If you’re writing a picture book, how should you handle illustrations? Let’s compare illustrating your own manuscript, finding another illustrator, or leaving it to the publisher.

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Picture Book Author Illustrator Video Transcript

Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Today, we are going to talk about the picture book author/illustrator, whether that's you or whether that's a team where you are the illustrator, somebody else is the author, or whether you do both, or whether you are the author and somebody else is the illustrator. How do we leverage that kind of situation where we're presenting a fully finished dummy of a project to agents, to publishers? How do we leverage that for success?

A lot of you have heard that if you are a picture book author/illustrator, same person doing both things, that is a ticket to the stars. And I would say that there is some truth to that. So if you are one person, and you're an illustrator, usually, picture book author/illustrators tend to be illustrators first because it is a little bit easier to finesse the writing part rather than the artistic talents. And for all of those writers who are sitting here wondering if they should learn how to draw and take a couple of classes and become a picture book author/illustrator, I would say, in most cases, you need a lot more illustration experience like that. You are competing with MFA as an illustration. In the picture book market today, it has gone very competitive, highly evolved. It is its own art form. And so, if you don't necessarily have that level of skill and are not trained, it's probably gonna be a long shot. You may even become a liability to yourself if the art is just not there.

So when people ask me, "Well, I'm a writer. Should I learn how to draw?" My response is generally, "Well, it's a little bit more difficult than that. It's not just, you know, stick figure with like bunny ears." So barring that, if you are an author/illustrator... Usually, you're an illustrator first, then you, sort of, take some time to refine your writing. Yes, you are in a better position than either just a writer, and I don't mean to sound dismissive so I'm not saying just a writer because a lot of you out there are writers and it is still perfectly possible to sell just a manuscript into a picture book deal. Or if you're just an illustrator, that can be a really difficult road to travel because there are so many illustrators not only who write their own work before looking to illustrate other projects as well. So a lot of fierce competition and just a lot of material to sift through for the agents, and art reps, and publishers that need to pick up artists, so that can be difficult. Being just a writer can be difficult. The author/illustrator has the unique proposition of putting together the text and the illustrations in such a way where they truly marry.

If I'm creating both, I can really have control over that inner play. I can match the tone of the words with the tone of the art. That's something important that a lot of people don't think about in picture books. It's just this idea of overall tone. And if I can present it to an agent, and usually, that's done with the manuscript separately, but also a sketch dummy where everything is laid out, the text is laid out over sketches, it looks to be as if it was a rough draft of the finished product. We have maybe two or three mock finishes in there, which are fully rendered illustrations which show exactly how the whole thing would be colored, what style it would be, and what the finished product would look like.

Presenting that to an agent or a publisher is especially compelling if it's done well because you're like, "Well, here it is. This is exactly what this is gonna look like. This is exactly what it's gonna feel like. This is how the page turns will work. I created it all." You don't have to do any matchmaking between the tasks and the artists. You don't have to sort of juggle two people on the contract. It's just me. Do you want it or not? That can often be a very easy decision whereas this text that's sitting in front of a publisher or an agent, it's just like, "Well, this could really work with such and such illustrator or this kind of illustration style but if we do something like this, that might not work so well. And there are just more variables or I really want this illustrator but they're booked through 2024." There are a lot of moving parts to marrying the author and the illustrator in a deal, whereas if I'm one person and I present something compelling, it's a straight shot to publication. And so, that is why author/illustrator, one person, can have a competitive edge when it comes to picture books.

Now, if you're a writer, and you say, "Well, for those reasons that you just said, Mary, I am not that confident that my text will get picked up without some kind of illustration. Should I hire an illustrator and give myself a leg up?" Well, that's certainly an opportunity for you, potentially, to get to that nice clean road to publication, but there are some potential liabilities for you there. So, first of all, not a lot of us are artistic directors. We just don't have the eye to dictate what would work really well and that is a liability when it comes to telling a hired illustrator or your partner illustrator what to do.

Now, sometimes, illustrators can really run with the project and add their own flair to it. Sometimes, they want direction and they want to be told. And if you have no idea what to tell them, how to direct them, how to guide them, you may not end up with a product that is compelling enough, varied enough. The composition is all the same. It's like the camera kind of pointing into somebody's living room, page after page after page. These can actually be detriments to the project if there's no, sort of larger vision. And some writers, they don't have that larger vision. That's why they're writers and they're not illustrators. The visual piece is lost on them. And so, if you don't know how to sort of work with the illustrator, if they're a new illustrator, if they've never illustrated a picture book, they may not have ideas to bring to the table. And sometimes, these partnerships, they don't take off because of relative lack of an experience.

The cost is also another potential barrier to entry. You need good illustrations to sort of make a compelling case for yourself but good illustrations are extremely expensive. So you can pay for somebody in their second year of graphic design school to illustrate the project. They'll charge, you know, a thousand bucks. A thousand bucks is still a lot of money but a main tier or like kind of approaching top-tier illustrator will charge $15,000 to $25,000. And then, you know, if you want a name illustrator, they'll charge you more than that to fully illustrate a picture book.

And so if you're a writer and you just want to get this manuscript to cross the transom, do you have the capital you need to hire a compelling and experienced enough illustrator? And ideally, it would be a work for hire project. Not a lot of people are gonna take you up on your offer of future royalty share because, you know, 50% of 0 is still 0 if the book doesn't sell and all of the efforts, and the dedication, and the time is gonna be given upfront in a deal like that, so it's not that compelling. It's compelling to the writer who wants to make that kind of deal. It's not as compelling to the illustrator. You're not gonna get necessarily the best of the best, the most compelling, the thing that paves your way to publication without paying for it. And so, if a project doesn't end up going anywhere after that and there are no guarantees that it will if you attach an illustrator, especially if neither of you really know how to art direct yourselves or one another. That's a sunk cause that you're not gonna get back, unless you then go to self-publish, and then you have to market the thing to see any returns on your investments. So there's a big investment, hiring or partnering with an illustrator and it may not still get you exactly what you want. So those are two, kind of, big things to think about if you're thinking about bringing an illustrator on board independently.

So what do you do if you're just a writer? I would strongly recommend trying to write the best manuscript possible and submitting that before you try to go down the road of partnering with an illustrator. If you're an author/illustrator, you are sitting pretty. Author/illustrators still get rejected every day, unfortunately, but you can make this kind of compelling case for yourself and if you happen to match with a really great illustrator, you're able to turn out a really great dummy with your partnership. You could also pave your way to success that way but it's okay to just submit a manuscript to an agent, to a publisher. They still do that work of matching authors to illustrators and putting books together. Publishers love to do that but, you know, you still will hear scuttlebutt in the industry that an author/illustrator just makes a more compelling case. Try to put your blinders on, ignore that, and write the best manuscript that you possibly can.

If you're an illustrator, you are going to want to canvass publishers, art directors, art reps, and literary agents with your materials. Being digital makes it easy. You just send people toward your gallery. Your portfolio should represent characters, emotions, body language, and interesting uses of color, kind of things that demonstrate your style, whether your style is very sketchy or watercolor, digital, cartoony, whatever the case may be. You wanna showcase everything that you can do and hopefully, you can get some nibbles on "Hey, I just bought a manuscript. I'm an art director. I'm a publisher. I would like to hire you to illustrate it." But there are a lot of illustrators out there, just like there are a lot of writers out there. And if you cannot meet in the middle as an author/illustrator or an author/illustrator partner, you have to just keep doing what you're good at. I would not recommend that you try your hand at illustration or try your hand at writing if you don't know how to piece together a story. You can always sort of make small inroads on your storytelling, whether visual or in words, but that may not be the thing that sets you down the road as an author/illustrator. But I've seen all three happen, all three scenarios, illustrator only, author/ illustrator, and writer. I've also seen the fourth scenario of an illustrator and writer teaming up independently and then hitching to a publisher. So I wouldn't necessarily listen to the people who say author/illustrators only. A lot of agents will put that on their pages but there are still agents that are looking for text only, that are looking to hear from illustrators independently.

I hope that breakdown was helpful. My name is Mary Kole from the Good Story Company. And here's to a good story.

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