How To Make a Personalized Children’s Book

For Christmas this year I put together an illustrated children’s book featuring my family. It was fun and took a really long time. The finished product was put together at the local copy store twenty minutes before they closed on the eve of Christmas Eve. Some of the paint was still wet on the illustrations when I scanned them in last-minute and the cover was done last-nanosecond. Wish I'd left more time for that.

Here’s some tips and things to keep in mind if you’d like to write and draw a book starring your nieces, nephews, sisters, parents, in-laws and Aunt Donna.

It’s deucedly difficult to draw a convincing likeness of people, especially if you want to remain on their good side.

Good caricatures exaggerate features. Nobody in my family has forty-two fingers or fish gills behind their ears or a foot growing out of their forehead, but still you sketch something out while looking at a picture and it just . . . I don’t know. A sketchy artist on a boardwalk somewhere can draw a giant forehead or little tiny ears or whatever and get away with it. Not that anyone in my family is sporting giant foreheads or tiny ears, but you rip something out and think, well, that’s not unflattering but somehow not flattering either. I think I’m going to buy scented candles as gifts instead of this project. But you push on.

 ‘Caeser salad’ doesn’t really rhyme with anything.

My niece Claire adores Caeser salad and that was a pivotal point for my little book. You can go through the alphabet in your head (...ballad....um....salad....), then search the internet for ‘rhymes with.....’

I ended up with ‘valid.’ Definitely a stretch, but, hey. Nobody really wants a scented candle.

 It helps if you put the pages in proper order.

A Dr. Seuss-like ripoff already doesn’t make a whole lot of sense so when you switch pages around at the copy center and insert a rhyming couplet about a sea turtle where it should be rhyming a snippet about a metal detector, you risk confusing the reader. And yourself.

In your defense, back-to-back pages that come out of the copier with page 7 on the back of page two look an awful lot like page 9 through 12 and it’s almost closing time so you need to throw this thing together because you don’t have the industrial stapler at home and you should have started and finished this way earlier and remember when you were going to send this off and have it bound professionally? Do they still make soap-on-a-rope? Maybe Dad would like some nice aftershave. Anna could use a nice Barbie, I’m sure, and everybody else can get a calendar from the hardware store.

Cost and putting it together.

Seven bucks a book. Seven pages of double-sided color copies on 8 1/2 x 11. Folded in two, so each page out of the printer makes 4 pages when folded up. Cover was card stock. Back cover had a little illustration just because. So that made for 26 pages with either text and image or just text or just an image.

I found it helpful to make a little mock-up from notepad paper sheets with the proper number of pages, then you can layout how each chunk of text fits with your illustrations and fit the thing together. Also helpful or even absolutely necessary when you start making the actual pages. I used a brochure template set up for two pages back-to-back, which helped keep things orderly. Ended up with seven pdf files and in theory this should have kept things in order as they came off the copier. In practice, it got jumbled and I wound up figuring out how to reinvent the layout of the wheel and getting it wrong on one copy. Oopsy.

So there you go. To make a picture book about your family vacation to Hawaii, you should write a story, then get some crayon-slash-paints or whatever those things are and pretty soon all your pictures will have the same four colors in them, but whatever, and then do some trigonometry to figure out how many pages you need and what goes where and look for a template to lay it out and make a pdf and -- boom. You got yourself a book.

Easy peasey.