How I Illustrated and Published a Children's Book!

i'm so excited to be sharing this video with you guys because i illustrated and published my first children's book it's called abc's for the american born chinese and the whole idea is that i want kids to be able to learn the alphabet with chinese american fruits vegetables and other foods alphabet books are such a great way for kids to begin to learn and associate the english language with things as important as foods so why not make them foods that we would see in an asian household instead of a is for apple b is for banana we have a is for asian pear b is for bok choy c is for century egg all the foods that i grew up loving to eat i personally love the idea i mean i made it so i'm a little bit biased but i genuinely would love it for my future children i also think it's a great way for parents to be able to connect their children with their culture whether it's having hot pot for dinner or making zones's together i'm really proud of my first book and i'm so excited that you can actually get it on amazon like who would have thought i also made downloadable coloring pages and posters so if you're interested in how and why i wrote a children's book i'm gonna walk you through from conception all the way to printing and publishing so why a children's book well when i was starting digital art i realized that none of this is actually tangible if i don't print it out it kind of just lives in my ipad so i started printing tote bags stickers posters and around the same time my friend's baby turned one and he was buying children's books and i thought what if any time someone i knew had a baby i could gift them a children's book that i wrote and illustrated like how cool would that be plus like a book of your art now that is tangible i started researching borrowing different ebooks to study different art styles screenshotting as i go i took notes of my favorite stories and also ideas that these authors were teaching kids what did i want to tell with my story i actually wrote three different scripts all different variations taking place in a grocery store and some sort of incorporation with the alphabet but after i did character studies and was starting the final artwork i started to realize this is way too complicated for me for my first book i don't actually know what i'm doing i don't know like what if i get the math and the dimensions and the bleed lines wrong so i came up with abc's for abc's i wrote out my list from a to z went through multiple iterations interestingly i was the hardest letter i also developed a very specific art style i'd take a fruit or vegetable and draw it three different ways with different brushes decide which i liked best then i would ask my friend to send me random food items to draw like cabbage a butcher and i would practice until i could draw any object in this style then it was pretty much straight to drawing i spent all of my thanksgiving break drawing but i loved it it was like the most productive i felt in 2020 i would draw two or three a night and then i had a bunch of my friends review my drawings and help me spot things that needed improvement whether it was a small detail here or there or completely redrawing now the cover i looked at a bunch of people's covers a lot of alphabet books to figure out what exactly i wanted and i drew three different designs i think of everything the cover was the hardest for me to do just because there is so much pressure riding on the front cover but i think once i started to do these like outlines of the foods it really filled in a lot of the spaces and i actually love the cover now initially i wasn't looking to publish i was just going to buy and gift them as needed but my friend said well you already did all the hard work like just try publishing it and it is actually stupid easy to do it you can do it through amazon's kindle direct publishing and there's only like three pages you need to fill out the only thing is that amazon does take a large cut of the profits um yeah i guess we'll talk about it they take about forty percent printing this book costs 365 and that'll depend on your book size and page count i decide to charge 7.99 so i earn a dollar 14. yeah i'm not here to earn money my ideal is that this would have been a board book so it's a little bit more durable for kids to kind of like throw around um but this will do for now in the meantime i've reached out to more traditional publishing whether or not they'll get back to me i don't know so that was the whole process and now a reading abc's for the american-born chinese abc's for the abcs a is for asian pear b is for bok choy c is for sentry egg d is for dragon fruit e is for eggplant f is for fish g is for ginger h is for hot pot i is for ice cream mochi j is for jackfruit k is for kumquat l is for lotus root m is for mushroom n is for nappa cabbage o is for octopus p is for persimmon q is for quail egg r is for radish s is for snow p t is for taro u is for urchin [Music] v is for vermicelli w is for winter melon x is for xiaolongbao y is for yam and z is for zonzo so i hope you will check out my book and share it with your fellow asian americans if you are writing a children's book good luck and if you are my friend thank you so much for your help and support you guys gave me so much feedback and i'm so grateful [Music] bye you

Channel: cathy lu

Views: 14,015

Rating: 4.9372549 out of 5

Keywords: illustrating children's books, illustrating a children's book, publishing a children's book, self publishing on amazon, how to illustrate a children's book, how to publish a children's book, how to publish a children's book on amazon, how to illustrate a childrens book, how to illustrate a book cover, how to illustrate a book yourself, how to self publish a children's book, how to create a children's book, making a picture book, making a picture book from start to finish

Id: WyShL7dh7EU

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021