Episode 064 - Writing and Publishing Children's Books with Keith Wheeler
February 2, 2021
Keith Wheeler talks about writing and publishing children’s books, including the importance of writing for the parents as well as the child, how to find and work with an illustrator (including advice to never work with friends or family), and the production process and options for books with illustrations.
Keith Wheeler is a multi-award-winning author. His first work was published while he was a freshman in high school and since then, Keith has self-published over 250 books in numerous genres, and has helped others achieve their goals of becoming published authors. His philosophy is simple: “EVERYONE from 7 to 107 has a book inside them waiting to come out and I love to help them on that journey.”
"It's okay to write beyond their knowledge level, beyond their reading level. Just not too much because if you do it too much, it can become overwhelming. And the last thing you want to do, especially for a child, is deter them from reading." —Keith Wheeler
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast today. My guest is Keith Wheeler. Hey Keith, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Keith: Hey, Matty glad to be here.
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm glad to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Keith Wheeler is a multi-award-winning author. His first work was published while he was a freshman in high school and since then, Keith has self-published over 50 books in numerous genres and has helped others achieve their goals of becoming published authors. His philosophy is simple: Everyone from seven to 107 has a book inside them waiting to come out and I love to help them on their journey.
[00:00:34] So today we're going to be talking about indy publishing a children's book, and I wanted to start out the conversation by finding out, Keith, what prompted you to decide to write a children's book in the first place?
[00:00:48] Keith: I have a huge family. My mom has eight brothers and sisters. My dad has eight brothers and sisters. Each of them has a couple of kids, so I’ve got tons of cousins. My mom ran a daycare, so I’ve pretty much been around kids my whole life. And I loved reading since I was a child, my wife says my maturity level ended at childhood and that's why I write children's books, which is partly true. But I just love seeing the look on a kid's face when they first fall in love with a book. And it's just where it started from.
[00:01:18] Matty: When you first had this glimmer in your eye of wanting to write a children's book, how firm was the idea right off the bat? Did you know what age you were going to be writing for? Let's talk about the content before we talk about the publishing approach you chose.
[00:01:32] Keith: Yeah, absolutely. The first book I wrote, it actually started off as a bedtime story with my oldest daughter, who was three at the time. And I would always read her bedtime stories or just tell her bedtime stories off the top of my head. I would tell different stories and then I got to this one where she was just, “Tell me that story again. Tell me that story again.” And so that's where the idea of that particular story came about. ...
[00:00:06] Keith: Hey, Matty glad to be here.
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm glad to have you here. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you ... Keith Wheeler is a multi-award-winning author. His first work was published while he was a freshman in high school and since then, Keith has self-published over 50 books in numerous genres and has helped others achieve their goals of becoming published authors. His philosophy is simple: Everyone from seven to 107 has a book inside them waiting to come out and I love to help them on their journey.
[00:00:34] So today we're going to be talking about indy publishing a children's book, and I wanted to start out the conversation by finding out, Keith, what prompted you to decide to write a children's book in the first place?
[00:00:48] Keith: I have a huge family. My mom has eight brothers and sisters. My dad has eight brothers and sisters. Each of them has a couple of kids, so I’ve got tons of cousins. My mom ran a daycare, so I’ve pretty much been around kids my whole life. And I loved reading since I was a child, my wife says my maturity level ended at childhood and that's why I write children's books, which is partly true. But I just love seeing the look on a kid's face when they first fall in love with a book. And it's just where it started from.
[00:01:18] Matty: When you first had this glimmer in your eye of wanting to write a children's book, how firm was the idea right off the bat? Did you know what age you were going to be writing for? Let's talk about the content before we talk about the publishing approach you chose.
[00:01:32] Keith: Yeah, absolutely. The first book I wrote, it actually started off as a bedtime story with my oldest daughter, who was three at the time. And I would always read her bedtime stories or just tell her bedtime stories off the top of my head. I would tell different stories and then I got to this one where she was just, “Tell me that story again. Tell me that story again.” And so that's where the idea of that particular story came about. ...
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[00:01:54] It wasn't until years later when I actually went to publish it where I was like, okay, who's the audience, and start solidifying that. And obviously trying to sell a book that's just for three-year-olds is going to be a lot harder than broadening it out to three- to six-year-olds, which is what I ended up doing.
[00:02:12] Different books that I’ve written in children's books, some have been very solidified. My concept books, I know exactly the age range. I know what it's going to be about, whether it's going to have a moral at the end or not, which I don't think that every children's story has to have a moral at the end of the story. My first book that I wrote, MIMI'S ADVENTURE, does. But sometimes you just want to a fun story to read, just like if you're watching a movie, sometimes you just want to watch a comedy and it doesn't have to make sense. It's just for entertainment purposes only.
[00:02:43] But for that particular book, it was originally written for a three-year-old and I did have to broaden that a little bit once I started thinking about the marketing side of it and actually trying to sell it. What I originally created and what it ended up being changed and morphed a little bit once I started thinking more about the age range that I was going for and therefore the vocabulary that I wanted to use to entice them from when they were three to when they're six and even beyond.
[00:03:15] Matty: When you started out, everyone should have their ideal reader, and you had your ideal reader; it was your daughter. And then as time went on, did the idea for the book age along with your daughter, or was she maybe four but you were thinking about what you wanted for a six-year-old, and then did you have a pool of six-year-olds to try that idea out on?
[00:03:36] Keith: It was funny because it was 17 years between when I wrote it and when I actually went to start thinking about publishing it, so my kids were way grown up by then. What I was thinking of is yes, I wrote it for a three-year-old, but who was the book really for? It wasn't just for the three-year-old. It was for the parent or guardian, whoever reading the book to the three-year-old.
[00:03:58] And one thing that I did with my kids is I'd start telling this story to them for a while. When they got a little older, I'd give them the book and have them tell me the story back. Even though they couldn't read, they've heard this story enough times and seeing the pictures that they knew what went with what picture. And then eventually they'd get old enough to where they could start reading that book.
[00:04:17] And that's the thought process that I went through for that book is I wanted it to be able to be for the three-year-old hearing the bedtime story all the way through the person learning to read and starting off with something that they're familiar with. And so that's how I came up with a three- to six-year-old range.
[00:04:37] Matty: It is interesting to think about writing a book for someone who can't actually read it. And the fact that you're serving two audiences, you're serving the children, but you're also serving their parents or their teachers, the people who are reading the book.
[00:04:51] Keith: Because they're the ones buying it, right?
[00:04:52] Matty: Yeah, exactly. As your children got to an age where they were reading it themselves and you saw how they were making the transition from their understanding of the book based on hearing it to their understanding of the book based on reading it themselves, did that change your approach for subsequent books? How you wrote it, the language you used, for example?
[00:05:11] Keith: It did. It did. One thing my wife and I pride ourselves on is we never talked down to our kids. That's one of the things that when our kids went to preschool, I’ve got four kids, all of their preschool teachers would always comment on their vocabulary.
[00:05:25] And so one thing that kind of morphed over the years as the kids got older was, I don't want to just use all these little “baby words.” I want to use words that grow with the child. And what I found from doing that and getting feedback from parents is that they love the fact that their kid is not just learning how to read, but they're learning bigger words.
[00:05:49] Now I'm not saying huge, astronomically, large words. It's okay to write beyond their knowledge level, beyond their reading level. Just not too much because if you do it too much, it can become overwhelming. And the last thing you want to do, especially for a child, is deter them from reading. And so it's a fine, delicate balance. I usually do probably about two words in my book that are what I consider over the reading level or over the knowledge level of the child reading it or being read to.
[00:06:19] Matty: I really like that approach because I think back on the books that I loved as a child and a lot of them were ones that were using terms that I wasn't familiar with, words that I wasn't familiar with. And I could guess from the context what it meant, but it was so exciting because they were treating me like a grownup, and I thought that was super cool.
There's some quote, and I wish I could remember where it was from, but if a listener knows what I'm talking about and knows what the source is please let me know. But there is some quote about the child following along in a conversation—it may not be a book, it may be a conversation he's listening to—and it's as if he's jumping from stone to stone, grounding himself on the parts that he understands, but jumping joyously from stone to stone to try to weave together the meaning of what the adults are saying. And I just think that's so true. That's definitely the experience I recall having as a child.
[00:07:13] Keith: With my four kids, it's the same way. They definitely want to try to figure out what you're talking about. Even if it's nothing remotely accurate, they're still trying and that's still learning one way or another, whether they're correct or not. Being wrong is still something you learn.
[00:07:31] Matty: Yeah. And it's interesting to go back to those books as an adult and say, Oh, that's what it really meant, and realize that you had spent decades thinking that the book was about something totally different because of some interpretation.
[00:07:43] Keith: And besides books, even in movies for kids, Disney movies, one of my kids' favorite movies was ALADDIN, the original, and one of the things I remember when my cousin was little and I was babysitting him, at the very beginning one of the characters says the word purpose. And he asked me, he's what is a purpose? And I had to explain to him. So even in movies that are made for children, they do the same thing. They use words that are slightly above the knowledge level of that child, because they're still learning.
[00:08:13] Matty: This may not be so true if you're writing books for six and under, maybe by six, but a lot of those movies have sort of secret messages for the parents. So the parents can giggle at things that are clearly never going to make sense to the kids for another couple of decades. And that's a tricky balance too, because you want to put some things in there that's going to make the reading experience pleasant for the adult, but not burden it too much for the target audience, which is the child.
[00:08:40] Keith: Absolutely. Because the child might be the one being like, “I want that book again, I want to hear that book again,” but if the parent doesn't enjoy reading it, they will quickly deter them and pick something else out. So it's a delicate balance. There are plenty of movies that I go back and I watch again and I'm like, Oh, I didn't even catch that.
[00:08:59] And even in that particular book, and I'm glad you brought that up because it was something that I had done in the illustrations intentionally, not so much for the parent but just in general for both, is one of the key characters in my book is a red balloon. And before the balloon comes up in the actual story, I had it hidden in different areas throughout the pages that went before it. And so what happens is when they read it back the second time, now they're seeing the balloon that they didn't even recognize before, didn't even notice. So little things like that can go a long way to make a book readable. Not just read it one time and put it away, but something that they continue to go back to.
[00:09:44] Matty: I have one more question about the textual content, and then I wanted to move on to the illustrations. And that is that as someone who really has almost no interaction with children—I don't have the huge family you have and my interactions with kids are pretty limited—and so when I think of children's books, I'm thinking of the books I loved as a child and the experiences I loved as a child. And I can imagine someday having an idea that I would want to capture as a children's book, but I would strictly be writing it for myself. And I would have no idea what the appropriate age range was. I wouldn't be writing it for a target age range. I just be writing it and then retrospectively going to someone who knows kids and say, what age child do you think would enjoy this? Is that at all a viable approach?
[00:10:32] Keith: Absolutely. It's definitely a viable option. The one thing about children's books that a lot of people, they just say the word children's books, majority of times they're thinking of picture books, but children's book is technically everything from zero to 17. So a young adult novel is technically a children's book. Concept books, which are for zero- to two-year-olds, those are still children's books. So yeah, that's definitely a viable option to just write it and then figure out who your target audience is later.
[00:11:01] You're maybe going to have to go back and make some tweaks and changes. Because one thing that you really want to keep in mind is once you know who your target audience is, especially if you're going to write a book about a female character, that almost always is going to make your target audience females. People want to be able to relate to the main character. And so if your main character is a female, then it's going to be harder for a boy to relate to it than a girl.
[00:11:34] Those little nuances, as you're writing, it will automatically be decided. As you get closer to the young adult novels, then, yeah, it's easier to steer away from that. But in general the gender interested in it is going to be based on whoever your main character is, what gender they are.
[00:11:53] But as far as age range, a lot of that just comes down to the concepts that are in your story. How deep they are, is it something that's above the head of whatever age range, that's what's going to determine what the “perfect” age range is. Even more so than the actual verbiage you use, because there are kids that, regardless of their age, it may be at a lower reading level or higher reading level.
[00:12:18] So I worry less about age. That's mainly for me for when I do publish it. If you go through any kind of print-on-demand company to do that or even traditionally published, they need to know who their target audience is for marketing purposes. But yeah, getting back to your question, writing it to write it and just get that story out, especially your first draft, is completely fine to not have a target age range in mind. Because at that point, the important part is a story. You can find the audience for it if you have a good story. That's the answer I would give for that is I wouldn't worry about your age range to begin with, unless you already know.
[00:13:00] And the more away from kids you are, even when I was doing, when I was finally publishing it, my kids were teenagers by then. So I was a few steps away from having a three- to six-year-old at that point. But I still was able to, like you were talking about, talk to people that are more familiar with people in that age range. I have plenty of friends who have kids that were in that age range and had them read it and get their feedback, understanding that just like with an editor or anything else, you don't have to make the changes that they suggest. After all it is your book. But getting that extra feedback can only enhance your book, even if you don't make the changes themselves.
[00:13:36] Matty: I want to move on to the illustration side of it. You were writing the story, and as you were writing it, did you have a clear idea of what you wanted the illustrations to look like, or was that something that evolved later after the story was largely completed?
[00:13:51] Keith: In general, I knew what I wanted. Because like I said, I wrote it for my daughter, so she basically was the main character. So I knew about what I wanted the character to look like and stuff like that. There were key elements in the story that obviously had to be there just for the story to be accurate and for the illustrations to match up with the actual words.
[00:14:08] But other than that, and again, it was 17 years between the two, I was able to bend a little bit on some of the things. I always believe in giving an illustrator at least some leeway and some freedom to do what they do best. What you do best is write, so that's what you should do. Let them do the illustrations because that's what you're hiring them for.
[00:14:31] And so if they feel like they're pigeonholed into doing exactly what you want, then it's probably not going to come out like you want it to because, one, they're not going to have so much passion in it because none of it is them in it. And the other thing is nothing is as good as what you've seen in your head. Unless you're the one drawing it, you can't really completely articulate what's in your mind. So it's a happy balance as to how much freedom you give them opposed to how much, okay, this is exactly what I want.
[00:15:03] And for that particular book, and even for my subsequent books, the illustrations that I’ve done or that I’ve had done, I basically give them the scene, I tell them the characters that are in it about what the background is. It doesn't have to say, I want a tree to the right-hand side. Indoors, outdoors. Is it in the living room? Is it out in the woods, that kind of thing.
[00:15:24] And then again, who the characters are, if you know what the characters are going to look like, then you want to obviously include that information. And I usually do that at the very beginning, and I just do it all in Word, but at the very beginning, I basically just give them a character sheet and just tell them what I know about the characters. The gender, the hair color, the eye color, what they're wearing, whatever specs that I have in my mind. And then after that, I just let them do their thing. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised every single time.
I have on occasion seen people who are known authors that are more strict and I’ve heard them being less happy and more back and forth has happened, like, “Fix this, fix that,” as opposed to just letting the illustrator do what they do best.
[00:16:12] Matty: How did you find your illustrator?
[00:16:13] Keith: I actually found mine through a Facebook group. I belonged to quite a few Facebook groups back then for authors and he was an illustrator and we just hit it off, just answering questions from other people in the group. And I just reached out to him and I'm like, look, honestly, I’ve had this book for 17 years. I've had probably five or six different people offered to illustrate it. I've had a couple of people start and it never worked out for whatever reason. That's one reason why it took so long is because it took me that long to find an illustrator that I really liked.
[00:16:49] And obviously I wasn't focusing on it every single day for those 17 years. There were many years that went by that I didn't even think of it. So I just sent it to him. I looked at some of the illustrations that he'd done on his page and really liked the style that he used. And so I just gave him a copy of the book and just asked him, is this something you think you'd be interested in working on?
[00:17:10] Matty: For the ones that you had tried, you said there had been a couple of attempts and it just never really gelled. Were there legal or financial ramifications of an experiment that didn't pan out into an actual published book?
[00:17:26] Keith: No. The biggest thing, and this would be a huge suggestion I would make to people is, don't work with friends or family. Friends or family, they mean well, and chances are they've heard your story a couple of times so they're familiar with it. But things happen, people lose interest and people's feelings get hurt.
[00:17:45] And luckily, I’m amicable with every single person that had ever started doing the illustrations for me. I actually had a teenager, one of my youngest daughter's best friends, had done the illustrations for the Mimi book before the final illustrator. And even though hers were great pictures, but they were done by a teenager, so they weren't to the level that needed to be in order to really have something marketable.
[00:18:12] So what I did was on the book you'll actually see, it says “original storyboard by,” and I put her name, so she's still got credit for it because she took what was in my head and did a storyboard basically for it, which made it so much easier on my illustrator who I ended up eventually getting. I just sent him all the illustrations and I'm like this, these are an idea of what I'm looking for. It doesn't have to be exact, but this is where I'm going with it. And so it gave him that guidance that I was talking about while still giving him that flexibility to add his own style.
[00:18:49] There were no legal ramifications or monetary, but it really just came down to timing. People get busy and especially if it's something that may not be paying or may not be paying a lot or whatever, it takes a back burner to jobs and children and life. And so that's a difference between getting friend, family, whatever, and getting a professional, getting someone who this is their job so it is going to be a focus for them.
[00:19:15] That was the biggest suggestion I would make. I've heard of many more nightmare stories where people do have legal ramifications or financial or lose friendships or don't talk to family members or whatever because of working together and not working out.
[00:19:32] That would be one of the biggest suggestions I would make is to keep it professional because that's what this is. This is a business. Whether you sell one copy or a million copies, it's still a business, and when you think of it that way, I have found that you make smarter decisions.
[00:19:50] Matty: The closest I’ve come to having to mesh together text and images is book covers, and the closest experience there that I’ve had is that years ago for my first Lizzy Ballard thriller, I did a blind contest on 99designs. And so I provided the book name and the summary, I provided information about the book, and then designers could submit cover ideas, and then you had a winner and that was the person who did the cover. You work with that person to do any final tweaking. And I can imagine doing something similar for a children's book.
[00:20:29] If you just have an idea, like you have children's books that you really like the style of, and you want to go out onto a professional forum and say, “I like this, Can you show me a sample of what you would do?” is that possible? Do you have to pay the people to create a sample for you in that scenario?
[00:20:48] Keith: First of all, most illustrators, just artists in general, will typically have a portfolio that you can look at. And so you can see right off the bat what their style or styles that they're good at, that they're comfortable with. There may be styles and examples on their portfolio that they like, but that doesn't gel with your story, it doesn't gel with you, and that's fine.
[00:21:11] I believe that everybody who does work should get paid for it. It doesn't have to be super expensive. And one of the options that I’ve actually done recently is I actually just did a short series on my channel. Got a book illustrated using Fiverr, believe it or not. And so I basically did what you were talking about, which is I did some research and found four or five different people and I reached out to them and I gave them the exact same specs and just asked them all to give me a sample page of this.
[00:21:43] And that way I was able to compare apples to apples. And I paid them. They each had different prices—everything from, I think, $20 up to one person charged a hundred for one page. It all depends on how complex the image is, how experienced the illustrator is. You can usually get someone who's not necessarily just starting out as an illustrator but maybe just starting out as selling it, that they'll usually be willing to give you more of a discount because they just want to build up their portfolio, especially if they know that their name is going to be as an illustrator on this children's book, that can be enough to really bring down a price on a book or on the illustrations that they're doing.
[00:22:27] Matty: is there anything that writers should watch out for in terms of legal rights to the material? Let's say the book takes off and now you want to start offering merchandise. You want to have a onesie with the character on it or a backpack or whatever. What do people have to look out for so that they have full rights to use the illustrations in that way and that they're either getting all the proceeds or they're dividing the proceeds with the illustrator or whatever they want to do there?
[00:22:57] Keith: I'm not a lawyer don't even play one on TV, But I definitely suggest that there's plenty of resources online where you can get legal documents and stuff like that. But the most important thing that you're looking for when it comes to illustrations is complete commercial rights. And that basically just means that you're getting the full rights to those illustrations for commercial use, for selling. That's just a big, fancy word for selling. So that's the big thing is you want to make sure that you have commercial rights to those illustrations.
[00:23:28] And whether you've decided on an amount that you're going to pay as soon as they get done, are you going to just share the royalties, whatever you decide on should definitely be in writing and it should be clear that, regardless, you have commercial rights for those illustrations for your book. And if you decide to do royalties, it may be after a certain number of months you get all commercial rights as opposed to partial commercial rights or whatever. Just make sure it's all ironed out in writing.
[00:24:01] And anytime I communicate with an illustrator or really in any kind of business is I always make sure I have it in writing. So even if it's a phone call or a Zoom call or whatever, I always follow up with an email so it's in writing. So there's no ambiguity and people know both sides, know exactly what's expected of them.
[00:24:21] Matty: It always surprises me the implied hierarchy between the writer and the illustrator. And I'm saying this writer to writer, so hopefully you won't take offense at this, but when I buy a children's book for my nieces or nephews, for example, I'm always attracted first by the pictures. And then I usually page through it just to make sure the story's decent. But it's the pictures that are selling me. And I'm always surprised that with children's books it’s almost always "written by" in the big marquee letters and then "illustrated by" in the little subtitle letters.
[00:24:54] Keith: I agree. I understand exactly what you're talking about, how there's almost this employee / employer kind of relationship. And it's not that. It's collaborative. You can do a picture book without any words and still get a story across just like you can write a story without illustration. So you need each other in order to make the right book. In all my books that have an illustrator, their name is in the same font, it's the same font size, because it's important to me.
[00:25:23] Now, I have no scientific rationale behind this, but what just comes to mind is the reason why the author's name would be first is because you usually follow an author. If you like one of Keith Wheeler's books, you might like another one, as opposed to you following an illustrator. A lot of times it's just a one-off. Very seldom do you have an illustrator unless it's a series working with the author multiple times. It's just they're working at two completely different things and neither one really can wait on the other one. If the timing matches perfectly, then that's great. But many times it doesn't. But yeah, I agree. They're complete equals because you can't have one without the other,
[00:26:04] Matty: How many illustrators have you worked with for your own books, not the books you're helping other people publish?
[00:26:11] Keith: I’ve worked with probably five or six illustrators. I do have a series that I did and it's a series of concept books and I actually did those illustrations myself. Once I started the YouTube channel, I wanted to prove that the story that's in the book is how important it is. And if you have an original concept, because the thing about any kind of book is in order to make it marketable, it needs to be something that's familiar enough in the genre where people are interested in it, but it's unique enough to where it doesn't just blend in with everybody else. And it's that happy balance.
[00:26:49] And so what I wanted to prove was that you can take a concept and as long as it was sound and it worked, even with using free illustrations. I actually went to pixabay.com, which is just a free stock image site, and all of the illustrations that are in there in all four books all came from a free site. And then I made the cover. I did all the interior and everything else. So the entire book from beginning to end was completely free.
[00:27:19] And yet the first book in the series just won the 2020 Pinnacle Award for children's educational book. It's in pediatrician's offices. I've had librarians, teachers, and everybody else all love it. And I didn't use an illustrator. All the images were completely free. It's possible, regardless of your budget.
[00:27:40] Matty: That's a great transition to the last topic I wanted to talk about, which was the actual production. I think most of the people who are going to be listening to this podcast are going to be familiar with the production process for ebooks. Uploading it to platforms for ebooks or print or a hard cover, print on demand and all those. Can you talk through a little bit about what the production process was, both for the book that you just described where you did it all yourself and a book where you worked with an illustrator?
[00:28:08] Keith: Yeah, obviously the first thing you want to do is you get the actual text down and you can still be tweaking that as the illustrator is doing their part. And that's what I try to do. Once I know what the scenes are going to look like and I have most of the verbiage down, then I’ll give to the illustrator because usually there's going to be some time delay in order to get you the illustrations that you really need. And so I try to make it as efficient a process as possible. And while I'm tweaking some of the verbiage and letting some beta readers maybe read the initial verbiage, then I’ve got the illustrator doing their part, uploading it. Whether it's an ebook or paperback it's all pretty much the same process.
I put everything together in PowerPoint, solely based on familiarity. There are other softwares I'm looking at right now. I know Adobe InDesign is really big and that's kind of the industry standard, but especially when I first started out, I didn't have the funds for Adobe Illustrator. And then with the channel, I'm teaching other people about it is I wanted to make it as low a barrier of entry as possible, because I know how easy it is to get deterred from doing something. And so it's, no, just get it done. And so the actual upload process is pretty much the same, whether it's an ebook or a paperback.
[00:29:27] Matty: If you're doing it in PowerPoint, you set the dimensions of the slide to the dimensions that you want the book to be, and then each slide is a page in the book, then you export it as a PDF, I imagine.
[00:29:41] Keith: Yeah. The biggest difference is, and this is one of the biggest questions I get when it comes to picture books is bleed versus no bleed. No bleed means there's going to be basically a white border around the outside. And so if you have a book that's eight and a half by eight and a half, which most of my books are, then your interior is going to be eight and a half by eight and a half. Whereas if you are doing with bleed, that means you want your illustrations to go all the way to the edges, which is what most people think of when they think of a picture book, the illustrations cover the whole book.
[00:30:14] And then what you have to do is you actually have to add a certain what's called a bleed, some extra on the outside and then the top and the bottom. So that way, when the printer is creating your book and they're cutting it, if they don't cut it exactly the size that it needs to be, there's not going to be a white area.
[00:30:36] So those are the sizes that you'd have to do within PowerPoint. So keep that in mind when you're creating the interior is, do I want these illustrations go all the way to the edge? Because if I do, then if I'm working with KDP, I need to add 0.125 Inches to the outside, to the top, and to the bottom in order to not get kicked back from uploading it.
[00:30:58] Matty: I guess that another thing to check in advance would be to check all the standard trim sizes of all the platforms you want to go to, because my husband has a photography book and he had designed it to certain dimensions and then realized that those dimensions could only be printed by a custom printer, which I think in general, people want to steer away from because it's ridiculously expensive. Whereas if you're working within the standard trim sizes that KDP or IngramSpark offers, then you're set up to do inexpensive print on demand. Does that play out for children's books as well?
[00:31:35] Keith: Yeah, absolutely. And especially since picture books are in color, which means they're already going to be more expensive. The other thing to keep in mind is not only if you have to get a custom printer it's going to be more expensive, but also, if you're doing print on demand that's one of the great things about it is you don't have to buy 500 books or whatever. It's all done when people purchase it. If you don't pick a standard size, then for example, if you go to KDP and you own, and you pick one of the non-standard sizes, then it may not be able to be published if you go to expanded distribution, because it's not standard. KDP may have the ability to print this size, but lulu.com may not, or Barnes and Noble may not. So it enhances your marketability and your ability to be more widespread if you pick one of the standard sizes.
[00:32:29] Matty: When you sell a paperback print copy of your book, can you give a sense of what the profit margin is there?
[00:32:36] Keith: Yeah. The first thing that I always do when it comes to any kind of book is when it comes to deciding on the price is I go into that particular niche, that particular genre, and I look at the top 10 or 20 books that are selling and that's important. And I look and see what their prices are. Because I want to be competitive, just like with any business, I don't want to low ball it. I don't want to be super low, but also don't want to be astronomically higher than everybody else, especially if it's my first or second, if I don't already have a following, chances are, they're not going to spend $12 on a book when everybody else in that same niche is selling it for $8.
[00:33:13] That's the main part. I worry less about the profit that I'm making. Yes, it's a business, but the profit doesn't matter if you're not selling any books. So it's a happy balance just like with any business. My books typically sell for $9.99. Children's books in general are usually 24 to 32 pages and if you sell it at $9.99, you're usually making a couple bucks royalty off each particular book sold in paperback. And so that's the price range that I go with is usually about the $9.99 mark. I do have one book that's an exception, but it's also not self-published, it's traditionally published.
[00:33:47] Matty: Do you have your books in hardcover?
[00:33:50] Keith: I have one of my picture books in hardcover. The reason why I didn't do the other ones is simply because in general, people don't like to spend that kind of money on a children's book because a lot of times it's going to be read once or twice and that's it. And so it's a lot, again, it goes back to the whole being more expensive. Now I do think that you should offer, especially if you're doing print on demand, if it's not going to cost you anything to go with Ingram and do the hard cover. I know Ingram charges, or go with the lulu.com and Lulu, you can do hardcovers for no cost.
[00:34:21] Matty: No cost in the sense that they're making their money based on a percentage of the sales, not an upfront charge. Is that correct?
[00:34:28] Keith: Exactly. Unless you purchase your ISBNs. If you're using their ISBNs, there's no upfront costs for doing business with them and for creating a hardcover. Everybody likes to read their books differently, whether it's a picture book or an adult book. So all of my books are available in ebook, paperback. Like I said, one or two are available in hardcover and then most of them are available on audio as well.
[00:34:55] Matty: Oh, really? I was going to say audio as a joke. How does audio work for your books?
[00:34:59] Keith: That's one of the many misconceptions is that you cannot take a picture book and turn it into an audio book. It's a picture book. It's all about the pictures. But if you're creative about it, you can, because you got to remember, they're still pictures. You're reading these books to kids, the pictures are in their head, their imagination. That's what they have. As we get older, we have a tendency to forget about the imagination and stuff like that, but kids don't.
[00:35:22] And by having a great narrator by having them put in different sound effects and things like that, like just hearing crickets and owls hooting in the background, you already know probably in the woods, it's probably nighttime cause the owls are out, without seeing anything.
[00:35:37] Matty: As you were talking, I realized the other kind of obvious thing about audio books is the parents could get the picture book in eBook or print and the audio book and if mom and dad are busy on a Zoom meeting and junior wants to hear a story, then they can have the audio version read it to them while they're looking at the pictures.
Keith: Especially on car rides.
[00:36:00] Matty: Yeah, exactly. That's very interesting. So how long is the audio book for one of your books?
[00:36:05] Keith: That's the thing is obviously for a picture book is not going to be that long. Most of my books range between three and five minutes. Because of that, they're usually only $4 to buy the audio book. And the royalties obviously are going to be lower, but you can get more uploads.
[00:36:23] And the other thing is because so many people think about, like I said, that picture books can't be in an audio book, the competition is so much a lower on audio book for picture books than it is for an ebook or paperback. When I first published an audio book for my picture book, I think on Audible, in that particular age range, there was probably less than 50 books in competition. That was my first one. You've got a much better chance of getting seen if you're one in 50. One of my other books I did, it was less than 25.
[00:36:56] Matty: Are you selling on ACX or on Findaway?
[00:37:01] Keith: My children's books are available through ACX, because when I started out, I wanted to minimize my expenses as much as possible, so I did do the royalty shares. So when you do the royalty share, you're stuck with a 50/50 split for seven years. So they're on ACX, but through ACX they're on Amazon / Audible, which is big, and iTunes. And then I do have other books that are available through Findaway Voices.
[00:37:26] Matty: It seems like another possibility for that kind of scenario is to have a platform where authors can sell direct to consumers, like PayHip. I use PayHip for my own book so people can download my ebooks from PayHip and I get a much bigger percentage than if they're buying through Amazon or Barnes and Noble or one of the other platforms. Especially if you were reading it yourself—I mean, you have a very pleasant voice. I think people would enjoy hearing you read the stories—and you could put that up basically for free and be getting a larger percentage of the cut. And I think then the challenge is just leading people to PayHip, having a platform where you can let people know that that's available and that, yes, this is a reputable site and yes, I'm authorizing the sale, but that's something else people could consider.
[00:38:13] Keith: Absolutely. Anytime you sell anything from your website you're going to get a higher royalty than if you sell it off a third party, because you don't have to pay the third party. So, yeah, whether it's your e-book or your paperback, anything, if you can get them to a site, your website or whatever, then it's going to be a lot more lucrative for you.
[00:38:31] But going back to what you're saying about the audio, you can even do video. One of the things that I do for my newsletter for my children's books, if they sign up for the newsletter, I have specific videos solely for those people. And it's just me telling them a little bit more about the story, telling them a little bit about the characters. And some people love that, but you can basically be doing almost a book trailer, if you will, of you reading the story to them, but in video form as well.
[00:39:04] Matty: You could even post that on a YouTube channel, along with a link to something like Buy Me a Coffee so that obviously a lot of people would be listening for free, but every once in a while, you'll get somebody who likes it enough or is thoughtful enough to buy you a coffee or, there are other services like that.
[00:39:18] Matty: Well, this has been so helpful, Keith, thank you so much. Why don't you tell the listeners where they can go to find out more about you, your books and your other work online?
[00:39:26] Keith: Absolutely. The biggest places you can go is to my YouTube channel. Which is Keith Wheeler Books. I also have a website, keithwheelerbooks.com. And you can check out my books there, obviously they're on Amazon and you can just search Keith Wheeler and find me there. But YouTube is where I'm at the most. It's where I do most of my social media, if you will.
[00:39:49] Matty: That's great. Thank you so much. This has been so helpful
[00:39:51] Keith: Happy to be here.
[00:02:12] Different books that I’ve written in children's books, some have been very solidified. My concept books, I know exactly the age range. I know what it's going to be about, whether it's going to have a moral at the end or not, which I don't think that every children's story has to have a moral at the end of the story. My first book that I wrote, MIMI'S ADVENTURE, does. But sometimes you just want to a fun story to read, just like if you're watching a movie, sometimes you just want to watch a comedy and it doesn't have to make sense. It's just for entertainment purposes only.
[00:02:43] But for that particular book, it was originally written for a three-year-old and I did have to broaden that a little bit once I started thinking about the marketing side of it and actually trying to sell it. What I originally created and what it ended up being changed and morphed a little bit once I started thinking more about the age range that I was going for and therefore the vocabulary that I wanted to use to entice them from when they were three to when they're six and even beyond.
[00:03:15] Matty: When you started out, everyone should have their ideal reader, and you had your ideal reader; it was your daughter. And then as time went on, did the idea for the book age along with your daughter, or was she maybe four but you were thinking about what you wanted for a six-year-old, and then did you have a pool of six-year-olds to try that idea out on?
[00:03:36] Keith: It was funny because it was 17 years between when I wrote it and when I actually went to start thinking about publishing it, so my kids were way grown up by then. What I was thinking of is yes, I wrote it for a three-year-old, but who was the book really for? It wasn't just for the three-year-old. It was for the parent or guardian, whoever reading the book to the three-year-old.
[00:03:58] And one thing that I did with my kids is I'd start telling this story to them for a while. When they got a little older, I'd give them the book and have them tell me the story back. Even though they couldn't read, they've heard this story enough times and seeing the pictures that they knew what went with what picture. And then eventually they'd get old enough to where they could start reading that book.
[00:04:17] And that's the thought process that I went through for that book is I wanted it to be able to be for the three-year-old hearing the bedtime story all the way through the person learning to read and starting off with something that they're familiar with. And so that's how I came up with a three- to six-year-old range.
[00:04:37] Matty: It is interesting to think about writing a book for someone who can't actually read it. And the fact that you're serving two audiences, you're serving the children, but you're also serving their parents or their teachers, the people who are reading the book.
[00:04:51] Keith: Because they're the ones buying it, right?
[00:04:52] Matty: Yeah, exactly. As your children got to an age where they were reading it themselves and you saw how they were making the transition from their understanding of the book based on hearing it to their understanding of the book based on reading it themselves, did that change your approach for subsequent books? How you wrote it, the language you used, for example?
[00:05:11] Keith: It did. It did. One thing my wife and I pride ourselves on is we never talked down to our kids. That's one of the things that when our kids went to preschool, I’ve got four kids, all of their preschool teachers would always comment on their vocabulary.
[00:05:25] And so one thing that kind of morphed over the years as the kids got older was, I don't want to just use all these little “baby words.” I want to use words that grow with the child. And what I found from doing that and getting feedback from parents is that they love the fact that their kid is not just learning how to read, but they're learning bigger words.
[00:05:49] Now I'm not saying huge, astronomically, large words. It's okay to write beyond their knowledge level, beyond their reading level. Just not too much because if you do it too much, it can become overwhelming. And the last thing you want to do, especially for a child, is deter them from reading. And so it's a fine, delicate balance. I usually do probably about two words in my book that are what I consider over the reading level or over the knowledge level of the child reading it or being read to.
[00:06:19] Matty: I really like that approach because I think back on the books that I loved as a child and a lot of them were ones that were using terms that I wasn't familiar with, words that I wasn't familiar with. And I could guess from the context what it meant, but it was so exciting because they were treating me like a grownup, and I thought that was super cool.
There's some quote, and I wish I could remember where it was from, but if a listener knows what I'm talking about and knows what the source is please let me know. But there is some quote about the child following along in a conversation—it may not be a book, it may be a conversation he's listening to—and it's as if he's jumping from stone to stone, grounding himself on the parts that he understands, but jumping joyously from stone to stone to try to weave together the meaning of what the adults are saying. And I just think that's so true. That's definitely the experience I recall having as a child.
[00:07:13] Keith: With my four kids, it's the same way. They definitely want to try to figure out what you're talking about. Even if it's nothing remotely accurate, they're still trying and that's still learning one way or another, whether they're correct or not. Being wrong is still something you learn.
[00:07:31] Matty: Yeah. And it's interesting to go back to those books as an adult and say, Oh, that's what it really meant, and realize that you had spent decades thinking that the book was about something totally different because of some interpretation.
[00:07:43] Keith: And besides books, even in movies for kids, Disney movies, one of my kids' favorite movies was ALADDIN, the original, and one of the things I remember when my cousin was little and I was babysitting him, at the very beginning one of the characters says the word purpose. And he asked me, he's what is a purpose? And I had to explain to him. So even in movies that are made for children, they do the same thing. They use words that are slightly above the knowledge level of that child, because they're still learning.
[00:08:13] Matty: This may not be so true if you're writing books for six and under, maybe by six, but a lot of those movies have sort of secret messages for the parents. So the parents can giggle at things that are clearly never going to make sense to the kids for another couple of decades. And that's a tricky balance too, because you want to put some things in there that's going to make the reading experience pleasant for the adult, but not burden it too much for the target audience, which is the child.
[00:08:40] Keith: Absolutely. Because the child might be the one being like, “I want that book again, I want to hear that book again,” but if the parent doesn't enjoy reading it, they will quickly deter them and pick something else out. So it's a delicate balance. There are plenty of movies that I go back and I watch again and I'm like, Oh, I didn't even catch that.
[00:08:59] And even in that particular book, and I'm glad you brought that up because it was something that I had done in the illustrations intentionally, not so much for the parent but just in general for both, is one of the key characters in my book is a red balloon. And before the balloon comes up in the actual story, I had it hidden in different areas throughout the pages that went before it. And so what happens is when they read it back the second time, now they're seeing the balloon that they didn't even recognize before, didn't even notice. So little things like that can go a long way to make a book readable. Not just read it one time and put it away, but something that they continue to go back to.
[00:09:44] Matty: I have one more question about the textual content, and then I wanted to move on to the illustrations. And that is that as someone who really has almost no interaction with children—I don't have the huge family you have and my interactions with kids are pretty limited—and so when I think of children's books, I'm thinking of the books I loved as a child and the experiences I loved as a child. And I can imagine someday having an idea that I would want to capture as a children's book, but I would strictly be writing it for myself. And I would have no idea what the appropriate age range was. I wouldn't be writing it for a target age range. I just be writing it and then retrospectively going to someone who knows kids and say, what age child do you think would enjoy this? Is that at all a viable approach?
[00:10:32] Keith: Absolutely. It's definitely a viable option. The one thing about children's books that a lot of people, they just say the word children's books, majority of times they're thinking of picture books, but children's book is technically everything from zero to 17. So a young adult novel is technically a children's book. Concept books, which are for zero- to two-year-olds, those are still children's books. So yeah, that's definitely a viable option to just write it and then figure out who your target audience is later.
[00:11:01] You're maybe going to have to go back and make some tweaks and changes. Because one thing that you really want to keep in mind is once you know who your target audience is, especially if you're going to write a book about a female character, that almost always is going to make your target audience females. People want to be able to relate to the main character. And so if your main character is a female, then it's going to be harder for a boy to relate to it than a girl.
[00:11:34] Those little nuances, as you're writing, it will automatically be decided. As you get closer to the young adult novels, then, yeah, it's easier to steer away from that. But in general the gender interested in it is going to be based on whoever your main character is, what gender they are.
[00:11:53] But as far as age range, a lot of that just comes down to the concepts that are in your story. How deep they are, is it something that's above the head of whatever age range, that's what's going to determine what the “perfect” age range is. Even more so than the actual verbiage you use, because there are kids that, regardless of their age, it may be at a lower reading level or higher reading level.
[00:12:18] So I worry less about age. That's mainly for me for when I do publish it. If you go through any kind of print-on-demand company to do that or even traditionally published, they need to know who their target audience is for marketing purposes. But yeah, getting back to your question, writing it to write it and just get that story out, especially your first draft, is completely fine to not have a target age range in mind. Because at that point, the important part is a story. You can find the audience for it if you have a good story. That's the answer I would give for that is I wouldn't worry about your age range to begin with, unless you already know.
[00:13:00] And the more away from kids you are, even when I was doing, when I was finally publishing it, my kids were teenagers by then. So I was a few steps away from having a three- to six-year-old at that point. But I still was able to, like you were talking about, talk to people that are more familiar with people in that age range. I have plenty of friends who have kids that were in that age range and had them read it and get their feedback, understanding that just like with an editor or anything else, you don't have to make the changes that they suggest. After all it is your book. But getting that extra feedback can only enhance your book, even if you don't make the changes themselves.
[00:13:36] Matty: I want to move on to the illustration side of it. You were writing the story, and as you were writing it, did you have a clear idea of what you wanted the illustrations to look like, or was that something that evolved later after the story was largely completed?
[00:13:51] Keith: In general, I knew what I wanted. Because like I said, I wrote it for my daughter, so she basically was the main character. So I knew about what I wanted the character to look like and stuff like that. There were key elements in the story that obviously had to be there just for the story to be accurate and for the illustrations to match up with the actual words.
[00:14:08] But other than that, and again, it was 17 years between the two, I was able to bend a little bit on some of the things. I always believe in giving an illustrator at least some leeway and some freedom to do what they do best. What you do best is write, so that's what you should do. Let them do the illustrations because that's what you're hiring them for.
[00:14:31] And so if they feel like they're pigeonholed into doing exactly what you want, then it's probably not going to come out like you want it to because, one, they're not going to have so much passion in it because none of it is them in it. And the other thing is nothing is as good as what you've seen in your head. Unless you're the one drawing it, you can't really completely articulate what's in your mind. So it's a happy balance as to how much freedom you give them opposed to how much, okay, this is exactly what I want.
[00:15:03] And for that particular book, and even for my subsequent books, the illustrations that I’ve done or that I’ve had done, I basically give them the scene, I tell them the characters that are in it about what the background is. It doesn't have to say, I want a tree to the right-hand side. Indoors, outdoors. Is it in the living room? Is it out in the woods, that kind of thing.
[00:15:24] And then again, who the characters are, if you know what the characters are going to look like, then you want to obviously include that information. And I usually do that at the very beginning, and I just do it all in Word, but at the very beginning, I basically just give them a character sheet and just tell them what I know about the characters. The gender, the hair color, the eye color, what they're wearing, whatever specs that I have in my mind. And then after that, I just let them do their thing. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised every single time.
I have on occasion seen people who are known authors that are more strict and I’ve heard them being less happy and more back and forth has happened, like, “Fix this, fix that,” as opposed to just letting the illustrator do what they do best.
[00:16:12] Matty: How did you find your illustrator?
[00:16:13] Keith: I actually found mine through a Facebook group. I belonged to quite a few Facebook groups back then for authors and he was an illustrator and we just hit it off, just answering questions from other people in the group. And I just reached out to him and I'm like, look, honestly, I’ve had this book for 17 years. I've had probably five or six different people offered to illustrate it. I've had a couple of people start and it never worked out for whatever reason. That's one reason why it took so long is because it took me that long to find an illustrator that I really liked.
[00:16:49] And obviously I wasn't focusing on it every single day for those 17 years. There were many years that went by that I didn't even think of it. So I just sent it to him. I looked at some of the illustrations that he'd done on his page and really liked the style that he used. And so I just gave him a copy of the book and just asked him, is this something you think you'd be interested in working on?
[00:17:10] Matty: For the ones that you had tried, you said there had been a couple of attempts and it just never really gelled. Were there legal or financial ramifications of an experiment that didn't pan out into an actual published book?
[00:17:26] Keith: No. The biggest thing, and this would be a huge suggestion I would make to people is, don't work with friends or family. Friends or family, they mean well, and chances are they've heard your story a couple of times so they're familiar with it. But things happen, people lose interest and people's feelings get hurt.
[00:17:45] And luckily, I’m amicable with every single person that had ever started doing the illustrations for me. I actually had a teenager, one of my youngest daughter's best friends, had done the illustrations for the Mimi book before the final illustrator. And even though hers were great pictures, but they were done by a teenager, so they weren't to the level that needed to be in order to really have something marketable.
[00:18:12] So what I did was on the book you'll actually see, it says “original storyboard by,” and I put her name, so she's still got credit for it because she took what was in my head and did a storyboard basically for it, which made it so much easier on my illustrator who I ended up eventually getting. I just sent him all the illustrations and I'm like this, these are an idea of what I'm looking for. It doesn't have to be exact, but this is where I'm going with it. And so it gave him that guidance that I was talking about while still giving him that flexibility to add his own style.
[00:18:49] There were no legal ramifications or monetary, but it really just came down to timing. People get busy and especially if it's something that may not be paying or may not be paying a lot or whatever, it takes a back burner to jobs and children and life. And so that's a difference between getting friend, family, whatever, and getting a professional, getting someone who this is their job so it is going to be a focus for them.
[00:19:15] That was the biggest suggestion I would make. I've heard of many more nightmare stories where people do have legal ramifications or financial or lose friendships or don't talk to family members or whatever because of working together and not working out.
[00:19:32] That would be one of the biggest suggestions I would make is to keep it professional because that's what this is. This is a business. Whether you sell one copy or a million copies, it's still a business, and when you think of it that way, I have found that you make smarter decisions.
[00:19:50] Matty: The closest I’ve come to having to mesh together text and images is book covers, and the closest experience there that I’ve had is that years ago for my first Lizzy Ballard thriller, I did a blind contest on 99designs. And so I provided the book name and the summary, I provided information about the book, and then designers could submit cover ideas, and then you had a winner and that was the person who did the cover. You work with that person to do any final tweaking. And I can imagine doing something similar for a children's book.
[00:20:29] If you just have an idea, like you have children's books that you really like the style of, and you want to go out onto a professional forum and say, “I like this, Can you show me a sample of what you would do?” is that possible? Do you have to pay the people to create a sample for you in that scenario?
[00:20:48] Keith: First of all, most illustrators, just artists in general, will typically have a portfolio that you can look at. And so you can see right off the bat what their style or styles that they're good at, that they're comfortable with. There may be styles and examples on their portfolio that they like, but that doesn't gel with your story, it doesn't gel with you, and that's fine.
[00:21:11] I believe that everybody who does work should get paid for it. It doesn't have to be super expensive. And one of the options that I’ve actually done recently is I actually just did a short series on my channel. Got a book illustrated using Fiverr, believe it or not. And so I basically did what you were talking about, which is I did some research and found four or five different people and I reached out to them and I gave them the exact same specs and just asked them all to give me a sample page of this.
[00:21:43] And that way I was able to compare apples to apples. And I paid them. They each had different prices—everything from, I think, $20 up to one person charged a hundred for one page. It all depends on how complex the image is, how experienced the illustrator is. You can usually get someone who's not necessarily just starting out as an illustrator but maybe just starting out as selling it, that they'll usually be willing to give you more of a discount because they just want to build up their portfolio, especially if they know that their name is going to be as an illustrator on this children's book, that can be enough to really bring down a price on a book or on the illustrations that they're doing.
[00:22:27] Matty: is there anything that writers should watch out for in terms of legal rights to the material? Let's say the book takes off and now you want to start offering merchandise. You want to have a onesie with the character on it or a backpack or whatever. What do people have to look out for so that they have full rights to use the illustrations in that way and that they're either getting all the proceeds or they're dividing the proceeds with the illustrator or whatever they want to do there?
[00:22:57] Keith: I'm not a lawyer don't even play one on TV, But I definitely suggest that there's plenty of resources online where you can get legal documents and stuff like that. But the most important thing that you're looking for when it comes to illustrations is complete commercial rights. And that basically just means that you're getting the full rights to those illustrations for commercial use, for selling. That's just a big, fancy word for selling. So that's the big thing is you want to make sure that you have commercial rights to those illustrations.
[00:23:28] And whether you've decided on an amount that you're going to pay as soon as they get done, are you going to just share the royalties, whatever you decide on should definitely be in writing and it should be clear that, regardless, you have commercial rights for those illustrations for your book. And if you decide to do royalties, it may be after a certain number of months you get all commercial rights as opposed to partial commercial rights or whatever. Just make sure it's all ironed out in writing.
[00:24:01] And anytime I communicate with an illustrator or really in any kind of business is I always make sure I have it in writing. So even if it's a phone call or a Zoom call or whatever, I always follow up with an email so it's in writing. So there's no ambiguity and people know both sides, know exactly what's expected of them.
[00:24:21] Matty: It always surprises me the implied hierarchy between the writer and the illustrator. And I'm saying this writer to writer, so hopefully you won't take offense at this, but when I buy a children's book for my nieces or nephews, for example, I'm always attracted first by the pictures. And then I usually page through it just to make sure the story's decent. But it's the pictures that are selling me. And I'm always surprised that with children's books it’s almost always "written by" in the big marquee letters and then "illustrated by" in the little subtitle letters.
[00:24:54] Keith: I agree. I understand exactly what you're talking about, how there's almost this employee / employer kind of relationship. And it's not that. It's collaborative. You can do a picture book without any words and still get a story across just like you can write a story without illustration. So you need each other in order to make the right book. In all my books that have an illustrator, their name is in the same font, it's the same font size, because it's important to me.
[00:25:23] Now, I have no scientific rationale behind this, but what just comes to mind is the reason why the author's name would be first is because you usually follow an author. If you like one of Keith Wheeler's books, you might like another one, as opposed to you following an illustrator. A lot of times it's just a one-off. Very seldom do you have an illustrator unless it's a series working with the author multiple times. It's just they're working at two completely different things and neither one really can wait on the other one. If the timing matches perfectly, then that's great. But many times it doesn't. But yeah, I agree. They're complete equals because you can't have one without the other,
[00:26:04] Matty: How many illustrators have you worked with for your own books, not the books you're helping other people publish?
[00:26:11] Keith: I’ve worked with probably five or six illustrators. I do have a series that I did and it's a series of concept books and I actually did those illustrations myself. Once I started the YouTube channel, I wanted to prove that the story that's in the book is how important it is. And if you have an original concept, because the thing about any kind of book is in order to make it marketable, it needs to be something that's familiar enough in the genre where people are interested in it, but it's unique enough to where it doesn't just blend in with everybody else. And it's that happy balance.
[00:26:49] And so what I wanted to prove was that you can take a concept and as long as it was sound and it worked, even with using free illustrations. I actually went to pixabay.com, which is just a free stock image site, and all of the illustrations that are in there in all four books all came from a free site. And then I made the cover. I did all the interior and everything else. So the entire book from beginning to end was completely free.
[00:27:19] And yet the first book in the series just won the 2020 Pinnacle Award for children's educational book. It's in pediatrician's offices. I've had librarians, teachers, and everybody else all love it. And I didn't use an illustrator. All the images were completely free. It's possible, regardless of your budget.
[00:27:40] Matty: That's a great transition to the last topic I wanted to talk about, which was the actual production. I think most of the people who are going to be listening to this podcast are going to be familiar with the production process for ebooks. Uploading it to platforms for ebooks or print or a hard cover, print on demand and all those. Can you talk through a little bit about what the production process was, both for the book that you just described where you did it all yourself and a book where you worked with an illustrator?
[00:28:08] Keith: Yeah, obviously the first thing you want to do is you get the actual text down and you can still be tweaking that as the illustrator is doing their part. And that's what I try to do. Once I know what the scenes are going to look like and I have most of the verbiage down, then I’ll give to the illustrator because usually there's going to be some time delay in order to get you the illustrations that you really need. And so I try to make it as efficient a process as possible. And while I'm tweaking some of the verbiage and letting some beta readers maybe read the initial verbiage, then I’ve got the illustrator doing their part, uploading it. Whether it's an ebook or paperback it's all pretty much the same process.
I put everything together in PowerPoint, solely based on familiarity. There are other softwares I'm looking at right now. I know Adobe InDesign is really big and that's kind of the industry standard, but especially when I first started out, I didn't have the funds for Adobe Illustrator. And then with the channel, I'm teaching other people about it is I wanted to make it as low a barrier of entry as possible, because I know how easy it is to get deterred from doing something. And so it's, no, just get it done. And so the actual upload process is pretty much the same, whether it's an ebook or a paperback.
[00:29:27] Matty: If you're doing it in PowerPoint, you set the dimensions of the slide to the dimensions that you want the book to be, and then each slide is a page in the book, then you export it as a PDF, I imagine.
[00:29:41] Keith: Yeah. The biggest difference is, and this is one of the biggest questions I get when it comes to picture books is bleed versus no bleed. No bleed means there's going to be basically a white border around the outside. And so if you have a book that's eight and a half by eight and a half, which most of my books are, then your interior is going to be eight and a half by eight and a half. Whereas if you are doing with bleed, that means you want your illustrations to go all the way to the edges, which is what most people think of when they think of a picture book, the illustrations cover the whole book.
[00:30:14] And then what you have to do is you actually have to add a certain what's called a bleed, some extra on the outside and then the top and the bottom. So that way, when the printer is creating your book and they're cutting it, if they don't cut it exactly the size that it needs to be, there's not going to be a white area.
[00:30:36] So those are the sizes that you'd have to do within PowerPoint. So keep that in mind when you're creating the interior is, do I want these illustrations go all the way to the edge? Because if I do, then if I'm working with KDP, I need to add 0.125 Inches to the outside, to the top, and to the bottom in order to not get kicked back from uploading it.
[00:30:58] Matty: I guess that another thing to check in advance would be to check all the standard trim sizes of all the platforms you want to go to, because my husband has a photography book and he had designed it to certain dimensions and then realized that those dimensions could only be printed by a custom printer, which I think in general, people want to steer away from because it's ridiculously expensive. Whereas if you're working within the standard trim sizes that KDP or IngramSpark offers, then you're set up to do inexpensive print on demand. Does that play out for children's books as well?
[00:31:35] Keith: Yeah, absolutely. And especially since picture books are in color, which means they're already going to be more expensive. The other thing to keep in mind is not only if you have to get a custom printer it's going to be more expensive, but also, if you're doing print on demand that's one of the great things about it is you don't have to buy 500 books or whatever. It's all done when people purchase it. If you don't pick a standard size, then for example, if you go to KDP and you own, and you pick one of the non-standard sizes, then it may not be able to be published if you go to expanded distribution, because it's not standard. KDP may have the ability to print this size, but lulu.com may not, or Barnes and Noble may not. So it enhances your marketability and your ability to be more widespread if you pick one of the standard sizes.
[00:32:29] Matty: When you sell a paperback print copy of your book, can you give a sense of what the profit margin is there?
[00:32:36] Keith: Yeah. The first thing that I always do when it comes to any kind of book is when it comes to deciding on the price is I go into that particular niche, that particular genre, and I look at the top 10 or 20 books that are selling and that's important. And I look and see what their prices are. Because I want to be competitive, just like with any business, I don't want to low ball it. I don't want to be super low, but also don't want to be astronomically higher than everybody else, especially if it's my first or second, if I don't already have a following, chances are, they're not going to spend $12 on a book when everybody else in that same niche is selling it for $8.
[00:33:13] That's the main part. I worry less about the profit that I'm making. Yes, it's a business, but the profit doesn't matter if you're not selling any books. So it's a happy balance just like with any business. My books typically sell for $9.99. Children's books in general are usually 24 to 32 pages and if you sell it at $9.99, you're usually making a couple bucks royalty off each particular book sold in paperback. And so that's the price range that I go with is usually about the $9.99 mark. I do have one book that's an exception, but it's also not self-published, it's traditionally published.
[00:33:47] Matty: Do you have your books in hardcover?
[00:33:50] Keith: I have one of my picture books in hardcover. The reason why I didn't do the other ones is simply because in general, people don't like to spend that kind of money on a children's book because a lot of times it's going to be read once or twice and that's it. And so it's a lot, again, it goes back to the whole being more expensive. Now I do think that you should offer, especially if you're doing print on demand, if it's not going to cost you anything to go with Ingram and do the hard cover. I know Ingram charges, or go with the lulu.com and Lulu, you can do hardcovers for no cost.
[00:34:21] Matty: No cost in the sense that they're making their money based on a percentage of the sales, not an upfront charge. Is that correct?
[00:34:28] Keith: Exactly. Unless you purchase your ISBNs. If you're using their ISBNs, there's no upfront costs for doing business with them and for creating a hardcover. Everybody likes to read their books differently, whether it's a picture book or an adult book. So all of my books are available in ebook, paperback. Like I said, one or two are available in hardcover and then most of them are available on audio as well.
[00:34:55] Matty: Oh, really? I was going to say audio as a joke. How does audio work for your books?
[00:34:59] Keith: That's one of the many misconceptions is that you cannot take a picture book and turn it into an audio book. It's a picture book. It's all about the pictures. But if you're creative about it, you can, because you got to remember, they're still pictures. You're reading these books to kids, the pictures are in their head, their imagination. That's what they have. As we get older, we have a tendency to forget about the imagination and stuff like that, but kids don't.
[00:35:22] And by having a great narrator by having them put in different sound effects and things like that, like just hearing crickets and owls hooting in the background, you already know probably in the woods, it's probably nighttime cause the owls are out, without seeing anything.
[00:35:37] Matty: As you were talking, I realized the other kind of obvious thing about audio books is the parents could get the picture book in eBook or print and the audio book and if mom and dad are busy on a Zoom meeting and junior wants to hear a story, then they can have the audio version read it to them while they're looking at the pictures.
Keith: Especially on car rides.
[00:36:00] Matty: Yeah, exactly. That's very interesting. So how long is the audio book for one of your books?
[00:36:05] Keith: That's the thing is obviously for a picture book is not going to be that long. Most of my books range between three and five minutes. Because of that, they're usually only $4 to buy the audio book. And the royalties obviously are going to be lower, but you can get more uploads.
[00:36:23] And the other thing is because so many people think about, like I said, that picture books can't be in an audio book, the competition is so much a lower on audio book for picture books than it is for an ebook or paperback. When I first published an audio book for my picture book, I think on Audible, in that particular age range, there was probably less than 50 books in competition. That was my first one. You've got a much better chance of getting seen if you're one in 50. One of my other books I did, it was less than 25.
[00:36:56] Matty: Are you selling on ACX or on Findaway?
[00:37:01] Keith: My children's books are available through ACX, because when I started out, I wanted to minimize my expenses as much as possible, so I did do the royalty shares. So when you do the royalty share, you're stuck with a 50/50 split for seven years. So they're on ACX, but through ACX they're on Amazon / Audible, which is big, and iTunes. And then I do have other books that are available through Findaway Voices.
[00:37:26] Matty: It seems like another possibility for that kind of scenario is to have a platform where authors can sell direct to consumers, like PayHip. I use PayHip for my own book so people can download my ebooks from PayHip and I get a much bigger percentage than if they're buying through Amazon or Barnes and Noble or one of the other platforms. Especially if you were reading it yourself—I mean, you have a very pleasant voice. I think people would enjoy hearing you read the stories—and you could put that up basically for free and be getting a larger percentage of the cut. And I think then the challenge is just leading people to PayHip, having a platform where you can let people know that that's available and that, yes, this is a reputable site and yes, I'm authorizing the sale, but that's something else people could consider.
[00:38:13] Keith: Absolutely. Anytime you sell anything from your website you're going to get a higher royalty than if you sell it off a third party, because you don't have to pay the third party. So, yeah, whether it's your e-book or your paperback, anything, if you can get them to a site, your website or whatever, then it's going to be a lot more lucrative for you.
[00:38:31] But going back to what you're saying about the audio, you can even do video. One of the things that I do for my newsletter for my children's books, if they sign up for the newsletter, I have specific videos solely for those people. And it's just me telling them a little bit more about the story, telling them a little bit about the characters. And some people love that, but you can basically be doing almost a book trailer, if you will, of you reading the story to them, but in video form as well.
[00:39:04] Matty: You could even post that on a YouTube channel, along with a link to something like Buy Me a Coffee so that obviously a lot of people would be listening for free, but every once in a while, you'll get somebody who likes it enough or is thoughtful enough to buy you a coffee or, there are other services like that.
[00:39:18] Matty: Well, this has been so helpful, Keith, thank you so much. Why don't you tell the listeners where they can go to find out more about you, your books and your other work online?
[00:39:26] Keith: Absolutely. The biggest places you can go is to my YouTube channel. Which is Keith Wheeler Books. I also have a website, keithwheelerbooks.com. And you can check out my books there, obviously they're on Amazon and you can just search Keith Wheeler and find me there. But YouTube is where I'm at the most. It's where I do most of my social media, if you will.
[00:39:49] Matty: That's great. Thank you so much. This has been so helpful
[00:39:51] Keith: Happy to be here.
Links
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/keithwheelerbooks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/selfpublishingtoday/
Instagram: kwheelerbooks
Twitter: kwheelerbooks
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/selfpublishingtoday/
Instagram: kwheelerbooks
Twitter: kwheelerbooks
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