How to Self-Publish a Children’s Book for Free, Part II

In Part I we addressed the why of self-publishing. If you are not sure whether or not you want to self-publish, go back and read that first. Now let’s turn to how to self-publish a children’s book for free or as inexpensively as you want to make it.

To restate, the goal of this article is to guide a new and unproven author on a tiny (or no) budget to successfully self-publish their first children’s book.

These are the steps we will be discussing:

1. Write your manuscript.
2. Re-write your manuscript several times.
3. Join a critique group.
4. Have your manuscript professionally edited.
5. Choose a trim size for your physical book.
6. Illustrate or hire an illustrator.
7. Choose between Print-On-Demand (POD) or batch printing.
8. Buy ISBNs or use a free one.
9. Register your book with the Library of Congress and copyright it.
10. Design the final product or hire a book designer/formatter.
11. Upload and publish the book.
12. Market and advertise the hell out of it.

Let’s dig in!

1) Write your manuscript.

That might seem obvious, but you have to write it before you can do anything. It will not write itself. Writing the idea or a summary or even a synopsis is not enough. You have to write it.

At this step, it does not matter how or where you write it. Most people have access to a text editor like Word. But anything will do it. Google Docs is fine and is what I used. An email client will work too. You can even write on a notepad with pen and paper — so long you can get it transferred to some digital format later.

How long should it be? It does not matter at this point. The first draft must be written first. Picture books are supposed to be no more than 500 words (down from 1000 words some years ago) but you will trim words when you review. The focus at this step is to write the book.

Once you have written a full manuscript, it is time to polish it.

2) Re-write your manuscript several times.

In this step, you will trim the word count and make sure your manuscript hits some of the basic structure you need. This topic is way too long for a comprehensive discourse on what makes a good manuscript. You may want to read a book like Ann Whitford Paul’s Writing Picture Books.

Some important things you want to ensure at the very minimum:

1. Your story has a compelling hook early on, preferably within the first 100 words. A hook is something that engages your reader. Readers want to know what will happen next. If you spend time describing the weather and yours is not a book about meteorology, cut it out.
2. Your main character wants something and there is an opposing force against him/her/it getting it. The opposing force can be a person, a thing, nature, internal struggles, etc.
3. Your character changes, grows, learns something in the process. Your story should not be “a day in the life”. Meaning, it should not be about how Bob went to the market, could not find bread and bought crackers instead. Or about the rain falling.
4. There is a clear resolution to the problem, preferably unexpected. It can’t be a coincidence or a last-minute miracle. The main character solves it.
5. Write your story in scenes, where you show, don’t tell. Don’t write Bob is sad. Write Bob cried/sobbed/frowned/etc instead.
6. Your text is no more than 500 words. That’s the limit for children’s picture books.

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg.

Your story can be about anything in the realm of children, but I will caution about one thing: rhyme. Unless you are a poet or an excellent writer already, do not try to learn two new skills together. The Wright brothers did not set out to make a machine that could fly and play music at the same time. Do not write your first book in rhyme.

3) Join a critique group.

Your spouse/mom/children should not be the only ones commenting on your manuscript. Join a critique group and have your manuscript read by several other children’s book authors. Do not worry! You are still doing things “your way” even after you take feedback from a critique group. Remember, feedback is just someone’s opinion. Take it or leave it. But it is much better to have opinions and consider them seriously then live in the bubble of our own head. If three people think your pink elephant character is evil and not adorable like you intended, you have a problem.

How do you go about finding a critique group or partner? Two options (do both):

1. Join the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI)
2. Join KIDLIT411 on Facebook.

“What if people steal my idea/manuscript?” They will not steal your manuscript outright. Trust me on this one. Successful writers do not need half-baked stories that they then need to improve upon. And regarding stealing your idea, it could happen. But most likely it will not happen because successful writers have lots of ideas. The sweat and tears come when dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. Ideas are a penny a bag full.

4) Have your manuscript professionally edited.

Attention to detail is hard to find exclusively within your circle of friends and family. Have them check your manuscript too, but do hire someone who does this for a living. Many Facebook groups have inexpensive editors who will work on a whole picture book manuscript for $25-$300. You can find others on UpWork, Fiverr, etc.

If you have a friend or family member who has superb attention to details, you may get away without paying a professional. But get at least two or three such friends to carefully review your manuscript. Offer to do something for them in return and acknowledge their work in your final book.

5) Choose a trim size for your physical book.

Now we are getting technical. Some trim sizes are not available with every printer. And some other sizes might be available but are not suitable to be sold via a wholesale distributor. Sadly, you will need to figure out a good trim size in parallel with choosing where to print it. But do not stress too much, it is not impossible to change trim size later. Your images might need to be resized or cut, though. A solid bet for children’s books is 8.5 x 8.5 inches.

6) Illustrate or hire an illustrator.

If you can draw and enjoy it, draw. You can draw on paper and have it scanned or buy an inexpensive tablet like this one (this is the one I used). Even if you do not have a tablet or a scanner you can still do it yourself for free. Find a library or a friend to help.

To draw my illustrations with my tablet, I used a free software called GIMP. It works on Linux, Mac, and Windows and a drawing tablet is not required — you can draw with a mouse if you must.

If you cannot draw, hire. UpWork, Fiverr and folks from Facebook groups are eager to take your project. I have seen quotes for 28 illustrations (a typical picture book is 32 pages, including non-illustrated pages) for as low as $600. If you go overseas, you can find something even cheaper. Of course, quality matters and prices vary wildly. Do not anchor on this $600 figure though. Find an illustrator you love and then consider the price.

Here are two FB groups that have illustrators answering requests for quotes in a matter of seconds:

Children’s Book Authors and Illustrators: Publishing, Marketing and Selling

Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators

Also, you can join the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and post on their internal forums.

Whether you do it yourself or hire someone, make sure the illustrations are high resolution — 300 DPI is the standard and the minimum for print. It also happens to be the maximum you need as there is no benefit to having more dots-per-inch (and more means a bigger file size).

7) Choose between Print-On-Demand (POD) or batch printing.

This choice is important. Print-On-Demand means your book is printed when it is sold, one copy at a time. You do not keep inventory at home or anywhere. It is more expensive per unit to do it this way. Amazon KDP and IngramSpark are two of the standard options for this (more on them soon).

If you want to lower your price per unit and thus increase your margins, you need to order many books from an offshore printer. Typically a minimum order is 500–1000 books depending on the printer. Quality is a factor too, so you need to decide carefully which one to use.

Going with a batch printer means you need to have books in your garage or storage somewhere and you will be responsible for selling your books somewhere, perhaps your website. It is a great option for established writers or for someone with clear marketing and sales plans. If this is your first book and you are not much inclined to set up a shop somewhere (say, with Shopify or by building your own site) it is more work and requires money upfront.

Going with the Print-On-Demand option is what I recommend for a new, unproven author with no time or skills for building an online shopping site. This is also your free option. If you go this way, Amazon KDP and IngramSpark are the best options. KDP prints paperbacks and Ingram prints hardcovers and paperbacks. I used KDP for paperback and Ingram for hardcover.

When using Amazon KDP, here are some of my recommendations:

1. Go for the 70% royalty rate unless you want to make your book super cheap or super expensive.
2. Use their free ISBN (more on this on the next topic).
3. If you do an ebook: 1) Do not choose DRM (Digital Rights Management). It only annoys your paying readers and protects you against stupid pirates. Clever pirates will still pirate your book because DRM is easily breakable. Plus, a pirated book is a reader you would not have otherwise anyway, which might turn into a buyer later on when you are famous. 2) Ebooks do not need ISBN, so do not buy one. 3) Set your ebook price to $2.99. 4) Run periodic campaigns on Amazon and set the price to free.
4. Order proof copies before you put the book out there.

Because batch printing requires upfront payments, the rest of this article will assume print-on-demand, which is typically free or inexpensive to set up. However, even if you batch print, many of the steps below will still apply.

8) Buy ISBNs or use a free one.

A single ISBN costs $125, from Bowker. Bowker is the only US company that can sell you an ISBN so go to them directly. If you buy a package of 10 ISBNs, the price drops to $295. Is it worth it?

This is where a lot of smart people make poor decisions. An ISBN is just a number that associates your book to a publisher’s name. Anyone can be a publisher. You do not need to set the publisher name to anything fancy. This means that a free ISBN that is associated with Amazon is just fine. Amazon will list the publisher exactly like so:

If you think “Independently Published” will hurt your sales, that is putting a lot of faith on some other name you pick. Your own name will still give away that the book was self-published. And if you make up a name like “Kute Kids Publishing” it only obfuscates this fact a little bit. Distributors and retailers will still not recognize that publisher’s name, andthey will rightly assume the book is self-published or from a very small, new publishing house. Either way, you gain very little by using your own imprint name, and thus, buying an ISBN just for this purpose seems silly to me.

If you print your book somewhere that does not offer a free ISBN, then you have to buy your own. Luckily, IngramSpark also offers a free ISBN.

As an aside: If you buy your ISBN, you do not need a corporation or LLC to associate it with the ISBN. So do not register an LLC unless you really need one or are paranoid people will sue you. Publishing is no more risky than blogging. Very few people would register LLCs for blogging so why do it for publishing? If you want the tax benefit for your expenses, a sole proprietorship will give you that. Run your book business as such. You may also register a DBA — Doing Business As — name with your state.

Bottom line: a free ISBN is unlikely to affect your sales, so use it.

You will also need a barcode. But do not buy a barcode. Barcodes are free once you have an ISBN. You can generate them anyway you want. This is the free site I used to generate mine.

9) Register your book with the Library of Congress and copyright it.

This is optional, but helpful. The Library of Congress will assign you with a control number called LCCN. You can apply for it for free, here. When they send you the number — typically a few days or weeks after you apply — you take it and put it on the copyright page of your book.

For copyright, you need to wait until your book is all done and designed. There is a fee to copyright a book, around $35 or so. You can copyright in bulk if you are either the sole author or the same author-illustrator team for all the books. This is useful if you have translations, for example. Do them in bulk and save. I think bulk registration is $55. Find out more here.

10) Design the final product or hire a book designer/formatter.

This is different from illustrating your book. This is putting illustration and text onto pages that are formatted properly and saved in the format that your printer company wants.

The state of the art software for this is InDesign, by Adobe. However, it costs $20 per month to use it and you likely will not need most of it.. For a picture book, you can use Powerpoint. I used LibreOffice Draw, which is free.

The important thing to do is set the page specs exactly as your printer tells you. For example, for a 8.5 x 8.5 book with bleed (where illustrations extend beyond the margins) I set up my pages to be 8.625 x 8.75 due to the bleed. I further selected no margin so I could do the margins on my own. Here is a screenshot of my page settings:

When you are done editing the book and you are sure you followed the printer’s recommendations for margins, then you will export it as a PDF. Amazon KDP accepts RGB colors and PDF/A. Make sure you do not downscale your images. They should be 300 DPI images. Also, only compress them losslessly. Here are my Export to PDF settings in LibreOffice Draw:

Again, this works perfectly with KDP and LibreOffice software is free on Linux, Mac, Windows.

For IngramSpark, they require CMYK colors and PDF/X (as opposed to PDF/A). LibreOffice and other free tools do not do these things. But do not worry. Keep using LibreOffice Draw or Powerpoint or whatever software you already have. You only need a tool to convert to PDF/X and CMYK. You can pay for InDesign or use their free trial. I got away with a free trial, but it will not work for my second book as the trial only lasts 7 days. After that, there is a cheaper alternative called Affinity Publisher. The price is $20, one-time. That is a lot cheaper than the InDesign subscription. I have not used it yet, so I cannot comment on how well it works. But the software claims it can convert any PDF format to PDF/X with CMYK colors and that is all you need.

11) Upload and publish the book.

Once the book is ready and you are happy with the results and sure it does not contain new mistakes, it is time to upload it to the printer. With Amazon KDP you fill out a form with the metadata of the book such as title, author, genre, and all the technical specs for how to print the book that you have already selected, such as paper size, paper quality, bleed or no bleed, etc.

This is also where you get the free ISBN for it. So, you need to have done part of this step before you finalized the book in the previous step. By now, your book is in Draft mode and you can simply upload it and wait for Amazon to approve it.

IngramSpark has a very similar process. The free ISBN is also part of the setup and you need to have the book in Draft mode before you get to this step. IngramSpark, however, charges $49 to set up your book. That fee, in my opinion, is a rip-off. There is no upfront cost to them. They charge it because they can. However, you will discover through the grapevine that every month there is a promotion code that makes this step free. Google around and you can set up your book for free, once a month or so. The promo code worked for me the first time.

12) Market and advertise the hell out of it.

Congratulations, your book is out there. Once Amazon and Ingram approve your book, it is automatically listed on Amazon and many other retailers. Good job!

Now, your real job begins. You need to sell it. No one will find your new book and make it a bestseller if you are not out there promoting the book.

This step, for me, is the hardest one and one I suck at the most. Therefore, I cannot objectively tell you what works. But I can tell you that at a minimum you will need to have: social accounts (FB, Instagram, Twitter, and Goodreads at a minimum), a website with an email capture gadget to form a mailing list, and a willingness to hustle.

There are a lot of resources out there on how to market and promote your book. School visits, book signings, guest blog posts, and influencers are just some of the ones you will hear repeatedly. Google around and read a lot. Make a plan and put it in action. Good luck!

Eduardo Pinheiro is the author of “Toloc Toloc” book series. If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying the book — all royalties will be donated to charity — and leaving a review on Amazon. Thanks!