Welcome! Thanks again for joining us on The Eccentric Picture Book newsletter! 

In this issue:

• Community doors are OPEN

• Week in Review

• Illustration in Action

• Next Week

Hold up! Grab your beverage and let’s take a sip together. Ahhh!

The Eccentric Picture Book Coaching Community Launches

Let’s start at the start: this newsletter serves two purposes:

1. Delight fans of weird, slightly-disturbing, off-beat children’s picture books.

2. Present all the facets of bookmaking to aspiring, indie, or stuck picture book makers, to help them learn the craft, as I create books from scratch right through to ecommerce.

After the first few issues, I took my little brain in August and put 100% of it into getting an offer and a community platform figured out: written, designed, illustrated, programmed, and tested. My background in design, copywriting, web development, art, advertising, and making coffee, all came to a focus on this one task central to the entire future of this picture book enterprise.

That’s what I’ve been doing those post-launch, cricket-chirping weeks.

Now I share that with you!

[NOTE: If you are into bookmaking, this next section applies to you. If you are into the weird children’s book reading part of all this, you can scroll past this!]

Introducing…The Eccentric Picture Book Coaching Community:

What is it exactly? You need to click through to read all the deets (it’s a fully detailed offer with all the info you’ll need), but here is the super short skinny version:

The Eccentric Picture Book Coaching Community is:

• Answers to all your “how do I make a picture book" questions on a 24/7 private forum

• Weekly video Office Hours

• Encouragement, advice (tough and otherwise), and resolution to all your bookmaking confusion.

• Pain relief (if you know it, you know it!)

Free coaching, as in totally free

This issue is going out shortly to 257+ subscribers, and the offer you see for a free seat (after you click through) is very serious. I’m giving away 3. That means you’ll have me as a consultant all for yourself, if you act quick. This is a free, some-strings attached offer: I just need testimonies from you!

This is what I’m going to replace with testimonies from people like you who are more stuck in the bookmaking processes than they’d like to be:

If you are struggling to magine yourself in a coaching community, but have questions, feel free to email me personally and I’ll chat with you. No questions are off limits!

So if this sounds intriguing, click on through to read more

Weekly Over the Shoulder

iPads with Procreate are amazing drawing tools. One great feature is the “animated playback” of what you draw.

Seeing how illustrations are made are some of my favorite videos to watch. Even my own! Let’s look at some from this week.

Community Hero

I needed an for the community landing page that demonstrated the frustration and fear that many people experience when working on picture books. As I always say, it’s a lot harder than it looks, if you want to do it right, and control all the aspects of everything to make a great product. Here is what that feels like when you haven’t gotten it all figured out:

Regarding all the images in this section: It’s helpful for those interested in drawing to see the systematic yet chaotic progression from “what am I doing lol” to “it’s finished” on the iPad.

(NOTE: These are not “story” illustrations, but rather, illustrations from the landing page of The Eccentric Picture Book coaching community, where you can see all these images in context)

Sad Confused Cat

RIP Bobbie

Testimonies Please

Next Week

• Hard and paperback front and back layouts for the different platforms for “The Hideous Very Bad Alphabet”

• Figure out which platforms I’m going to make these available on, as a one off back catalog book that won’t be actively marketed for a bit yet.

• Decide which series of 3 stories will be first to go through the whole process on this newsletter. Likely, it will be “Dangerous Boys for Bedtime Stories”, and sketch a few things which I’ll share here!

• Talk about writing: I’ll share my process. What’s yours?

sEe yOU nExT WeEk!