Are you stressed out with publishing your children’s book? Let me tell you how to publish a children’s book on Amazon!
The publishing company that had published Melissa's first children's book had made a pile of mistakes. But fortunately for her, she only had to pay a hundred dollars per mistake to get it corrected.
Well, that was a terrible deal. That's one of the reasons why in today's article, we're going to discuss How To PUBLISH a Children's Book on AMAZON!
So it was several months ago when Melissa, who is a children's book author, had her books already on Amazon. She had gone through some other publishing company. She went through one of the ones that I've mentioned on this blog
and was not happy at all.
The resolution of the pictures was poor quality. It didn't quite match what she was expecting. The cost was a lot higher and it took a really long time for them to finally get the books onto the market.
She had a new book and she had written the story for her new children's book. She wanted to publish a children’s book on Amazon! The problem was it was too confusing for her to figure out how exactly to get it published.
How do I find the illustrators that are going to be necessary to get this book on the market and to get it sold? The whole process seemed confusing but at the same time, she remembered her previous experience.
With the other publishing company and how difficult that had been to try to get her book going without mistakes. Then she changed her mind and wanted to shift things around. They were trying to charge her for every single small thing that she was doing.
So she was sitting back with her book trying to figure in working through all of these things. She realized that if she did not manage to get this book, this story on the market if she didn't manage to make a decision, it would never actually get on the market.
She began to wonder if she had enough information. Or if she needed to wait even longer which brought a lot of self-doubt to Melissa trying to figure this all out. So the previous publisher created an obstacle, they wanted an awful lot of money for every single small minor change.
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So she knew she wasn't going to go with them another time. Now on my Youtube channel, I tend to stay away from commenting negatively on these publishers. They tend to sue anyone who says anything bad about them.
That's one reason why it's always a good idea to find other people who can vouch for them. Who's been through the whole process personally. Through Youtube, Facebook groups, these sorts of things.
That's just a quick little bit of advice on that one. The second thing though is that they control the rights to the book. So in other words, her book, the manuscript, the images, and all of it were almost in a prison.
They literally controlled all of it. When she did ask to give a copy of the illustrations that were within the book, they sent her low-quality images that had come from the book. That was incredibly frustrating.
Because she was thinking “maybe I could just build the book on my own or take those images and use them in a different copy of the book and then we would go from there”. But the problem was that they were sending these low quality.
They didn't even understand that maybe she would want to use those images somewhere. Not that because she could have just taken the book and stripped the images out of the book herself. But she wanted the full-quality versions of it.
Was that really that much work? And then again back to the issue which is you need to pay for every single change that you want to make. So she decided after watching some of my videos that maybe we could do a session together.
So that's exactly what we did. We discussed her exact situation and where exactly she was getting herself stuck. We were trying to see how we can do it so it doesn't have to be so hard with this whole self-publishing issue.
The first thing was we need to avoid people that are going to lock your books in their little publishing prison. Where you give them your manuscript and you tell them what you want. They work with you and usually, most people are very happy during this phase of it.
But once it gets to the end, then your book is completely locked with them. Now you may be thinking and one of my regular followers has commented before that we need to see and do some more changes in one of their books.
But then the idea is that I don't have any additional changes once these changes have been made. But the reality is we're always needing to optimize our book.
If we cannot do this if we don't control the documents for the book itself and so that's one of the reasons why we don't want to get our books locked behind a publishing company. Whether these are hybrid or vanity publishers if you prefer.
I don't like the term vanity publisher. Where you pay them and they do the service for you. So there's nothing about vanity there. It's about you having a book in a store and you want to get it out.
Learn To Trust Yourself
So, I completely understand that particular mindset. The thing is that Melissa was working through this. Trying to figure out which way would be the best way to go and trying to avoid these companies.
The other one is that we only go for companies that people can vouch for. Whether we're thinking of buying a product or a service or anything. We really should not do that until we know, like, and trust the people we're working with or we're listening to.
Not just their sales page but people have been through the program. People who have tried it and have been very satisfied with it. That's something that a lot of these hybrid publishers you’re simply not going to find, there's nobody.
I've tried to help these people, by Googling and looking up Facebook groups. Where all the people who are so happy have gone with these companies. It's not a scam because they are helping you get your book on the market.
But the price that you're having to pay is so massive. Then any changes, because they have no interest at all whether the book sells or not, that means nothing. They're onto the next person to have them pay ten thousand dollars to get their book on the market.
And so at least don't buy or pay for a service until you've found a group of people. As a Facebook group, for example, a group of people who've tried that service and have been happy with it. I was just telling one of my viewers that exact same subject today.
The next thing I commented was that trust yourself. This is what this whole blog and my Youtube channel are about. You can trust yourself to actually go about doing the process yourself.
When we're going to go and publish a children's book on Amazon. The first thing we're going to do is research what the other children's books on Amazon look like. We're going to want to make sure that our book does not look that much different.
It should not be very different from all of the other books that we have on Amazon. The best-sellers are very easy to find in this book a free Discovery Session. We can take a closer look at your exact book and the best books that match on Amazon.
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Then the next thing is you're going to write the story. Perhaps you've already written that story which is fantastic. Then we're going to need an illustrator.
If we're doing it ourselves, we're going to go to Upwork.com. And we're going to find an illustrator, somebody who can do the drawings. You want to find somebody who has again the same subject and lots of reviews.
Like a thousand reviews that are all positive and then we're going to use them. Because it's not about one book, we're going to need to do multiple books. That's always the way to make the most money possible.
It is building a brand around a particular character or story like Curious George. Or some of these other ones where the illustrations are very important. Like Dr. Seuss for example, all of the illustrations sorts of follow the same pattern.
Do we really want to switch from illustrator to illustrator? Would it be better if we could stick with the same one? Would it be great if we actually could control the exact amount of money that we're paying each time?
And that we have access to this illustrator. It's somebody who understands us and the quality of the books we want to do. So that's the next step there.
I was commenting to Melissa to find that illustrator. Then the final thing is that the illustrator is also going to do the cover of our book. By using a tool like Jutoh, we can pull it all together.
The formatting is exactly flawless for the book. Then we set up our KDP account on Amazon and we're able to upload the book. Upload the cover and upload the metadata to Amazon.
Following these simple steps which I give away on all my free Secret Checklists. They're able to pull through all of this and you're able to get your book on Amazon. I was so excited about the children's book front.
For two of my three children, we did exactly this process. They were so excited they had done all of the drawings for the book. They had come up with the story and then we put it all together using Jutoh.
We had them even do the cover for the book. Pulling it together and then putting them out on Amazon. These books are still selling today which is even more fun.
Choosing The Best Route
Because then it's a children's book done by children. Just need a little bit of help in terms of how to get the formatting done. But using the template that I have in the formatting course, we're able to pull it together.
To make it super simple to do it. We can cover all the different sizes and the books being published. Not just on Amazon but on all of the different sites.
So from my personal background story, that is something that I also found. I'm not only speaking from the experiences of hundreds and hundreds of coaching clients. But also from my own children in our own background.
Give it a try, to see what it takes. In order to publish a children's book on Amazon. The thing was for Melissa, she finally chose not to try to do it herself. She realized, “I have more money than time”.
So she decided to go with one of the companies that I recommended for her to go with. The reason I recommended this particular company is not because I have a deal with them. But because it was a company that is trusted.
It's a company that has positive results and positive people who have had great experiences with them. They have a limited amount that it costs.
They say “look, it's going to be so many pages, it's going to be a thousand dollars. We're going to guarantee that we can get your children's book onto the market.” They're going to find the illustrators, they're going to put it all together.
So she decided to go this route. This is an important point, it's that this isn't “one size fits all”. What we're talking about here is that I believe the best route is to self-publish yourself.
But if you can't do that or you don't want to do that, then going for some of these other hybrids can be a good thing. As long as you have people who can vouch for them. This was a company that I trusted so I recommended Melissa to give it a try.
They were a little slow and so from a listing standpoint, she was hoping she could get the book out by Christmas. But they were taking months and months to do the different portions of the thing. It can be understood based on the number of people who are ordering with them.
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With all the backlog that they have and all of the different services that they're providing. It can make it a little bit tricky. That's one of the things, if you know how to do it yourself then you're not waiting on anyone.
You're just waiting on the illustrator who promises to get you the drawings by a certain date. So you can do it yourself. The thing is that Melissa ended up feeling great about this thing.
Because she did manage to get the book out. She's looking back at her previous books. She can see that the book also can be done following a similar process.
She's now tempted to do the next one herself. It's a transition, we are learning in this process. Some people have this idea that you're just going to simply happen in one night.
We'll just put the whole thing together, get all the illustrations, and have this book on the market. On your very first try, you're going to succeed and sell millions of copies. This is just not what happens but what happens is you should celebrate your wins.
Getting your book on the market at all was a huge one. Going through better hybrid publishers even better where you have control over those documents. You upload it to your own account and then finally do it yourself is the top win.
Then as we go through the cycle, we get faster at doing it ourselves. We're able to better do the entire process. And that just leads to a feeling like Melissa was feeling.
It is this sense of “Yes, I actually accomplished something great. I did get this book onto the market and it's a high-quality book. I looked at it and it was a great book. It was something I could definitely see myself reading to my kids when they were younger.”
So that was a big one. But there are just so many things you can do to ensure that your book completely fails. And Melissa had done some of these.
But in reality, we're all testing and trying. It's so easy and that's one of the reasons I teach it. I hit the exact subject of 3 Ways To Make Sure Your Book Bombs. Check out my previous blog and video about that.