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How To Write, Draw, Illustrate, and Publish your own Children's Book

This blog post describes How To Write, Draw, Illustrate, and Publish your own Children's Book.

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My First Illustrated Children's Book

I did this because I wanted to learn how to do it. I am not an artist but I enjoy learning. This is my first illustrated children's book. It is about cats that know fung fu and their adventures.

Topic

Well, if you have a story in mind then do that. However, if you are looking to make money, then you will have to pick a niche. This can be challenging and you will need to do some research. But in general, if you treat this as a product, then making something people want or need is really important. See below in the publishing section for additional recommendations.

Writing

Writing can be tough. But there are approaches to follow to write a good story. One approach is to follow Dan Harmon's (creator of Rick and Morty) Story Circle.

It is a good way to structure your story and many episodes of Rick and Morty were written in this way.

Drawing and Illustrating

Here I will recommend the books that helped me to learn how to draw. No, I am no artist but there are steps to drawing that can be learned. Obviously, you will need to draw and color digitally so here I will also list the software and hardware I use.

Books

Software and Hardware

The software I use is called TVpaint. It is for 2D animation. I really like it. The hardware I use is a wacom tablet and it is the best I have found for digital hand drawing. There are different sizes. What you get will depend on your budget.

Publishing

This assumes you want to self publish with Amazon. Their service is called KDP. You can just google Amazon KDP. Here are some recommendations when publishing with Amazon:

Sponsored Content

Merch

When you draw, keep the backgrounds in a different layer. That way you can use your illustrations without background for your merchandise. Amazon Merch is a part of amazon you can use to make and sell merchandise. See an example below.