Making a Living As a Children's Book Author

By Scott Smith

Jump Start Your Career As a Children's Writer!

Many years ago, I had the idea for my first picture book. I sat on in for years for one reason and one reason only: I couldn’t draw. Like at all! Even my stick figures looked terrible!

I hoped one day to be connected with an illustrator who couldn&rsqu

• Language: English
• Publisher: SL Editions
• Release date: Mar 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087871011

Scott Smith

Scott Smith was educated at Dartmouth College and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

Book preview

Introduction

Many years ago, I had the idea for my first picture book. I sat on in for years for one reason and one reason only: I couldn’t draw. Like at all! Even my stick figures looked terrible!

I hoped one day to be connected with an illustrator who couldn’t write, but one day I decided to stop waiting and start doing! I got proactive and started looking for an illustrator. And it wasn’t as much as I anticipated. I realized that this was something that really could be done on a budget!

This book is twofold. One, it’s for writers like me who need to know how to find an illustrator on a budget; two, it’s for children’s writer who are hoping to one day make a living doing this.

Let’s be clear: This is not an easy career; nor is one you will get rich quick at. But if you are ready for some hard work, then read on!

[1]

Illustrations On a Budget

When I first looked into illustrations, I was astonished by the cost. I figured I could just find a talented artist who would work for free and share the profits. I figured wrong!

It’s very rare to find an artist who will work for profit sharing—some will even want profit sharing even though they are being paid. On the low end, illustrators charged upwards of $100 a page, so even going cheap on a 30-page picture book would cost about $3,000. And then you have to share the profit!

So I started feeling a bit hopeless; but then I remembered years ago reading about Upwork—an online service that connects talent. It’s free to use, but you do, obviously, have to pay the person you hire.

A bit reluctantly, I put up a proposal that I’d figure would get lots of high bids. I also explained the style I was looking for and asked that bids be per page and assume the book was 30 pages. I figured, what do I have to lose? You aren’t obligated to actually hire anyone. But something funny happened: the bids were actually affordable.

Some illustrators asked for as low as $5 a page; others went as high as $50. On the low end, there were lots of CGI style illustrations; there’s nothing wrong with that style, but I found them to be a bit generic; the more original illustrations went for, on average, $15 to $30 for full color.

So for the illustrations I wanted, I was looking at a $450 to $750 investment. That still sounds like a lot, right? Let’s break it down. Let’s assume you want to sell the book for $2.99 digitally and $5.99 as a paperback (and don't worry about the cost to make the book—I’ll show you how to do all of this for free later in the book). At those prices you’d be looking to make about $2.00 for every book sold. So you’d have to sell between 200 and 400 books to break even. Does that sound impossible? It really isn’t that hard to do; in the last chapter I’ll show you how a little bit of easy marketing can get you to those numbers.

Also, keep in mind, selling books yourself means you have the right to publish it in pretty much every territory. If you publish a book traditionally, a publisher will usually publish in the United States and sometimes Canada and the UK; selling it yourself means selling it all over the world is literally just a simple click! So you’ll have an instant worldwide audience.

If you want to make your money back more quickly, then you can try selling it for more. A digital book will usually earn 70% royalties off anything priced about $2.99 and 35% off anything priced below. A print book is based on several different factors, and you’d have to refer to the distributor for the right amount—at $9.99, however, you’d probably be able to earn at least $3 to $4 for every copy sold.

Also keep in mind that, unless you make other arrangements, you own the illustrations. You don’t have to give byline credit if you don’t want to; you don’t have to share profits; and you can even sell the illustrations—so, for instance, you could make a t-shirt or other merchandise with images from your book to earn a little bit of extra income. You could even resell the image. Just think outside the box—you will own the illustrations and don’t need permission to do anything with them.

That all sounds doable, right? But Upwork is an online service—can you really trust an online service? If you were hiring someone off something like Craigslist, I’d be a little skeptical. Upwork, however, has a lot of safeguards to make sure you don’t lose money—as long as you play by the rules. Upwork will even take care of tax stuff for you. And speaking of taxes, keep in mind if you make a profit on doing this, then you can start writing things like this off!

What rules should you be aware of? The biggest one is that sometimes Upworker will try and tell you their email or get you to do a Skype call; I’d be leery of this because usually the reason they want to contact