Publishing My First Children's Picture Book: What I Wish I'd Known Before Starting

I self-published my first novel, Scripted, almost three years ago, and so I thought I knew what I was doing as far as self-publishing went. But it turns out children's picture books are a whole different beast.

With Scripted, I had used their Kindle Create software program to format both the ebook and paperback, and in the end it wasn't too difficult. It turns out you can't really do that with illustrated books. They have software specifically for children's books called Kindle Kids' Book Creator, but it only exports ebook formats. I knew I wanted a paperback version, so I had to... gulp... learn to format it myself.

There are actually some nice video tutorials out there about how to format a picture book on Word or Canva. I chose Word because Canva's measuring tools are more approximate, and I wanted to have the exact paper size. Also, you can export your Word document as a PDF and then upload that to Kindle Kids' Book Creator and thus get the ebook to look exactly like your paperback.

The first thing I discovered was there are specific sizes Kindle will publish an illustrated book in. I went for a square 8.75x 8.75 because it seemed to be fairly common, and my pictures were all squares already.

The next thing I discovered is Kindle will only publish a paperback if it has at least 24 pages.

Uh-oh.

I had only prepared thirteen illustrated pages. 

The idea of creating more pictures was exhausting. First I would have to come up with more magical creatures and clothes they do or don't wear, then rhyme them. And then I would have maybe another month or two of work making the pictures. 

Or... I could just put the words on separate pages. Children's books do this all the time. The words are on one page, and the illustration is on the page facing it. I decided to do that, as I could easily reach 24 pages doing that. With the title page, copyright page, acknowledgements, and the author page at the end, I even had a few pages that had the text right on them as I had originally planned and still reached 24. 

I do wish I had created more pictures that would completely stretch across both pages. When I was making the pictures on Stable Diffusion, the default output was 512x512, so everything came out as a square. It would have required more time, but I could have made more pictures that were 512x1024 so the text was on a background that was more interesting than a solid color or a simple gradient. But that would have needed to happen early on in the process.

The next thing I discovered is that there are magic numbers in printing. When you have a book with lots of pages, this isn't as important, but when you have, I would say, less than fifty, it's a bigger deal. This video does a fair job of explaining why.

Basically, because of the way book pages are cut and bound, you want to have a multiple of sixteen pages, but multiples of eight are acceptable. Otherwise, you're going to end up paying more because the printer has to use up an extra sheet (or half-sheet) of paper for your extra pages.

Well, there was no way I was making it to 32 pages, so 24 exactly was my goal. In retrospect, I wish I had written the book with all this in mind so I could have 32 pages. I probably would have written more.

The next thing I discovered was bleeding. It turns out if you want to ensure your pictures run all the way to the edge of the page, you actually have to format the book so each picture hangs off the edge just a little bit, .125" inches on the top, bottom, and outer edge. Also, because of the way pages are cut, there's a little bit of uncertainty about how much of the image will be cut out between each printed book. Thus, you want to make sure that really important things, including text, are at least .25" away from the edge of the page. That's called the safe zone. I ended up having to add a little more to some pictures because some key details (a pair of socks, for example) weren't in the safe zone. I used a tool in Photopea called Content-Aware Fill to easily add a centimeter or two to said pictures without having to completely redo them. I also had to shrink some text to get it to fit in the safe zone.

Again, if I had known about these formatting requirements, I would have made may pictures a little different from the beginning, making sure my subjects were more centered to ensure they wouldn't get cut off.

Well, I finally had my book all formatted, with everything inside the safe zones and the pictures bleeding all the way off the end of the page (this probably isn't the correct terminology...). I uploaded the ebook for pre-orders about two weeks ahead of my chosen publication date, and ordered a proof of the paperback to make sure it looked good.

While waiting for my proof to arrive, I sent out a few ARCs, set up an author website with the help of my programmer husband (please don't ask me to explain that process. All I know is I now have a website), set up an author profile on Facebook, and started an application with the copyright office. I'll have to let you know how that last one turns out later. There's now an option to say some of your work is copyrightable and some isn't. I explained that my text is completely my intellectual property, but the artwork was created using AI and heavily edited, and left it up to them to decide how much of it to copyright. I won't hear back from them for a while, though.

Another side note on copyrighting, I wish I had waited a few days between publishing the ebook and the paperback, because if you have a physical version of a work, they require you to send in a physical copy, which of course costs money. If there's only an electronic version, you can just send that in, and that is cheaper (although you still have to pay the $70 fee). There's also the question of whether officially copyrighting a self-published work is worth it, but since AI was involved, I really wanted to know how much of my book was my intellectual property in the eyes of the US government.

My proof arrived and I discovered one last thing: how a picture looks on your screen isn't how it looks in printed format. Things that were easily readable on my monitor were not so on the page. The darker pages were really dark in the book, and there were even a few pages with bright, saturated colors that were... hard on my eyes.

I fixed the difficult to read text by switching from black to white or the other way, but I wasn't sure how to fix the saturation problem. I realize now I probably could have easily brightened the pictures using Photopea, but at the time I ended up approving the pictures as they were and hoped others wouldn't mind the self-published author's first time children's book had some imperfect illustrations. And then, once it was published, I realized how easily I could fix the problem, but I felt guilty changing the book when so many people had already bought it, and why did people who bought the book later deserve a nicer-looking one than my loyal fans who bought it when it first came out?

So, if you bought the book and you've wondered why some pages are oddly dark or not the soft pastels of most kids' books, I'm sorry. As I've read other books with my kids, I realize there are few picture books that actually use the color black. Most of them use dark grey and your mind tells you it's black. Anyway, one more thing I've learned in this journey is to go lighter than you think you need to, or turn down the brightness on your monitor so you get a better idea of how it will look when printed, or give yourself more time from when you order proofs to when your book goes live so you have time to examine the printed book, ponder over issues, and fix them, with maybe even more time to get a second proof and make sure that one looks right.

My kids have yet to complain about the pictures, and no one else has mentioned the darkness or saturation problem, though, so maybe it's just me being a perfectionist.

If I ever write another picture book, there are definitely some things I'll do better, but for now I'm going back to working on novels. Kindle Create does all the formatting work for me with those.

Writing and illustrating My First Children's Picture Book

 A few years ago, my oldest child (who was then a toddler) tried to put some shoes on a toy dragon. They didn't fit, and I jokingly said, "Dragons don't wear shoes," and then thought, That's got a catchy beat to it. During some down time, I came up with other mythical beings and the clothes they wouldn't wear and made it into a poem with the idea of creating a children's book.

However, I'm not an artist, and I knew I would have to ask someone to illustrate the book for me, but I wasn't sure I was ready to pay for such a thing. So the poem sat on my phone for months and then years, unpublished.

This year, I felt that I really wanted this book to happen. I don't know why, maybe it's because I wanted to have a new book published but knew that my current WIPs need a lot more work before I would even consider publishing them. I haven't gotten much writing done in the last year (see my writing hiatus post) and it would be nice to feel like an author again. Or maybe having a new baby has made me realize how quickly my first baby has grown and I'm having a mid-life crisis and desperately want all of my projects finished right now. Whatever the case, I was determined to get this children's book published.

The words were all done, the next step was an illustrator. I decided to write down exactly what I wanted in each picture, which ones I wanted to be a single page, which should be double, and got a rough idea of the layout of the book. Next I went to Fiverr to find an illustrator, someone who would do it for fairly cheap but still produce something nice. I found a few people whose style I liked and whose prices were reasonable and contacted one.

I sent a message through Fiverr to this illustrator stating how many illustrations I wanted, how many would be two page and how many would be single page images, and how many characters would be in each image. I asked if he could give me a rough estimate for this and he quickly responded that my idea sounded great and he would love to help me out. He asked me to tell him about my book. I had kind of already explained it was a book about mythical beings and the clothes they do and don't wear, so I thought maybe he wanted an outline of the plot. But my book is more of a list than a story so I told him it was a poem. I also provided the first stanza as an example. Again, he quickly responded and said my idea sounded great, then asked me to send him the text. 

This is where I started to feel uneasy. He was asking for a lot of information but still hadn't given me a quote for his services. I had already told him how many illustrations I needed, why did he need the whole text to tell me how much it would cost? 

I know this might sound paranoid, but if I handed over my entire book, he could easily ghost me, make illustrations to match the text, and sell it himself. His Fiverr profile indicated he didn't live in the US, and I didn't know anything about him beyond an internet persona, so I had almost no chance at settling things in court if it came to that.

Maybe he was a perfectly nice guy who didn't realize how shady he seemed, but my first question had been how much will you charge me and he still hadn't answered that. So I moved on.

But with my now paranoid brain scanning illustrator profiles, I suddenly felt like everyone on Fiverr could be out to scam me.

My next plan was to reach out to author friends in my writing Facebook groups and see what illustrators they had used, and how they had found them. But the responses I got were for illustrators that mostly seemed to do cover art for books, and they weren't in the cartoony children's style I was hoping for. Someone suggested going to a Facebook group dedicated to children's book illustrators, but warned me that there could be scammers on there.

Aah! They're after me!

My paranoid brain almost imploded.

At this point I was afraid to ask anyone I didn't know by name to help me out. But I also knew that if I asked a friend I would be entering into a business deal with them. Long story short, I've had several experiences where I had a friend do work for me and I wasn't pleased with the result, but I didn't want to hurt their feelings because I didn't want to hurt our relationship, so I just smiled and paid them and left unhappy. I've sworn off doing business with friends.

So here's where I become a great big hypocrite.

Remember when I wrote that post about AI chatbots and how they can't innovate and we need to mostly consume human-made stuff to show that's what we really want and not get trapped in a world of repetitive stories? It probably sounded like I think AI shouldn't be used to create media, huh?

Well, I decided I would use AI art to illustrate my book.

And, guys, it's actually rather fulfilling.

Here's the thing about AI art generators. They can't innovate, either. I logged into Leonardo.Ai, typed in "Dragon wearing shoes, claws poking out of shoes," and and it gave me a dragon, but no shoes. Because dragons don't wear shoes, obviously. 

This happened with almost every one of my pictures. I used two different AI art generators (Leonardo.Ai and Stable Diffusion) and neither knew how to combine the two ideas I would give it. A dragon with shoes? A unicorn with a hat? A fairy with a jacket? How do I do that? Sometimes one or the other didn't even know how to make the mythical creature I asked it for. Neither seem to know what a griffin is.

So then I learned how to use photo editing software. I would get a decent picture of the mythical creature I wanted (usually after several iterations) from one or the other AI art generator, and then get a separate picture of the clothes I wanted it to wear, put them together in Photopea (a free, online version of Photoshop), and do another iteration in the AI art generator so they would look like they belong together. Then there was usually more editing to be done, little tweaks if I found that the AI was focusing on a small error in the picture and making it way more obvious, and back and forth until I got something I liked. 

Started with this

Ended with this

I learned a ton about the various tools you can use in Stable Diffusion in particular to get what you want. OpenPose helps with posing characters a certain way, Inpainting can redo one small part of the picture (or preserve one part while changing the rest), Reference will create a character that looks like one you provide, and the various Checkpoints can control the style of your image or tell Stable Diffusion how to make certain creatures (without those I wouldn't have been able to make a centaur or a unicorn).

I still would consider myself a novice at this, but I was quite proud of what I was able to do. It was a ton of work, though a real artist would probably say it's much harder to make something original. To that I would say, not if you're completely art impaired like me. I tried to draw a unicorn. Just... just look at it, guys.

I didn't bother with ears or eyes. I knew it was a lost cause

AI art let me create something I never could have done on my own, and although I know I didn't technically make those illustrations, I put in enough work editing and tweaking to feel like I did. 

So, maybe I'm not totally a hypocrite?

Next time, I'll tell you about the next part of my publishing journey: formatting.

Also, please make sure to order a copy of the book on Amazon, available Sep 18!

Boredom as a Writing Tool

I heard this quote a few years ago about how kids need to let themselves be bored because it's in those moments where they're not being entertained that they create things, and something like a question about how many authors, music composers, artists, and inventors will we miss out on because the rising generation doesn't let themselves get bored. I went searching for this quote and, while I didn't find exactly the one I was looking for, it turns out a lot of people have said similar things.

Robert M. Persig said, "Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity."

Kim Raver said, "I think it's necessary to let kids get bored once in a while--that's how they learn to be creative."

In Nicholas Kardaras's book, Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids -- And How to Break the Trance, he says, “If you really want a child to thrive and blossom, lose the screens for the first few years of their lives[...] Most importantly, let them experience boredom; there is nothing healthier for a child than to learn how to use their own interior resources to work through the challenges of being bored. This then acts as the fertile ground for developing their powers of observation, cultivating patience and developing an active imagination-- the most developmentally and neurosynaptically important skill that they can learn.”

This child is about to do something awesome

I skimmed several articles and noted reddit threads where people said basically the same thing: creativity happens when kids (and adults) are bored, and the fact is we live in an age where we are almost never bored. We always have these little screens in our pockets and if ever there's a moment of downtime, we inevitably pull it out and start scrolling.

I'm not here to judge or to say smart phones phones or social media are evil. What I want to talk about is my own worry that by constantly using my smart phone I have deprived my brain of enough down time to think of stories. 

Lately I've noticed that I haven't been able to make a lot of progress on issues in my novels. Usually when I run into a section where things feel off or I'm stuck trying to figure out the next plot point, I actually come up with the answer when I'm away from my computer, just pondering things out. But that hasn't been happening for a while.

I have two sections in two different books in the series I'm currently working on that I've been stuck on for a while. The first is a section that has already been written and which I have been trying to edit, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it. There's not a lot of action, and it's rather long, and the timeline is a bit off. It's boring to edit and I'm sure it's boring to read. The second is a section that I haven't written yet and is full of action, but I don't know exactly what should happen. 

Normally with things like this I would just let it simmer for a few days and the answer would come to me randomly and I would then write it when I next got to my computer.

But that wasn't happening and I couldn't tell why.

Then, at church we were talking about distractions, and I remembered this quote that I can't find about disconnecting from electronics and letting our kids (and ourselves) be bored. I realized that I hadn’t been doing that. I have had plenty of quiet moments lately where I have nothing going on (I have a newborn that needs feeding) but instead of sitting and thinking, I immediately reach for my phone. There's no time for my brain to work out problems when it's being constantly entertained.

When I was little we sometimes called TV the one-eyed monster. I think that monster is smaller now.

So I tried to cut back a little on the electronics. At least a few times a day, if I had a moment of quiet, I let the quiet remain and I let myself be alone with my thoughts.

And already I have come up with a few ideas for how to fix the first section.

Boredom is a writing tool. We need to be bored at least a little everyday to let our brains entertain itself. Often, for me, it will do that by telling itself a story, and then I can tell that story to others.

So if you can't come up with what comes next in your stories, or how to fix a problem section, try sitting with nothing to do. Let your mind wander. With nothing else to distract it, it might come up with a solution.

Will ChatGPT Take My Job?

 When I was young, if someone mentioned artificial intelligence, people thought of this:

this:

or this:

People were scared of any mention of AI and robots because they immediately imagined these things taking over the world and overthrowing humanity.

Who knew artificial intelligence would actually look a lot more like this:

this:

or even this: 

That last one is a from a chat with ChatGPT, a natural language processing (NLP) AI Chatbot, and some people are just as afraid of it and other generative artificial intelligence as they once were about evil robots.

You've probably heard that AI Chatbots like ChatGPT will eventually take your job. And as a writer, they are particularly worrisome because they can write anything you tell them to, including entire novels and screenplays. The implication is that someday, we won't need human writers for written media at all, and paid human writers will be pushed out of the market for the much cheaper computerized version.

So am I worried ChatGPT will take my job?

My initial response is no. Chatbots are an excellent tool. Look how my simple question above was answered in seconds by ChatGPT, meaning I didn't have to search through Google to find every possible example of AI we use on a daily basis, or even open up an article to see if it had what I was looking for. Chatbots are also useful for writing code, as they can immediately give you the code you need in the language you want for a specific task. And, yes, they can get you started on writing, and even help you brainstorm ideas.

But innovators they are not.

Everything coming out of artificial intelligence has first been put there by humans. The way Chatbots work is by looking at what already exists, finding patterns, and then spitting out text based on those patterns. A Chatbot cannot come up with a new story, it can only tell you stories based on stories that have come before. You might argue that's what all stories are, just reusing and rehashing old tropes, putting twists on genres that already exist.

But that's the thing. Humans can surprise us with those twists. Humans make new stories by taking well-known archetypes and turning them on their heads. A Chatbot doesn't know how to do that. They can only look at what came before and repeat it. Only a human can look at what came before and change it.

So none the stories and novels and screenplays that come out of Chatbots are going to be innovative. At some point, without new input, all of these stories will be the same. Sure, some people don't mind that, but I think for the most part people will prefer to be surprised by human tales.

With that said, there is the smallest part of me that worries what will happen if that percentage of people who prefer innovation is lower than I think. If the majority of humanity don't mind consuming the same stories and tropes and archetypes again and again, especially if the cost is low, then eventually human writers probably will give up and use AI to make their books as well. And then all our media will be a boring, beige, barely entertaining pool of repetition.

So here's my call to action. If you don't want that happening, you need to send a message to the people who produce media. Let them know that you prefer to be surprised. Read and consume mostly human-generated media that is innovative and new, and they will get the hint. That's not to say all AI-generated media should be avoided at all costs, but money talks, and if the money is leaning in a certain direction, that's the direction producers will lean toward as well.

Meanwhile, as a writer, I still think ChatGPT can be a good tool to get you started. If you are stuck, or don't know what to do next, a Chatbot can write a few paragraphs for you and you can either edit that or take a few ideas from it. ChatGPT can help you do research on topics you're writing about. Try it out and see how it can help you. But remember, what it spits out is only as good as what humanity has already given it, and, well, sometimes humanity is dumb. Also, it can't reliably give you sources for what it tells you. So, take whatever it says with a grain of salt.

My Writing Hiatus

My advice to people experiencing writer's block used to be, write a little bit every day, even if it's just a sentence. But this past year, I experienced such a motivation drain, I literally could not bring myself to write a single word.

It wasn't what you'd call writer's block. To me, at least, writer's block is when you don't know what to write. This was a complete lack of motivation. To my credit, I was pregnant, and doing anything was hard. I tried for a while to write something, but there were days when I would start up my computer, look at that Microsoft Word icon, and think, "Nope, I can't do it." Eventually I gave up and decided I needed a break.

For several months, I stopped even thinking about writing. Usually I have some plot swirling in my head, but I didn't even try to do that. And honestly, I think it was good for me. I think, for that time period, it was what I needed.

Eventually, while reading a shortened version of Snow White with my kid, I started thinking about how I wish the story was told. I came up with several chapters' worth of plot, and eventually wrote it down. After a while, even that project became dull to me, but I didn't want my momentum to stop.

So, I turned back to my quadrilogy. I wasn't ready to pick up where I left off, but someone who had read through the first book contacted me and said they would like to read the second book. I told them it wasn't ready, and I would need to fix some continuity problems first. So I tried that for a while. It was nice, because it felt like a mix between reading and writing, looking through what I'd already written and fixing things up.

But, at a certain point, even that felt like a slog. Part of the problem was I hit a section that needed a lot of fixing, and another part of the problem was the book simply was getting boring. Which meant I didn't want to read it, and I didn't want to write it.

But it was about that time that I started thinking of things that could happen in the final book, where I had left off months prior. I wrote several paragraphs, along with an outline for the next chapter. I was making progress on a project that I hadn't touched since the previous year, and then...

I gave birth.

I was too tired to write. My motivation was once again gone. I dropped writing and stopped thinking about it.

And you know? I don't feel guilty.

There is a season for everything. There is a season for being super productive, there is a season for writing, a season for editing, a season for publishing. And there is a season for being a mother and taking care of your newborn and yourself. 

I've come back to this blog to try to get some kind of writing out, to get back in the groove. Hopefully I can start writing my quadrilogy again. One thing I've learned from all this is when you're feeling a lack of motivation, maybe try another project. Maybe write a new story, maybe edit one you've already written, maybe try your hand at blogging. Or, maybe take a break. That's okay, too. When you're ready to come back, do what you can, whatever that is.

Hopefully this is the start of me coming back.

Another one bites the dust!

 I wrote a fight scene this week. I hate fight scenes. You mught think this is a bit of a problem in the fantasy genre, which often has battles and such, and the answer is yes, it is definitely a struggle for me. I know fight scenes are necessary. Action is exciting and can keep a reader interested in between dialogue and diplomacy that also has to happen.

 When I was working on the second or third draft of my novel, Scripted, my Honors Thesis advisor told me I should cut out anything that  didn't drive the plot along. He also said I needed to trim down scenes where there wasn't any action. I had a battle scene that I realized didn't really do anything for the plot, but I had already sent him my latest draft with this chapter in it. I fully expected him to tell me to cut it. Insteas he sent it back with the comment, "Yes! Action! This is great!" Something like that.

So action is important. And who doesn't like a good fight scene? My problem is the choreography. You don't want a fight to end too quickly. If someone gets knocked out or wins too soon, it can be a let down. However, if I let things get out of hand, sometimes I can't find my way out of a fight and it ends lamely. Like someone tripping over a rock lame.

The mechanics of fights can be difficult, too, especially if weapons are involved. The chapter I wrote this week did not have weapons, but I still struggled even knowing where to start.

So here's what I did: first, I sat on it. I let some ideas come and go as I pondered some interesting things that could happen in the fight. I did zero writing that day, I just thought.

The next day, I typed up some of the best ideas from the day before, including the way I wanted the fight to end. That way I could at least try to wrap things up in a way that led to that ending.

The next day I still was not feeling excited about writing the scene but I made myself write at least one paragraph.

And stuff actually started flowing. I incorporated a few of the ideas I had writtwn previously, and got about half-way through the chapter. The next day, I finished it, with the ending I had planned. A few things got changed to make it flow better, and then it was done.

I can't tell you how good it feels to be done with that chapter! I don't want to say I dread action scenes, they're just not the easiest thing for me to write. Having a plan can help, though.

What are some of your most difficult scenes to write? What helps you get them done?

Author Burnout

For the past couple of months I've been super excited over the publication of Scripted, and pumped up to finish the quadrilogy I've been working on since I was a teenager. Since about the beginning of this year, I've been trying to edit the second book in that series to fix some continuity errors that happened because I changed a lot about some characters over the years, along with my writing style. I finally got about halfway through that second book and then...

I got burned out. I am tired of working on this book. I know exactly what needs to happen, I know the changes that need to be made, but I don't want to go through the process of making those changes. I just want it to magically be done.

Maybe part of my burnout is from working on the same story for so long. But I think part of it is also because Scripted has hit a dead-end as well. I didn't exactly do anything that you're supposed to do when you self-publish. I didn't get reviews before publication, I didn't do much promotion, I haven't paid for any marketing. There is a reason for this: I know that until I have my quadrilogy ready, I'm probably not going to get a lot of attention. Series are one of the best ways to hook new readers. And without any other books under my belt, Scripted alone probably won't get me noticed as an author.

So I've been waiting on promoting myself as an author until my quadrilogy is close to being done. The problem is that puts a lot of pressure on me to get it done. Scripted is sitting there like an orphaned book, and I want to get more readers and sales, but I also don't want to bother until I have more novels available for purchase... but then that brings back the pressure thing. It leaves me feeling a little hopeless.

Normally, I advise authors to write at least a little bit every day, even if it's just a few sentences. So I'm writing this blog, because I don't know if I have it in me to write my quadrilogy today. I don't want to take too big a step back from this project, because the point is to fix continuity problems; if I wait too long, I might forget what I've done, and just create more problems.

Maybe now is the time to have a beta reader help me out. If someone else can find discrepancies in my writing for me while I take a break, maybe I can come back at it refreshed and ready to work.

Anyone want to help me out?