The Book Transformation - How and Why

 

So, what goes into transforming a children's story into a published picture book, apart from many months of work?

Storyboarding

The first step is to make a storyboard of your work. During this step, you need to start thinking about breaking down your story into pages and layouts and visualizing your book in your mind.

For this, it isn't necessary to invest in any major tools or software. Any standard word processor (Google docs, Microsoft Word etc.) will let you organize your story into a book-like view.

For Microsoft Word, for example, this can be done through "View --> Side to Side".

Make sure that you think about the layout of the text across the pages but also how you will want the images across the pages, if yours is a picture book.

Images and Notes

At this early stage, you may not yet have images or pictures for your book, so to begin with, you can google for images that are a close representation of the final product you have in mind.

Make as many notes or 'Comments' as possible  about this in the storyboard. If you are working with an illustrator for images, these notes and the images you choose will be vital in ensuring you convey the tone and spirit of your book as closely as possible. 

Decide on publishing

Many would possibly recommend thinking about publishing options after having completed your print-ready version of the book. However, I think that it is very important to try and figure out whether you will self-publish, whether you will print-on-demand or work with a publisher to bulk-print.

Independent publishers give several more options with respect to paper quality and size of the book. However, either you, or the publisher, will need to register as a seller on Amazon and be responsible for monitoring orders and ensuring you have enough inventory of the book in stock.

Print-on-demand comes with less hassles. Amazon, or any other publisher offering print-on-demand services, typically helps with distribution, provides sales reporting and stats and helps you put up an author page and provide information about the book that will appear when customers buy it.

The reason this choice is important is that, if you do go with the print-on-demand option, you are signing on for a choice of standard book sizes and paper thickness. It also means that you will need to have images of this standard dimension and resolution available with which to make your final print-ready document.

On-demand KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) standard sizes and paper options are available here.
Note that Amazon KDP will not help you self-publish or list on Amazon.in
For this, you will need to tie-up with a publisher in India that provides print-on-demand services. There are are several such organizations and I went with Amazon KDP for geographies outside India and Notion Press for the Indian market.

Finding an illustrator

This is perhaps the most crucial step in the creation of your final print-ready manuscript. It is essential to find a professional illustrator if you are serious about having a professional-looking end product. Thankfully, professional freelance illustrators are easy to find; the tricky bit is finding an illustrator who can bring to life the images and notes from the storyboard.

Fiverr is a website where freelancers can showcase their services and provide estimates of cost for the services they provide. It is essential that you spend several hours going through the portfolio of freelance illustrators and then picking 2 or 3, before asking them for a trial illustration.
Illustrators have multiple projects ongoing at the same time and it is essential that you have some idea of what the final illustration will look like, before committing the project to one artist / illustrator.

These are two of the sample images I received before I made my decision. As you will see, both represent the same scene in the story but are very different takes on the same scene.

I had a "focus group" of parents and kids, who had already been prepped and given a general gist of the story. Going with my gut feeling and feedback from my focus group, I picked Winna, who goes by aninozart on Fiverr.

Her illustrations and images have brought the story to life and that choice is one of the best decisions I made throughout this publishing process.

Getting a print-ready manuscript

Once you have a set of images from the illustrator that have gone through a review and revision process, you're set to start on the print-ready manuscript. Most publishers will need this print-ready document to be in a .pdf format.
Occasionally, the cover can be an image file but the manuscript itself is almost entirely expected to be in a .pdf format.

When working with your illustrator, you have a few additional elements to consider.

1. Decide on whether you would like to add in the text on top of the images yourself or whether you would like your illustrator to do this for you

2. Decide on a 'bleed' or margin. Most publishers expect a 0.125" margin on all sides during the publishing process. As a result, when you're asking your illustrator for images for an 8.5"x8.5" book, you will need the images to be 8.75"x8.75", to include the bleed

3. All images need to be a minimum of 300dpi (I'd recommend at least 600 dpi)

4. Ensure that the images that you receive from the illustrator are in a format with which you can work (depending on the tools that you have)

5. The cover image will need the back and front cover pages combined into a composite image

6. Think about Inside cover pages and filler pages while storyboarding your book

My recommendation would be that you add in the text yourself, as the possibilities of last minute text revision are very high (they were for me) and you may not want to be dependent on the illustrator for simple changes such as the addition of a comma or the changing of a single word.

You may want to invest in a few simple tools to help you with this.

I used Inkscape, available for free, to help with image modification and the addition of text.
Inkscape has numerous 'Help' videos available on YouTube for image resizing, text addition and numerous other features. One addition benefit is that Inkscape allows saving of images, with added text, as a .pdf, specifying dpi and bleed at the time of save.

Another tool you may want to use is a .pdf editor - a tool that allows you to combine multiple .pdf documents into a single .pdf and rearrange pages at will. There are freeware tools available but also websites that allow merging multiple .pdfs online.

And after that...

You're ready to go, for the most part.
All that's left is the submission of your completed .pdf manuscript and the .pdf cover on the KDP website and the nervous wait for the submission to be approved.