And then the discussions devolve into various levels of hostility as working illustrators defend their right to be paid fairly for their labor, writers accuse illustrators of gatekeeping and overcharging, and things just deteriorate from there until a moderator disables commenting.

Why do you want to listen to me about this?

Your Self-Published Children’s Book is a Vanity Project (and That’s Okay)

Let me emphasize this again for the folks in the back: there is no shame in self-publishing your children’s book. And there is no shame in having and completing a vanity project. My friend Judy Gitenstein told me once that she only likes to work with writers who would want to publish their book even if they knew that they would sell very few copies, and I think that’s a solid philosophy. Most books, even published traditionally, don’t earn out, meaning they do not sell enough copies for authors to cover the advance they are paid. The average book sells less than 1,000 copies total over its lifetime. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s exceedingly unlikely you’re going to get rich and famous publishing your book.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t publish it though! Getting your story idea from concept to draft, refining that draft, showing it to people to make sure it makes sense and says what you mean it to say, then laying it out, and creating the physical object is a LOT of work, and at the end of the day you have published something! That’s amazing! And you should do everything you can do to get it in front of the widest audience you can.

A Brief Introduction to Book Production and What You’re Actually Asking For

You can expect an experienced illustrator to charge a page rate, meaning a flat fee for each page of illustration they complete for you. Illustrators, I’m talking to you now: you need to know how long it takes for you to complete your work, in hours, before you establish your page rate. DO NOT PAY YOURSELF MINIMUM WAGE, NO MATTER YOUR EXPERIENCE LEVEL. Yes, my young illustrators, you want to get experience, but I will argue that negotiating fair rates for yourself is part of the experience you need. I’ll wager that you’ve been developing your skills for most of your lives before you’ve ever considered taking on a professional project.

Sorry, writers, but even an illustrator’s first project should pay them more than they would get for stocking shelves at Target (which I did for about 9 months post-college before getting into commercial production. No disrespect. That’s hard work too.) Why? Illustration is skilled work. It takes years of study and practice to learn to draw, develop a consistent style, communicate effectively through your drawings, and manage your workload.

Book layout and production are separate skills from illustration. When I was in college studying graphic design, I was aiming for a career in print layout, mostly because I’m Old, and when I was in school the arts department administration was not yet convinced that the Internet was going to be a Thing that had staying power. I did happen to be in the first class at my college who got to use computers instead of acetate pasteups in the design lab, and thank goodness, because I have a foundation in analog design practices, a few very dusty skills with Quark Xpress, and early experience with Adobe InDesign that I’ve continued to develop to this day. And I still think it’s fun, some 20…25..oh god…years later. There is something so satisfying about setting up a clean master and styles, dropping in your copy, and woosh, a whole book to pick on and refine for another dozen rounds of revisions. I kid, but I really do like it, and I still get a little thrill by shift-placing a file and getting no overset errors.

Once your document is laid out, your book needs to be output in the filetype and with the settings required by your printer. They may also ask for the cover as a separate file, with different requirements. You’ll need to select your paper, your binding, and whether you want to submit your published book to be sold through retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Ingram catalog. In order to do that, you need to order a proof and then submit it for approval. If there are changes, you need to be able to make those changes. This process has killed many a personal project.

If You Care About Your Children’s Book Looking Its Best, You Should Expect to Pay a Premium

Your pages are going to take someone hours to create well. And those hours represent the accumulated time all the above training took as well. Same for layout and book production: Amazon has a tool that will do it for you, but believe me when I tell you that those books look weird. Remember why you’re doing this project— what do you want it to be at the end of the day, a beautiful reflection of the story you’re trying to tell at every level of production, or something you got done on the cheap? Remember that thing I said about there being no shame in self-publishing? One of the reasons people think of self-published, print on demand books as lesser than traditional publishing is because poorly laid out books look cheap.

I hope I’ve made it clear, but I’ll say it again, book production is a lot of work. It requires a lot of knowledge. You can acquire all of these skills and this knowledge. It will take time. Or you can hire someone who already has that knowledge and skill and it will take less time, but more money. This is the tradeoff.

Can’t I Just Offer to Split The Profits With My Illustrator?

My personal projects take hours that I don’t get paid for, but I’m willing to risk that time on them to get them out in the world. These projects are often my passion projects, my joy, the things I would do anyway even if I never get paid for them. and I understand that there is a risk that I won’t. I have a limited time to work on them, and that time is precious to me.

As a freelancer, my work hours are billable. If I don’t get paid for the hours I work, I can’t pay rent or buy food. To ask someone to work for free on your passion project is to ask them to carry your risk for you. Ask yourself, before you make this offer to anyone, what’s in it for them? Are you willing to turn YOUR project into something you share? How much creative control are you willing to give up for this share of the risk? Of course, you can have whatever you can negotiate. But understand what you’re negotiating with.

Okay, But What About Using AI to Illustrate My Children’s Book?

Look man, this is your project, you do you. There are ethical considerations when it comes to using generative AI to create images, especially when you’re talking about using them for commercial purposes. That’s a long discussion and probably beyond the scope of this article. Let me talk here about the technical considerations of using AI images:

AI is stupid, meaning, generative AI is a predictive technology and is not creating anything that it can’t extrapolate from a database, and it can’t infer anything from what you say beyond that. So your prompt has to be specific enough to allow the AI to predict accurately not only the image you’re trying to depict, but the composition you need to effectively communicate the idea in the space on the physical page within your layout. That’s art direction, my writers. It is a skill unto itself, so your prompting has to be rock solid to get what you actually need to make this book be what you had in your head when you set out to create it (and it’s still going to look kind of off, in my opinion). If you don’t have the skills to communicate your ideas to the robot, you’re not going to get what you’re aiming for, and you’re likely to settle on something lesser. Is that really how you want to approach this passion project?

On the other hand, any visually-oriented human being is going to be able to help you better realize your vision, in less time. Between the two of you, you will have a valuable human experience of creating something new together, and call me old fashioned, but I think that’s worth something.

I don’t know what’s going to happen with generative AI in the future. I’ve always wanted the Computer in Star Trek to be real, and what chatGPT does now feels almost like maybe it could grow up to be that someday. Maybe someday, the energy usage will have been worth it, the weird ethical grey areas around training on someone’s copyrighted intellectual property will be sharpened and resolved. But it’s not there now, and maybe you want to take that in consideration as you’re making your book now.

Holy Crow, Did You Read All of This? Okay, You Deserve Some Ballpark Numbers

Thanks for taking the time to consider my thoughts on self-publishing your Illustrated Children’s Book.

This is something I’m actually pretty passionate about— even if the book wasn’t necessarily my jam as a reader, I have loved every single book project I’ve worked with writers to put out, from slim little coloring books, to beach novels, to picture books I’ve illustrated or not. I am available for hire for illustration, book production, or both. My current page rates and production packages are available on my rate card on Sharptooth Creative, and I would be delighted to talk to you about your children’s book.

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I’m convinced that we need art, and frivolity, and joy, to survive unsurvivable things, or even just to make it through “Interesting Times.”

I was talking to someone I know who lost her house in the Eaton Fire recently, a lawyer who is giving a lot of time to look over the insurance policies of other Altadena residents who are going through the same. “Nobody is Fine,” she said, and as we were talking, she mentioned that she’s working so hard, in part, to try to keep calm.

“Yeah, but, like, give yourself some time to lose your shit,” I said. “Even if you have to put it on the schedule. Let yourself feel all of it or it’ll make a home inside of you.”

My therapist finally talked me into believing that we’ve got to let ourselves feel the full range of emotion or Bad Things start to happen to us, like chronic anxiety. So feel the rage, and fear, and despair. But on the other side of that, let yourself feel some relief too, to let your brain and body know that you’re on the other side of it. Or if you’re in the middle of it, know that that’s not the entirety of your existence.

It doesn’t have to be some grand lesson about resilience to be valuable. I suspect it’s even better if it’s not. Let’s allow for our brains to take a break every now and then and enjoy something pretty, or something stupid, or laugh at an immature joke.

I have some pretty grave concerns about what’s going on in the world right now. I don’t talk too publicly about what they are specifically— if you know me, you know what I’m talking about. Somebody I follow on Bluesky who is sharing English myths and lore talked about Enchantment as Resistance, and how that requires committing fully to both Resistance and Enchantment. We don’t have to stare into the abyss constantly to fight against it. Sometimes we must turn our faces toward the warmth of the sun.

While accounts of the Game not authorized by the NFL are strictly prohibited, I will say that I enjoyed having this one on in the background this year, especially since I am always rooting for the Birds, no matter what, so this didn’t disappoint.

More and more people are getting into the spirit of the Superb Owl every year, including conservation groups and natural history museums, and even long-haul truckers! I had a 5-minute interview about my paintings on SiriusXM’s Road Dog Trucking on Sunday morning (at 6am my time!) which was actually pretty delightful. I explained about the charities, about how this is a chance to get into the hype on my own terms, and raise a little money to care for wildlife all over the country.

This year, the Superb Owl painting was purchased in advance, so there was no auction, but that means that the prints are on sale immediately. All the owl stuff in the shop is going to contribute to the donation at the end of the month, so if you’ve been waiting to get some owl art, now’s the time!