5 Tips for a Successful Children's Book

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As a writer and published author of soon-to-be eight books, I recently embarked on the journey of a children’s book and received questions from my community about the process. Have you always wanted to write a children’s book? Are you curious about the steps? Let’s look at five tips for a successful children’s book under the self-publishing model!

1. Know the Market

For most people, your journey starts when you get an idea of a topic or plot you want to capture for your audience of kids. What books are already out there with a similar plot or topic focus? If there aren’t many, you have a brighter green light to go forward with your book. In contrast, if there are popular books already out there on the topic, or your plot is too similar to a best-seller, you could put yourself at risk of trademark or copyright infringement, so make sure your topic or spin on a topic is truly unique!

2. Confirm Your Audience

Now that you’ve confirmed your topic has value, who is your audience? Is it a certain age of children? Elementary aged kids? Parents with kids with a particular challenge, like kids going through divorce, kids starting at a new school, kids struggling with ADHD? In my process, I reached out to four child therapists in my community that I respected to see if they’d read my text for feedback. I asked them what age they felt it was written for when working with kids—a population I haven’t served in 7+ years—which helped me narrow down my age range for illustrations of the characters and future marketing.

3. Invest in Illustrations

A children’s book has to have eye-catching illustrations and cover design for people to want to pick it up. Therefore the most significant investment (both in time and money) is illustrations. If you are a creative person, you could attempt to complete the illustrations yourself. For many of us, however, the illustrations come to life through contracting another professional who specializes in children’s book illustration. I put out a request for proposal for an illustrator on upwork.com and had over 35 responses in 36 hours. The next step is taking a look at their portfolios to see what designs speak to you, and confirming price point and pages.

Tips:

1. Amazon KDP self-publishing requires a minimum of 24 pages to publish

2. Color illustrations cost more than traditional books to print

3. Set your budget for the project versus an hourly rate to manage costs. Plan for a range of $1000-$3000 USD depending on the contractor you hire, how many characters you want created, and how many pages your book includes.

4. Embrace Creativity and Communication

Once you hire an illustrator, your job isn’t done. Now comes the part about communicating your vision so they can bring your story to life! What aspects or details do you want included in your characters? Can you “paint the scene” in words for your illustrator to draft-up each page as part of your story line? I enjoyed this process the most because it challenged me to communicate what I was seeing in my head into details my illustrator could work with. Don’t be afraid to speak up about changes in the sketching phase to get things “just right.” After the illustrator gets your go-ahead, they add color for the final design.

5. Identify your Keywords

In the self-publishing space, keywords matter. Thousands of books are being released each day, so ensuring that your audience can find your book amidst millions of books is critical. I enjoy working with Richard Wolf at Wolf Design and Publishing. He’s fast, affordable, and shows his process of finding the keywords that will best help folks find your book when he delivers the results for you to put into your Amazon listing prior to publishing.

Your dream of writing a children’s book can be a reality! Embrace these five tips to get your children’s book out of your head and onto paper! I look forward to learning more about your process and celebrating the launch of your future book with you!

What to Do When Your Work is Stolen As a Self-Published Author

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You’ve published a book and it’s a big deal! After putting your thoughts to paper and finessing the gift you are giving your audience, you are focused on marketing your book and getting it out there. It’s exciting and feels like hard work all at the same time. Amidst the rollercoaster of emotions that come with being a published author, it doesn’t even cross your mind that someone could steal your work and sell it as their own in the self-publishing space. As the author of five self-published books, I sure didn’t, and yet it happened to me!

I found out my work had be plagiarized on 10/14/22. Not once but TWICE. I happened to be looking up my book on Amazon after a colleague reached out to share that they’d submitted a 5-star review. Imagine my surprise when I saw my Amazon #1 Best-Seller Perfectioneur: From Workaholic to Well-Balanced listed (in English, Spanish, and a workbook), followed by two almost identical titles, published to Kindle in July 2022. My first reaction was shock. Was that really my book title under another author’s name? I clicked on the Kindle listing and was even more baffled to see a verbatim list of my book chapters under their book’s description.

Exactly the same.

As I attempted to wrap my head around what was happening, I felt a mix of flattery—wow they thought my content was good enough to steal!—and outrage—do people really think they can get away with this? Luckily, a quick google search showed me how common it is to have your digital work plagiarized in the self-published space. Thankfully, my search also provided me with some guidance on possible solutions. I want to share my experience with you here so that you too can feel prepared if this were to ever happen to you as a self-published author.

Step 1: Gather your materials that show the Intellectual Property (IP) was yours first.

This is basically a paper trail showing your ownership before others decided to steal your material. Examples of things that could work include:

·      links to your book listing in Amazon that reflect the original publishing date

·      an email time stamp on your book manuscript

·      screenshots of marketing or social media posts that advertised your book

·      a blog where you first wrote about your concepts before the book was written

By no means is this an exhaustive list. Not to mention I’m not an IP lawyer. However, my attorney has emphasized over the years that ownership of IP is best proven by written materials that include unalterable dates on them. So start gathering your proof!

Step 2: Gather evidence of the plagiarism

This includes screenshots, links to the book listings, and capturing the ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) or the link of each product you are reporting.

Step 3: Outreach Amazon to file a Copyright Infringement Form

Millions of people have chosen to list their self-published books on Amazon. If this is you, utilize Amazon’s form to file your complaint. They will review the materials you submitted and will most likely ask for additional information to prove you are the original owner of the IP in question.

In my experience, I notified Amazon the Friday I found out and had resolution by Monday morning 72 hours later when they emailed me to confirm they were taking down the listings that had plagiarized my content.

What not to do? Do not outreach the sellers. Why, you might ask?

1)    From my google search, I learned that oftentimes the author listed isn’t even a real person. Instead, folks could be scraping your written material off digital devices to then place it under a fictious author.

2)    If you outreach them, the listed contact can remove the plagiarized content before Amazon can see it, getting away with plagiarism and any of the profits they made from your work. Not to mention they could re-list your book content under a new listing if not flagged by Amazon itself.

So begins your journey to resolution regarding plagiarism. You may have noticed that the first efforts I listed don’t involve taking folks to court. In fact, that could be a costly response to your content being stolen and is considered a last-resort option for many. If you have plans to continue to put out new self-published content, consider having an Intellectual Property lawyer on retainer for legal advice as you go forward. Lastly, do an Amazon search once in awhile to ensure your content isn’t showing up under another listing or author’s name again. It’s definitely not the fun part of being an author, but it may feel necessary to check your online listings regularly, in order to reduce any anxiety you feel about your work being sold as someone else’s book, oftentimes as a cheaper price.

Where do I go from here in my own personal story of plagiarism? I feel like I’ve learned a lot in the last 72 hours. I can only hope my experience can help another author navigate this aggravating event with minimal stress. After all, your work is valued and valuable—it deserves to be out there under your name as the original author within the safety net of a professional self-publishing space.