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From Sketchbook to Self Published Book

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​Read on the web.

Hi Reader,

Welcome to this edition of the Artzlife newsletter.

A huge thank you to everyone who's reached out to me in the past couple of weeks telling me about their hobby art journeys.

I'm so happy to have inspired some of you to s-t-r-e-t-c-h yourselves into your artistic talents.

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Coastal Inspiration

You may know that I live on the west coast of Canada and I'm pretty close to the beach which I get down to probably once or twice a month.

I have sketched many seascapes and features around the coast my most recent one being the concertina sketchbook, but I also did an acrylic over painting of English Bay.

Intertidal Pool

A few months ago, I was working in my grid art sketchbook and on one of the topics I started drawing was of an intertidal pool.

An intertidal pool occurs when the high tide comes in and it fills up pockets of water along the beach in amongst the rocks.

Then as the tide goes out, the ocean water remains and there are some sea creatures that are caught there, and they must wait in the pool until the next high tide if they want to escape.

Of course, many of these animals live in this beach area anyway.

You get organisms like crabs and sea stars, little fish and all sorts of things within these intertidal pools

They are sometimes in amongst the rocks in a small pocket of water along the beach where boulders are as well.

So, back to my sketchbook…

I did six little grid sketches of an intertidal pool.

One with a cross-section through the whole thing to see how its lies on the beach.

Next, a couple of other views from above and to the side.

Then I added a little tangerine sea star.

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Sea Star

And if you don't want to sea star is, it used to be called a starfish, but these days apparently, they are now called sea stars.

Which is the correct way to refer to this little 5-pointed (or more) friendly little animal.

I continued in my grid art sketchbook doing some more pages, but I kept coming back to this sea star page.

Then occurred to me that I could perhaps write a story and make a little children's book about this little sea star.

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The Story

Research

I did a little research and discovered that with children's books, you have to be in the right age category.

For my idea of creating a picture book with perhaps one sentence on each page, I would be in the kid's age group of three- to seven-year-olds.

Now in this clutch, mom is reading to them, and she shows her little darlings the words by pointing with her finger, so it has to be pretty simple.

It needs a simple vocabulary, but with a delightful story to it.

Friendship

I probably spent about three to four weeks working on my story.

It's pretty straightforward from an adult perspective, but from a child's view, it is actually a story about friendship.

And to be quite clear, I've never done anything like this previously.

I've never written children's stories or any fiction whatsoever, but being a hobby artist and creative person, that didn't stop me.

So, I worked on my story.

Images

Once I had my story 95% completed, I began the layouts for the artwork that would go in the picture book.

Now I knew I was going to self-publish this on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) with Amazon.

They have some specific criteria for sizes of the pages and the number of pages which have to be in the book of that size and so on.

Dimensions

To be honest, this is quite a complicated topic, but the instruction are all laid out there on their website and you've just got to plow your way through it all.

I decided to work on a book that would be 21.5cm by 21.5cm (8 ½" x 8 ½") which is actually a square.

Page Count

I was required to have at least 48 pages.

This meant that I had to do 48 original art pieces, one for each page in the book.

Once I had drawn the individual art pieces for each page, I could then add the words, on top of the image.

Procreate

To draw my digital images, I used Procreate on my iPad.

This is a hugely popular art app and you can draw things with your Apple pencil which is where I drafted these initial images.

Color Palette

I worked the pages back and forth for quite a few times.

Then I decided I need to stabilize my palette to make sure that I was using the same family of colours and repeating things from page to page to page.

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Front and Back Matter

Front Matter

I then turned my attention to work on what they call the front matter.

This Book Belongs To

I did an optional "This book belongs to…" page because children love to write their names in their books.

In time, when they become beloved books, the readers continuously return to them even later in life.

Title

It has to be the name of the book that matches the listing on Amazon.

Copyright

You can add a copyright statement if you choose.

For my book it says, "© 2024 Alison Hazel all rights reserved."

ISBN Number

An International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is the number of the book, and here you can let Amazon give you a number or you can get your own.

My ISBN is 978-1-7389045-1-8.

Note: Research this yourself as there are some strings attached to a KDP ISBN number.

I got my own ISBN number for this book from Libraries and Archives Canada, but you will no doubt have an institution in your own country that handles ISBN numbers.

For example, in the USA it is Bowker for your ISBN numbers.

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Back Matter

Blank Pages

At the back of the book there are a couple of pages because there is typically a double blank page at the end of a KDP book anyway.

You need to make sure that your book ends correctly.

Characters

Once the story had completed, I added another fun page which listed all the characters who appeared in my book.

This page says, "Meet Your Rock Pool Friends."

My main characters are:

• Sandy the sea star.
• Crabella the crab.
• Fin the Fish.

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More Books in the Series Page: Still Blank

I had planned to finish off with an author's page listing myself and any other books that were in the series.

It suddenly occurred to me that I could do a series of children's books and maybe have three or five other books related to Sandy, the sea star.

Still waiting…

The blank page is ready and waiting for additional books to be listed if I ever do any.

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Cover

Layout

The cover must be one large image as a PDF that covers the lot.

The spine is down the middle, with the front cover part on the right and the back cover section on the left.

Author

The author's name on the front is optional with KDP, so it's up to you if you display it or not.

Back Cover

On the back cover (left side) you must leave a white space for the bar code that Amazon will put on by itself automatically.

I wrote a little blurb about what's in the book, this is a little preamble if you will, a little taste about what's going on in this book.

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Uploading

Two PDF Files

When you upload your book, you need two files.

• One file is the body (manuscript), which is all your pages as one PDF.
• The second file is the full cover as a PDF.

Body Upload

So first I uploaded the body of the book.

It took a couple of goes because Amazon is very strict about bleed on the edges.

Bleed is making sure that the colour goes right to, and beyond, the edge of the page, and here I had to make some adjustments as well.

Cover Upload

The cover upload was something different too.

It is difficult to know how thick the book is going to be, and therefore how wide the spine will be and therefore, how to place to the words on the front cover center justified.

Timing Approval

This will take time.

Every time you upload a manuscript, Amazon chunters through it all and it's like you're putting things in a meat grinder.

You can go away, make a cup of tea, mow the lawn, come back and it's still working at it.

Once I had finally got my body pages file uploaded and I had the cover accepted by the gatekeepers, that was a big step forward.

Blurb

At this point you're also adding your blurb which will show up when people search for children's books on Amazon.

This is a paragraph or two as selling copy.

Publish

When you've entered all that information, you can then click through and say, publish.

Now, the very first time your masterpiece goes through to publish, it takes at least 48 hours for any approval or comments to come back from Amazon.

And I understand that when you are uploading for the first time, as a new author, or when you are uploading a new title such as this was the first time, they actually have a human look at it.

Adjustments

Every time from here on in, when you make an adjustment and reupload the book for approval, it takes at least 48 hours to hear back from them.

This all took time.

Author Copy

Finally, it was uploaded to my approval and once it is live you can order an author copy.

Now the benefit of ordering author copies straightaway that you don't get charged any profit.

Customer Copy

But I'll tell you a trick.

If you do order an author copy, there's a big flag printed across the front of the book that says author copy right across the book, so you can't really see.

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Book In Hand

Delivered

The book arrived.

Faded

Once I got it, I realized that my colours were slightly too faded.

I really needed to step up my colour palette, the sky, the sea and the sand were rather muted.

That was the one thing.

Paper

The second thing was that the paper that Amazon prints on is rather thin and there's not much you can do about that because that's the paper they are using.

So, I thought, I'd have to live with it, what can I do?

I made the book as a softcover, a paperback, and that was fine.

The cover was smooth and glossy and everything, but again the colours were quite muted.

Now, if I wanted to step up these muted shades to a more vibrant colour palette, I would have to go through every single art piece for every page for all the 48 pages and adjust the colours.

I asked myself, "Do I want to do this?"

I hummed and hawed and I thought, well, yes, I need to fix it because it wasn't working the way ot was.

I had to go back to the drawing board and adjust all the colours for all 48 images in Procreate.

Then once more I uploaded each page image into my master PDF document.

This took time.

When I was ready with the final colours, I once more reuploaded the manuscript, a new cover then I ordered another customer copy.

The book duly arrived, and I was quite delighted with it.

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Final Thoughts

First Copy

When I got the second book in hand, I was able to show it to my daughters because they knew I was working on something, but they hadn't seen it.

They were amazed that their old mom had done this and honestly, so was I.

Fun at the Rockpool with Sandy Sea Star is never going to be a best seller, it's not that sort of book.

What it did do was offer another creative outlet for me as a hobby artist.

It's an extra way for me to put my art and my ideas out into the world.

Series

Will I make a little series of these books?

Well, to start with I thought that was exactly what I would do, but as time has gone on, clearly, I'm not going to create another one soon.

Honestly, I don't see my future in children's books.

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Genesis

Takeaway

But what I want you to take away from this long story of my process is that it all began in my sketchbook.

As you perhaps know, I have multiple sketchbooks which I use for different things, but this is the first time any image from one of my sketchbooks has developed into something else.

It grew into a children's coloured picture book.

Original Sketches

If I had of spoken to you about this before this ever began, I would have suggested that I might have done a sketch and then made it as the basis for a painting.

So, here's the sketch in the sketchbook.

I think, "Yes, that's my concept art. Let me now move on and do the actual painting."

That's what I thought would have happened.

But what did occur was that I took my six grid art journal page and used it almost as a storyboard.

I was able to flesh out the grid into a story for my children's book.

The Path

I think it just goes to show that, even as a hobby artist, you never know where your art is going to go.

You never know where the journey is going once you start putting pen to paper and you're sketching, painting, creating or collaging to create something beautiful.

I mean, do you have to kiss 1000 frogs to find your prince?

Daily Art Practice

The point is that with daily art practice and working in your sketchbooks, as I encourage you to, something beautiful could grow from one of your images as well.

I don't know what it will be, and I had no idea I was going to do a children's book.

It was not on my horizon at all when I started, but it developed, it seemed the logical thing to do and once I started, I just pushed on.

Images

I've showed you several images from this book.

I may also do a video flip through so you can see exactly what's inside the book and what I did and how I did it.

Just a reminder, this book is called Fun at the Rockpool with Sandy Sea Star by Alison Hazel.

It is available on Amazon, and you can see the type of work I have done as my very first children's picture book.

Who knows what the future will bring?

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Read the full story

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Overarch

Sketchbooks

I encourage you to use sketchbooks, do your art as often as you can and lean into your creative life.

I believe all humans are creative and it's good for the soul.

I'd be interested to know if any of your sketches from your sketchbooks have leaped off the page to become something unique in their own right.

I would love to hear from you.