in bookstores or through a distributor. Personally, I highly recommend getting an ISBN for your book. It's very easy to get one. It doesn't cost a whole lot, and it gives your book more options and professionalism. Where do I get an ISBN? Option one, use a free ISBN from your distributor. Most self publishing platforms like Amazon KDP and Lulu offer free ISBNs as part of publishing with them. They will assign an ISBN to your book and place it on the book cover for you. The upside is that it's free or at least very cheap. But the downside is that you will not be listed as the publisher on your book. This means when your book is listed on Amazon or wherever you intend to sell it, the publisher will be listed as Amazon KDP or Lulu, or whichever platform you are using. That may not be a big deal to everyone. As an author, you still own the book and the copyright. But personally, I'd rather my books be published under my studio's name. Also keep in mind that your book will always be associated with this publisher. This may matter down the line if you intend to try to get your books sold in bookstores that may or may not like books published by Amazon. Or what if a smaller distributor like Lulu closes down? What happens to your book? Option two, buy your own ISBN. The alternative is to buy your own ISBN through an ISBN service. The only official source of ISBNs in the United States is Boucher. You can buy one ISBN for $125 or ten ISBNs for $295. ISBNs never expire, so if you plan on making more books in the future, you'll save some money by buying a book. I bought ten when I published We Are fungi and have already used four more. The upside to buying your own ISBN is you will be listed everywhere as the publisher. Your book is not affiliated with any other publishing platform, only you and your business name. The downside is it costs money. It's up to you if you think $125 is worth the book being published in your name. To me, it is. If you want to know more about ISBNs, Buker has tons of great information on their website. You can find that link on the resources page. Upload your files to the publishing platform. Create and set up your account. This process will depend on what platform you choose, but they are mostly similar, and each platform should clearly explain what to do once you begin. You'll probably be asked to supply title info, like the title, author name, language, and publication date. ISBN, you just type in the ISPN number and they place the image interior PDF, upload your book file for the inside pages. Pay attention if the printer wants your PDF to be formatted in pages or spreads. Cover PDF, upload your cover design. They will most likely want one cover image, including the front and back together. Use the printer's templates so the spine is the correct size based on the number of pages in your book. A link to this calculator is also on the resources page of this class. Set your book price and royalty amount. When you submit your book, you'll also need to choose a price. This will determine how much customers pay for your book and also therefore determine how much money you make from each sale. Most distributors pay out a royalty based on the book price after subtracting the printing costs. Amazon KDP currently pays a 60% royalty. So here is an example from printing a 32 page color book at 8.5 by 11 with Amazon KDP and a list price of 14 99. If the list price is 14 99, and the royalty rate is 60%, and the printing cost is 420, then your royalty will be $4.79. In this case, your book would cost each customer 14 99, and you would receive 479 per book sold. The printing cost for this book is 420. The cost is based on page count, ink type, black or color, premium or standard, and trim size. Most distributors will give you a calculator to determine your paperback or hardback printing cost, minimum list price and royalties. I've listed Amazon KDP's calculator in the resources page of this class. Submit your files for review. Now press that submit button. The publishing platform will review your files for any issues or missed requirements and most likely get back to you with your bookproof within 24 hours. Review your book proof. The platform will require that you review a proof of your book, and some may require that you order and review a printed proof. It's a good idea to order and review a printed proof, even if you don't require it to ensure everything prints out just how you want it to. You'll just have to pay the base printing cost of your printed proof. My proof of R fungi just costs $3.79. Be sure to set up your files and order your proof with plenty of time before your launch date, if you have one in mind. It should arrive within a week, but things can go wrong. If something needs to be fixed from your proof, you'll need to change it, re upload the edited file, and possibly order another proof. Approving your book proof. Once you're happy with the proof, click Approve. The timing until your book is available for sale will depend on the platform you choose and is a little variable. Amazon KDP says once you approve the proof, your book will be available for purchase on Amazon in three to five days. For we are fun guy, it was available after one business day. They are constantly adding new features here for authors and just released a way for you to set a manual release date. 27. Book Launch Promotion: Book launch promotion. Photograph your book. It's important to have professional looking photos of your book for your website's sales page. You can do this as soon as you get your printed proof before the book is officially published. My go to method is to place a big white sheet of paper on the ground outside or by a very sunny window and photograph the cover and interior spreads that way. Metal clamps can help you hold open the spreads, or you can ask a friend to hold the book. Sunlight is generally better for product photos than artificial light unless you have fancy photographer lights. You can edit your photos in Photoshop or software of your choice, removing the background, adjusting the levels, et cetera. I like to have at least two versions of the cover and each spread, one on a plain white background, and one on a more fun related to the topic background, like mushrooms. Book Launch day tasks. Don't sleep on launch day. On the day your book goes live and is available for purchase, you've got some work to do, particularly if you are selling your book on Amazon. If you have a wave of people clicking on and looking and buying your book in the first few days, Amazon will push it up its list and promote it to other people as well. So we might as well try. Sales page. Make sure the buttons on your website sales page link to where to buy the book. Consider adding something new to your website to alert visitors that your book is now launched. If you have the ability to, you could choose to offer a special deal for launch day. Email campaign. Send out your book Launch day email you planned in Module 23. Announce that the book is now live and include some fun photos from the book. Link to your sales page and or where they can buy the book and ask them to share the link with friends. Social media. I'm not going to repeat my rent about social media here. You can see that in Module 23. You should focus your time online wherever you feel it gives you the most value. And I mean that not only in terms of sales, but also everything else you value. In my opinion, social media does not bring in as many sales as some people say it does. And I also just don't like it, and I don't find value in it. So I don't do it. When We are Fungi was published, I was on medium and Instagram. I wrote a couple essays about my bookmaking process on medium during lunch week and posted about once a day on Instagram for the week of the lunch, sharing behind the scenes tidbits about the book. For my most recent book, I am not on social media, so I focused all my promotion on my substack email newsletter. This is a platform I like and find value in. It favors long form writing, artistic voice, genuine connection, and has no ads, influencers or algorithms. Advertising. Some authors choose to run online ads for their books, but that, like crowdfunding is a whole other beast that I don't know much about. It seems to me that perhaps the days of running successful online ads are also shrinking. It's possible you'll make sales from ads, but it's also possible that you'll waste your time and money. Personally, I believe organic reach is more powerful than advertising to strangers. It's the long game, but making books is my career, not a one off, so the long game is worth it to me. But that's just me. If you want to try ads, then go for it. Giveaways. Instead of ads, a giveaway can be an alternative promotional tactic. It's extremely cheap compared to ads. You just have to pay the printing cost of each book you give away, which was $4 for We R fungi. I chose to run a giveaway for one copy of Weir Fun Gui through Amazon. To enter the giveaway, a person just had to follow my Amazon author page and then click the giveaway Link provided. This promotion was awesome because it promoted my book while also getting people to follow my author page. So the next time I publish a book on Amazon, those people will automatically get a notification about it. While only one person received the book from the giveaway, I got a slight uptick in book sales during the giveaway. So I assume that many people who didn't win decided to buy the book anyway. Amazon KDP is consistently adding more tools like this to their platform. 28. Your Project + Resources: Whoo hoo. Congratulations. You made a picture book. Or wait. Did you just watch all these videos, and you haven't actually done anything towards making your book yet? Don't worry. I get it. I went through that period too, learning, researching and reading everything I could about making books, but not actually making books. Well, this is it. I'm here right now to give you a little kick in the booty. Start making your book. Today, right now, don't wait. You obviously have an idea for a picture book or you wouldn't be reading this. What are you waiting for? More information, more instructions, more steps to follow. You've got everything you need right here in this class to get started. Through these videos, I've shown you how I made my book and how a book is generally made, but I can't tell you how to make your book. Only you can figure that out. And the only way you can do that is to just start making it. I believe making art is one of the best ways we can spend our time, and there's not much better than seeing your idea come to life. So, come on. You could make a book, your class project. Your ultimate project is to create your own picture book. But I know that is a little daunting and a long process that could take you months or even years. My most recent picture book took me 2.5 years to finish. So to jump start your project, I would love you to share any portion of your book that you would like here in the Project Gallery. Some examples include your story idea, your book title, an early manuscript, an early storyboard, sketches of characters, sketches of spreads. And I'll be sharing my process from my most recent picture book, We Are Jelly fish in the Project Gallery, too. So come take a look and post something of your own. Resources PDF and books. Don't forget to check out the Resources PDF download on the project page, which includes all the links and digital files referenced in this class, including the further reading list and storyboard templates. One last thing. This class is also available in book form as a digital download E book in the Skill Share shop or a printed book on Amazon. You can search Mike Could Make a book on Skillshare or Amazon and find links to both those products in the class description and Resources PDF. Thank you. Well, that's the end of my picture book MasterClass. Thank you so much for watching and I hope it helped you on your bookmaking journey. I would love to connect more with you and see any finished or in progress books you're making. Besides sharing your work in the Skill Share Project Gallery, you can join my Substack email newsletter at the URL here, which includes weekly essays on creativity, living as an artist, and behind the scenes process work on my current books. Thank you. Thanks so much for taking this class and best of luck with your book.