Is there any way to have a children’s book illustrated on a tight budget?

Is there any way to have a children’s book illustrated on a tight budget? Over the past couple of years I have often felt like Sir Percival searching for the Holy Grail. I’ve determined, in my mind, that affordable illustration is possible although in my quest many promising leads have appeared only to later disappear. This time, I think I may have finally found it. Interested?

Several years ago my daughter Stephanie, a second grade school teacher in Maryland, wrote a children’s book titled Oliver the Clownfish – The Invitation Slip up. The problem she was having back then was how to have the book illustrated, on a school teacher’s salary.
My only actual experience with illustrators was from 25 years ago with an artist named Alan Chesley. The thing I remember most about Alan, aside from him walking around Annapolis with a cat sitting on his head, was the speed in which he produced illustrations. While his specialty was technical renderings of ships and steam locomotives, he could draw just about anything, and do it quickly. My 35 years of production has taught me that the hourly rate is not nearly as important as the speed in which a project could be completed. It was less expensive to pay someone $50/hour and have him finish in a couple hours, than to pay someone $10 per hour and have it take days. Alan was good and fast, which resulted in his pricing being quite reasonable. Alan moved on to become an Annapolis folk legend, so he was unavailable but I knew all I needed to do was find someone like him. How hard could it be, I thought?

Any of the regular readers of my column know that we found an illustrator for Oliver and it became the basis for a new illustration program, aimed at helping others, like my daughter. Oliver had gone so smoothly, I figured it wouldn’t be hard to duplicate? That was almost two years ago. Since them we tried to duplicate the Oliver experience a dozen or so times and one experience was more painful then the next. Illustrations were going back and forth between illustrators and author so many times, I lost count. There were corrections on top of corrections on top of corrections. One of the projects we ended up giving back to the author to get illustrated elsewhere. Many of the other projects are just now finding their way to the printing press. How could Oliver have gone so smoothly and the other projects turn in to such train wrecks?

In the end, the answer to this question lay almost solely within the author, not the artist. In the case of Oliver, there were no preconceived ideas of what the art was going to look like. My daughter considered herself a writer, not an illustrator. Her manuscript was sent to the illustrator with very little direction. It was up to the illustrator to come up with the “look”. The first draft came back from the artist and she and I both thought it looked great. It had a nice feel and followed the storyline just fine. Even when we showed the book to the editor who eventually came to head up our high end children’s book editorial program, there were only a few comments or corrections. You can see the whole story of how that project evolved by going to http://www.publishingbasics.com/childrens/index.htm. So what happened with the others?

I think the saying is “Hindsight is 20-20”. Looking back it’s pretty apparent what happened. The clearer the picture was in the mind of the author of exactly what the artwork should look like, the larger the problem. If the author had an idea of what every single component of the illustration was supposed to look like, there was trouble. Take a look again at the spreads at http://www.publishingbasics.com/childrens/step4.htm. You can see the minor corrections to the first draft that were requested. Now picture the comments saying something like, “the pink fish shouldn’t be pink and should be tuna instead of what it is and the coral needs to be different and the water is the wrong color blue, it’s Pacific blue and we want Atlantic blue and so on and so on and so on. You have now taken a perfectly good illustration and started to second guess the illustrator and their artistic interpretation of the story. This simple spread, with a different author, could have easily gone back and forth a couple dozen times, frustrating both author and illustrator. The reality of the whole thing is that in the end, there wouldn’t be a person on the earth, other than the author, who would be able to tell the difference between the first pass artwork and the twentieth. Remember, most illustrated children’s books are make-believe. They are imaginary objects in imaginary places doing imaginary things. If you have $10,000 to $15,000 or more to spend on getting each and every minute detail exactly as you have then envisioned, fine, you don’t need the rest of this article. Find an illustrator whose style you like and just keep going back and forth until you either get it right, in your imagination, or run out of money. If you are trying to see your illustrated children’s books published and are on a limited budget, read on.

The absolute least expensive way, aside from illustrating it yourself, is to try to work with stock illustration. We work with a place called www.IStockphoto.com. If you use my design service, the illustrations are free. This website has thousands of photos and illustrations on just about every subject. For instance, there are 891 illustrations under the keyword, Dog, and 586 for Cats and 4933 for Girls and 2119 for boys as well as 426 for airplanes and 492 for boats. You need to find about 12-15 illustrations to make the book work. Spend some time on the website and see what you come up with. It might surprise you what you find. Use your imagination. It will certainly pay off for you in dollars and cents.

For those of you who can’t find stock illustration and consider yourself pretty open minded, I have come up with an idea we are calling the Let Us Guide You program. The program is just what it says… we will guide you, not the other way around. The key ingredient of the program is the initial Look and Feel stage. This stage is very similar to our editorial analysis in that it is quite reasonable in price and gives you a clear picture of what lies ahead, should you decide we are right for you. For very little up front ($125) you will receive pencil comps of two spreads, one as two single pages and the other as a single two page spread. If you like what you see, we go forward with complete pencils. If you don’t like them, you move on. You can use the illustrations as a starting point with another illustrator. If you move forward with us, the complete pencils are also very reasonably priced at $325 for 24 pages or $425 for 32 pages. Once again, at the end of this stage, you can either move on with us or move on somewhere else, with pencils in hand. You can make some corrections to the pencils at a very reasonable $13.95/page. The final coloring in stage is the most expensive part of the process but probably has the least amount of variables. If you liked the pencils, you’ll love the colored finals. From start to finish you will spend about $1500, including the art, layout and design for a 24 and $1800 for a 32 page book (prices include cover, too.). The final product of this stage is a print ready PDF file which can be used to print either digital or offset copies. For more information on this program, please visit us at http://design.selfpublishing.com/illustration/option1.php5.

Last 5 posts by Ron Pramschufer

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