Get Things Done - Publish your first Picture Book by yourself on Amazon Kindle or IngramSpark

You have an idea of your first Picture Book, but don't know how exactly the way to do it? Here is a short guide that you can follow and bring your book to life.

1. Work on your Manuscript

Write your story quickly with the main ideas/lessons/characters inside that book. Then expand the ideas into the whole story.

Neglect of the grammar or spelling mistakes, firstly, you need to finish working on the manuscript. Don't give up in the middle of your work. I know this feeling - when we want to make everything perfect and then stop working on it because of the fear of making it wrong. It is alright, no problem if it's not correct on your first try.

Even when you decide to publish it in English, it's simpler and quicker to transfer your ideas into words when you write it in your own language, then work on the English version based on your first manuscript after that.

Tip: You can use Grammarly (free version) to check your manuscript for simple grammar and spelling mistakes when you work on the English version.

Read again and rewrite until you think it's perfect enough. Send the manuscript to your friends, the kids in your neighborhood or anyone you think can send you feedback on the manuscript.

2. Create a Moodboard

This step is to collect your favorite books, characters, illustration styles, color sets, fonts that you like to combine with your book content. During this step, you can also imagine how your book looks like, and write your story better. This step somehow brings your mind to your illustrator.

The easiest way to do it is to create a Pinterest board, collect everything and share it with your illustrator in the next step. Or if you can work on graphic design things, you can add all things into a Canva or Photoshop design.

This step can be done along with Step 1, not after. I trust you will have more inspirational ideas to make your manuscript better with a clearer vision on it.

Moodboard for "The Amazing Skin They're In Book"

Author: Scott Linney - Illustrator: Nikki Studio

3. Separate the manuscript content into Drawing Ideas

Keep in mind that the point here is: picture book has few words but rich content (some books even don't have any words!). This is even more important when you create books for early readers. We need to keep the text simple for young children to understand the story and read aloud again themselves if they want, and let the illustrations make their imaginations fly up.

So, think about how you want the detailed scenes and characters to be throughout your book. It's really helpful if your illustrator can get involved in this step, discuss and suggest ideas to you and make it right for you. If you are not good at drawings, some illustrators can help you to read your full story and suggest all drawing ideas for you based on their experience in the previous books that they worked on before.

Tip: illustrations can have more details than what is written in the texts, so we can have some extra things on each page. Sometimes, hidden items or characters (a small fish chasing his tail like a dog behind a coral - who is not relevant to the story - in a scene of 2 big octopus chatting for example) can surprise the kids and make them laugh. Think about it and make your book interesting.

Drawing Ideas for "Saving The Planet With My Poo"

Author: Shirley Johnson - Illustrator: Nikki Studio

4. Dummy Layout

A book dummy is the quickest way to see how your book looks like after publishing. You can do this step yourself, or ask your illustrator to create it after having the drawing ideas in Step 3. Then cut the paper and make it into a small book version, and flip the paper sheets yourself to check the overall looks.

Tip: The optimal book layout for Amazon Kindle and IngramSpark is 32 pages - if you have a different number, it should be a multiple of 8 - otherwise, we will have some extra blank pages at the end of the book which makes it look unprofessional. So keep in mind the proper number of pages when you create the book dummy. These 32 pages include some pages like title page, dedication page, copyright page, so we have about 30 pages of illustrations. Before working on the illustration, discuss with your illustrator about the paper size you want and the number of illustrations you need to avoid having fewer or more than the illustrations needed in the book, or incorrect sizes of the drawings.

Dummy Layout for "The Extraordinary Fairies: Turning Misfortune Into Blessings"

Author: Orchid Bloom - Illustrator: Nikki Studio

5. Final Illustrations

From the Book Dummy and the Moodboard, your illustrator now can work on your illustrations (or if you have drawing skill, you can make it yourself!). Here is the most popular process:

Create the Main Characters: the main characters will appear repeatedly in all scenes, so we need to decide on their appearance before working on the scenes and movement.

Main Characters - from sketch to final version for "Chomp Chomp Dinnertime"

Author: Natasha Taylor - Illustrator: Nikki Studio

Detailed Sketching from Dummy Layout: from the rough version of the overall layout on the Book Dummy, you can now create a more detailed sketch version for the whole book. Don't remember to add texts in this space - to make sure the illustrations will have a colored space for to add texts on later (we don't need to focus on the text fonts on this step).

Moodboard for "The Amazing Animals Book"

Author: Scott Linney - Illustrator: Nikki Studio

Play with the Color Scheme: You can try some different color schemes on 1 illustration and choose the one that you like. Then apply it to the whole book.

Revisions: Though you give detailed ideas before the illustrator works, you may want to add more details to your illustration to make the content more interesting. Tip: Discuss with them to have a good price for each illustration included unlimited revision before the project to avoid additional and unexpected budget on this step.

Revisions for "Cowrie the Cowgirl - Episode 2" book cover (work still on progress)

Author: Wednesday Boatneg, Crystal Orr and Dawn King - Illustrator: Nikki Studio

Finalize the Illustrations: We are now having all the final illustrations. You can ask your illustrator to create some mockup pages to see how the illustrations look like after being printed. Some illustrators will send you low-resolution images with their watermark on them in the revision step before completing the project. So remember to ask them to send you all proper files with high resolution to make sure your book will have high quality when printing.