In This Issue

• The Big Illustration: 50 Books, Missed Target

• Reader Questions: Standards, Pacing

• Week in Review: Proofs, AI Editors, Louis & Who?

• Eccentric Story Writing

• Illustration in Action

• BONUS!

The Big Illustration

I’m starting a collection of 50 picture books…with an edge

That is the master plan, and that is hopefully what you are here for!

So to do this, and get this in front of the right interested people (like you), I need eyeballs on this newsletter, just like any other newsletter. And paid ads are a super-efficient way to do that.

I started running a new paid ad this week on Facebook, and it HIT A NERVE.

Right off, it has done fantastic with a nearly 9% click through rate which is off the charts. It’s also getting comments, forwards, and reposts.

What’s interesting is WHY the “disturbing” aspect is resonating with readers.

The idea of “slightly disturbing children’s books” is definitely like catnip for the right audience. And I think that’s you!

Let’s look at the ad and the comment above it from this morning!

I think, and hope, this is why YOU are here :)

🎯 Community: I missed the target

Each week I cut this newsletter down to fit a reasonable length. A large amount of great behind-the-scenes content never makes it in, or this newsletter would be way too long!

I tested a paid coaching community as a home for that content. But, it didn’t fit the people on this list close enough. Missed the target. Boom, gone.

So now, a pivot:

1. Patreon is where the bonus content now goes: more raw sketches, full draft chapters, and other unedited notes and musings. Even numbers from advertising and sales. It’s more detail than I can publish here, and it will only be on Patreon. If I found it interesting and couldn’t put it here, it will go there. I’m not wasting any content. This is too ridiculously fun to waste anything.

2. Patrons also get a private Eccentric Chat for questions, reactions, and connections.

It is not aimed at thousands of people—only those who want direct access to the ongoing process of weird picture book making, and who want to talk about it and support it.

Therefore…

If what I’ve shared here has been useful or entertaining, Patreon is how to support the work. Join now and you’ll be following every book as they’re built, step by step, all the way to release. You get to see everything eccentric, weird, and slightly disturbing:

Start today by becoming a Patron, and get more eccentric vibes going:

🎵 NOTE: On that note, take today’s poll down below. I can’t read your mind, but I can work the click data you generously submit for me!

Reader Questions Answered

Q: Picture book standards

The most common format for picture books is 8.5 × 8.5 and 32 pages. The 32 page count has to do with how books are printed on large sheets of paper with ink on offset printers, but figures less with print on demand digital printing services like Amazon KDP. However, the 32 page format is still the most common standard. That means you have:

• Front matter

  • p1: Half-title (recto)

  • p2: Copyright / Dedication (verso)

  • p3: Title page (illustrated, author, imprint) (recto)

  • p4: [optional] blank or small imprint/copyright (verso)

• Story

  • p5: Story starts (recto, single opener)

  • p6–29: 12 full story spreads (p6 verso → p29 recto)

  • p30: Story close / “The End” (verso)

• Back matter

  • p31: Colophon / About / ads (recto)

  • p32: Back matter list / QR / URLs (verso): there are no hard and fast rules, but this is more or less the accepted basic format for picture books.

Q: Story pacing

Perfect timing on this question. Was watching a YouTube a couple days ago and snagged this helpful chart!

• Exposition: Keep it short 1-2 pages

• Rising Action: This the key! It’s just peak to peak with mounting tension on how to resolve the tension

• Falling Action + Resolution: Everything wraps up super fast, no fluff, no dilly-dally.

Have more burning questions?

Week In Review

Test copy of Hideous Alphabet

Oof. Typos, and off colors.

Got my proof back from Amazon KDP and found a couple dumb typos. Realized that dark red on KDP is more of a light brown!

Fixed all the typos and reset the red to a more vibrant tone that printed MUCH better.

Remember, what you see on the screen at any point during the bookmaking process isn’t what is going to come out of the printer. Test copies are critical to find and fix color issues like this. Totally expected!

One typo was apparently from bumping the keyboard…a floating “V” in the middle of nowhere.

Free “Book Editors”?

AI is astonishing when used correctly. Did you know you can use it to simulate people of a particular background or bio?

I follow an AI technologist who has a product that simulates thousands of users with unique profiles that he generated with AI and then uses them to evaluate simulated Facebook ad campaigns. His fake crowd (which numbers in the thousands) gives him results that are 80% accurate with the actual campaign once he runs it.

So why not do this for editing a picture book?

I created 20 diverse professional editor profiles from CEOs down to freelance editors, and then had ChatGPT evaluate the PDF copy of the inside of my book, scoring it and giving suggestions. Amazing insights! It caught things I hadn't even thought of!

With something like this you have to take everything with a grain of salt, but also understand how limited this is, but how useful it is too!

New series title issues: Henry vs Edward

The code name for one of the new series I'm working on is "The Dangerous Boys: Louis and Edward and the XXXXX”.

I was looking for very strong male names and then got the idea that it would be cool if they were kings from the past. Then I thought it would be cool if they were based on warrior kings. Then I thought it would be even cooler if they were saints.

But I had started with “Louis and Henry”. But Henry IV from England is definitely not in the hero column, so it was back to the drawing board. I used ChatGPT to research my king options. What an amazing research tool!

“Louis and Edward” it is!

Once the basic story idea was complete enough (it’s not done, and evolving as it should), I put it into another ChatGPT prompt to help me begin to break down the action among the 12 spreads I have to work with in the 32 page format book. A spread can be a full open book spread, or can be independent left and right pages.

ChatGPT is filling in blanks, like a helper, but not a real author. Nothing ChatGPT gives me is publishable. That’s 100% not why I use it. In reality, it’s a fantastic intern / assistant though, to help me speed up the grunt work of every aspect of organizing and producing the content

Weekly Eccentric Poll

[NOTE: Take this poll every week and make me make stuff you like. That’s why I’m here!]

Eccentric Story Writing

The firehose was crazy this week!

When ideas come, you have stop and capture them. Not all ideas are great, but you have to go through they haystack to find the needle.

For me, a story visual and exposition strikes almost out of nowhere. Some of the action comes with that, but not usually the end, which is the hardest part.

Since these are super personal incomplete notes, I don’t mind sharing at all how the sausage is made. So if none of what you see from the notes below make sense, it’s better that way.

Nobody, I assure you, nobody is going to steal your idea. Don’t be precious about them! Ideas are worthless, execution and originality are everything.

Illustration in Action

I am smitten with Tomi Ungerer’s work. Maybe some of you recall “Crictor”, published in 1958. It’s regarded as one of the all time children’s picture book classics.

I've been trying to nail down the style I want to use for one of the books I'm working on and hadn't nailed it down, but flipping through Crictor, I found it.

That doesn't mean I copy the style, like copy the characters or anything in the book, but I want to copy the watercolor approach and the line work approach.

So, how you do that is you get Procreate out and get the book and your iPad very close together, carefully setting up a 1:1 ratio of screen size and book illustration size. Then, customize the different pen and brush settings until you mimic it.

Here is my pass at copying one of the characters in terms of how pen and brush aesthetics:

To be sure my pen was as close as possible to the book, I took a close-up photograph of the printed book through a printer's loop (a small magnifying glass that printers use to check dots). Then I compared it to a laser print that I made. Here is what I saw, which confirmed I was close enough:

Using AI for art the right way

I can’t go super deep into how this works, but wanted to show how a properly set up prompt in ChatGPT can assist in creating reference art.

In my case, this ties to Tomi Ungerer, as I have a need for quick ideation and visualization of how some idea might work in his style.

I built a prompt and gave it some reference style images, then tried to recreate a scene from “Crictor” as a test. I emphasize that while this, from a certain perspective, can look amazing, it’s not that amazing. This is not production quality work, not even close. But that is the point since as an Illustrator I’m going to draw everything by hand of course.

But AI for reference and style images? It blows away having to do this by hand, flipping through endless books, and “googling” for images to achieve the same ends here using AI.

I mean, c’mon, look at this!

Close, but no cigar. BUT THAT IS THE POINT.

SHOPPING

Coming soon! The first book to become available in paperback will be “The Hideous Very Bad Monster Alphabet” that you’ve seen coming together over the weeks! We are a few weeks out at the most, depending on Amazon and Bowker getting the ISBN metadata updated!

Next Week

• Drawing on “Dangerous Boys” first story begins

• Bowker ISBN issues sorted out for imprints, and the Hideous Alphabet about to go live

• More writing on stories I started this week. Working on a method of story writing that makes it more natural to work in the 12 spread standard.

• TikTok experiments for selling books I’m very excited about, and didn’t know existed (fully) until 2 days ago.

• I’ve checked out something like 200 picture books from the library. I should probably share some of what I’m finding. Absolute goldmine of art and story!

BONUS!

Found this lil’ dude on Pinterest but lost the source by mistake! But he was saved in my photos so here he is for you. Perfectly macabre, perfectly cat.

Also, here is a quick snapshot of today’s hero image in progress, and then getting some color correction in Affinity Photo from a raw shot of the notebook photo:

sEe yOU nExT WeEk!