Many of you who are reading this blog post might already know what an illustration book is. You have been reading them since your childhood. Either as comic books or story books like Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or the academic books you had in your elementary and kindergarten school time. So, do these books work today as well? And if it does, how can we make one? Well, we’ll address all these questions in this article.
5 steps to create and publish your illustration book in 2022.
Step 1: Know your Target Audience
Know that you are writing to kids and not to teenagers. You need to keep demographics in mind as well. However, kids mostly have the same kinds of interests. For instance, children in every part of the world would love the concept of Spiderman and Superman. Also, know if you are writing for girls or boys. Girls prefer stories that involve the major role of a girl, for example, Snow White and Rapunzel.
To lessen the burden on you, you can hire a writer who has experience creating book illustrations online.
Step 2: Write an Incredible Story
Good stories are evergreen. People keep discussing them no matter how old they are. We are also discussing these old stories in the above paragraph. People have made several movies based on these famous stories. Therefore, writing a good story is the most important thing in the entire process. You need to perform steps 1 and 2 side-by-side to make a better story. Make a basic story concept, then roughly create some characters’ appearances. After that, brainstorm several things that you think could intrigue children. Decide the genre of your book.
Don’t make your story too soft, such that it involves no mystery, drama, or tension in it. Children would never like such stories. Every famous children’s story you read has some tension point in it, and it keeps moving around in the story until everything settles in the end. For example, Beauty and the Beast might have made kids think if the girl would marry the beast or not. Or if she wouldn’t marry him, will he hurt her or what?
Similarly, you need to create mystery and thrill in your stories. However, don’t go overboard with it. Also, don’t make your story look like a novel by writing it way too long.
Step 3: Draw the basic Look of cartoons
You drew the basic appearance of the cartoon characters you’ll use in the story. But you are making an illustration book, so you need to illustrate those cartoon characters according to the scene and actions they are performing. And we say that it’s the most difficult thing after story writing. Anyone can’t do it themselves unless they can draw really well. Here, we recommend you hire an illustration expert. Also, we said above to create a basic look of your cartoon characters for the story. But if you don’t want to create the cartoon characters yourself, you can hire a cartoonist in that case. You will do this step after you have written the story perfectly and completed your book. Book illustration experts will make illustrations of every page of your book according to the story.
Step 4: Book Cover
Book cover plays a vital role in a book’s success. It gains more importance in children’s books since kids are fond of good color combinations, attractive designs, and illustrations of cartoon characters. You can also create a book cover yourself with the help of online applications like Canva and Glorify. These online tools let you create. Therefore, we suggest you hire a professional book cover maker and tell him about your book so he can create a perfect cover for your illustration book. Along with the book cover, your title should be interesting enough, as it also matters in a book. Moreover, hardcovers work better than paperbacks in children’s books.
Step 5: Publishing the Book
The best option for publishing an illustration book is to publish it on amazon kindle. However, it has a drawback. Since kids are already using cell phones and computers nowadays, it’s not good to give them another screen to look at. Thus, it’s better if you consider hard copies. But hard copies have another drawback that it’s not good for the environment since books sell thousands of copies. And paper requires tree cutting. So, do we need to say now that it’s better to go for eBooks and kindles? Decide what option you want to go with.
Also Read: How to Succeed at Book Marketing
You can also traditionally publish your illustration book, but it has more hassle than self-publishing. And you can get rejected several times if they think your book quality is not good enough or would not suit the market. You also can’t hire an editor since they charge a lot if they have big names on their resume. However, if you have a good budget, you can hire an editor who edits your book and make it to a literary agent that will publish your book by any big publisher.
So, we have discussed four simple and effective steps to create an illustration book in 2020. Keep all these things we discussed above in your mind when writing a children’s illustration book to create a successful selling children’s book.
