Creating Children's Illustrated Books Children Will Love

This is an overview of the available children's book types on amazon.

You will see examples of:

Rhyming Books

Informational Books

Low Content Books

Character-Driven Books

Message-Driven Books

Other Books

You can make a choice of the types of books you want to include in your Children's Book Library - This training is focused on Character-Driven and Message-Driven Books.

This is a live look at the available children's book categories on amazon.

You will learn that I prefer animals categories because they are easy to personify. By giving them attributes, feelings, activities that are similar to people, the readers will identify with your characters.

You will also learn how I choose the animal that I wish to make the subject of my picture books. Choosing a category that you can dominate is the key to a successful children's book series on amazon! Watch this lesson to understand how to make the right selection!

This lesson is where "the rubber meets the road." You must take time to decide which category you are going to target and then decide what character you are going to use. You don't need to find an image yet, this is covered in the following lessons. Right now you simply need to COMMIT to a category and a character! Please do not move on in the training until you have completed this step.

This complete training is all about creating Children's Picture Books without spending a lot of money - Pixabay is a wonderful resource for finding background images for your book covers and for your book scenes. In this lesson you will see how I find the images I use without having to pay anything at all by utilizing Pixabay!

Identifying a character image that is available in many different poses will make creating library series of books very easy. By finding an artist on 123RF who has a number of different images of the same character, you will be able to draft story after story without looking for more images, or worse, having to pay someone to create more for you!

It is best to have at least a dozen different images of your main character. You can look for other artists that have characters who will also show up in your stories from time to time. For example, you will probably need a mom, dad, maybe siblings, a grandma... think about where you might want to build out your storylines.

For other characters like friends, you might even want a different animal altogether. All of your characters don't have to be alligators, there might be characters like a turtle or a snake that appear in several books as time goes on. Try to think ahead as you make your purchases so that you can build up a library of character images you can use over and over again without spending more money.

In this lesson, you will learn an easy way to write your storyline and then gather all the images you need to create your book. By following this step-by-step process, you will be able to build your book quickly and easily without constantly going to buy images and thinking through the process over and over again.

Learn precisely how to know, before you start, the number of scene images (bedroom, kitchen, living room),  how many character images (main character, dad and/or mom in different poses), and how many other item images (snacks or toys) that you need to get your book from start to finish quickly.

You will have a simple and straightforward process to take your book from concept to completion in just a few steps!

How many images will your story need? Which rooms in the house? Other family members? You determine where your story goes. It does NOT have to be complicated!

In this lesson, you will download the free software that is used to create the pages of your book.

The software download is located at Gimp.org

In this lesson, you will see the GIMP dashboard and learn where the tools are located.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Scale Tool to format the size of your book pages. 

We are building a 6" X 9" Book. A two-page spread is going to be 3750 px by 2775 px; a single page is 1875 px by 2775 px.

Make sure that the DPI is set to 300 DPI (not 72) if you are building a paperback. Otherwise the images will be blurry when the paperback is printed!

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Fuzzy Tool to add a transparent background to your images.

This is important because having a transparent background enables you to place your characters and other images on top of a scene in order to create your story pages.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Move Tool to place any image in a different place on the canvas.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Rotate Tool to manipulate the orientation of an image.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Flip Tool to change the orientation of the image.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Perspective Tool to change how an image appears to be oriented on the page against the background and toward other characters.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Eraser Tool to remove part of an image to make your character appear to be behind another object in the scene of your book page.

In this lesson, you will learn how to use the Text Tool to place text where you want it on the page. You will also learn how to create a box or oval as a layer and fill it in with a color so that you can place the text on top of this box to make it easier to read on your page.

Always remember to make sure text is not on the center line of a two page spread because it might get cut at the wrong place and become illegible.

In this lesson, you will take the storyline that you wrote in Lesson 7 and turn it into the pages for your book.

You have already written the story, gathered the images you need - all that's left is to put it all together for your book. Because you have previously completed the "heavy lifting" you will find it very easy to get your story from concept to completion.

This is the time that you start building your very first illustrated children's book!

Making a two-page spread split for the proper view of your eBook and paperback is so easy!