Writing a picture book can be hard enough…but now you have to get it illustrated! Thankfully, our friend Karen Ferreria has created what may be the BEST children’s picture book illustration service on the planet: GetYourBookIllustrations.com. On this episode of the Writing Momentum podcast, Chris and Gena talk with Karen about why she created this service, how it works, how affordable it is, and why you want your picture book PROFESSIONALLY illustrated. If you’re a picture book writer, you don’t want to miss this!

LINKS:

• GetYourBookIllustrations.com
• Liz Wilcox's Email Marketing Membership at https://writing.fyi/liz
• Get your FREE Move the Needle goal-setting for authors ebook at https://www.writingmomentum.com
• Write with us! Join Chris, Gena, and Rene each Wednesday at noon Central and let's get our writing DONE! https://www.writingmoments.com

Hello and welcome to the Writing Momentum Podcast.

I'm Christopher Maselli, and I'm here with my wife Gena.

How's it going today, Gena?

It's going really good today.

I'm excited about today.

I am too.

You know why?

I do know why, but you tell me why you're excited.

Because we are not alone today.

We have someone special here with us.

We want to welcome Karen Ferreira.

She's a professional book illustrator, bestselling author.

She's an award-winning creative director and she's Founder and CEO

of getyourbookillustrations.com.

She also puts on the Children's Book Mastery Summit, which we're

gonna talk about, in about a month from now when it comes out.

But we're so excited because this is a great service that you have, and

we just want to say, Hey, welcome.

Yes, welcome Karen.

How you doing?

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

Yeah so this service called getyourbookillustrations.com is really

cool because what it allows you to do, and I'm gonna let you tell everyone what it

allows 'em to do, but essentially it helps you get your picture book designed, right?

You connect writers and illustrators, right?

Tell us like how that works and what you got you into it and all that good stuff.

Yeah, that is right.

So I am an illustrator by background.

I did professional illustration and just loads of different

illustrations, but I really wanted to get into book illustration

and then I managed to do that.

And after illustrating some books, I was like, I'd really like to just

work with more authors in a bigger capacity, and so I started Get Your

Book Illustrations, and now we are a team of about 18 illustrators.

And it's all, it's a team.

Like sometimes people think I'll go find just an illustrator,

but it's not like that.

I really qualify and vet every illustrator and then they become

part of my team and they get trained.

So they know all the good stuff you're supposed to know when

you're illustrating books.

And I really wanted to do that as well because for authors,

it can be really challenging to find a good illustrator, right?

You get the two sides of the coin, which is it can be extremely expensive

or you can try and go the cheap route which is a little bit like back at

another coin analogy, but a bit like tossing a coin and it can work out

well, or it can work out horribly.

And I've seen so many people get burnt.

I was just like, I really wanna create something that's affordable, but

really high quality with professional illustrators who's gonna give someone the

illustration, so when they get to the book design part, which we also do, where we

put in all the text and do the interior and do the cover, but when they get to the

book design part, That they don't have oh, oops, the important stuff is being cut off

on the side or the main characters in the gutter, or there's no space for the text.

The illustrator didn't know to leave space.

So those might sound like almost silly, but these are big problems

that I see all the time, and it's a nightmare to solve them.

So that's how it all came about and why I'm doing it.

No doubt.

And so the, one of the things that I think is interesting that you touched on

was how, like when you're looking for an illustrator for your picture book, usually

you're trying to find one person, right?

And yet you've made it so that people can go on and see all these different styles.

And so you're not just having to say, oh, I have to find that one

person that has a style I like.

You can actually go on your website and choose from a variety of styles to

see what really resonates with you, and say, this is the kind of thing I want.

And then you connect the two together, is that right?

You connect that illustrator then with that author.

That's exactly right.

Basically I really have this, oh, I had this idea.

I really wanna, obviously there are hundreds of styles, right?

Like I can't offer every style that exists in the universe.

But I wanted to create at least a big enough portfolio or a big enough variety

of styles that I honestly feel any author with any type of book can find the right

illustrator for them with my company.

In terms of whether your book is funny or sensitive or whimsical or

whatever it might be, there will be at least one illustrator, if not

three or four that will suit that.

And then the way we work is we actually work through a project manager.

And the reason why I've done that is illustrators can all illustrate, but

they're not all as good at customer relations, communicating relaying

things always in a way that the client can understand, et cetera, right?

So I put the project manager kind of in between and we use a software called Nifty

PM, which is for Nifty Project Management, which is just a very simple software.

But what that does is it takes away those endless nightmare-ish threads

of emails getting lost and confused, and nobody knows what's going on.

So the illustrators on Nifty, the clients on Nifty, and the Project Managers

on Nifty, but the project manager is the go-between to really make sure

that everything gets relayed properly.

The client is always answered and helped in a way that they really feel

their questions are answered and so on.

So that as I said, it's one thing to hire an illustrator who can do

a beautiful job illustrating, but it's a whole different skillset

to work with clients, and a lot of illustrators also don't want to do that.

So it's a win-win really.

Yeah.

It's like you're giving us an advocate, right?

That works with us as authors to make sure that those things get done.

And I also love that on your site, because I've been on your site a few times I

was so excited when I saw that you had created this company because one of the

areas for when it, when people start questioning, should I be traditionally

published or independently published?

One of the areas that we have always had to say, the one area

that you really can't be generally, you really can't be independently

published is with children's books.

And then Chris showed me your site and we were like, it was so exciting because

that was the barrier to entry, right?

For that market, for the person who wants to be independently published,

they might have some kind of platform or they just want to do it themselves.

They don't want to have to jump through all the hoops of the

traditional publishing houses and with the way that the market is going.

Unless you do have a really strong following, the children's

book area becomes even harder to get that traditional publishing

and get that representation.

So I just, I applaud you for doing this.

I am so thankful.

But one thing I wanted to point out about that I've noticed by going to your site

is that it's not just for picture books.

People can, because there are so many different kinds of children's books

the types of illustrations change depending on whether you're doing a

full fledged picture book, or you're doing a chapter book, or you just

even maybe want to do a book that just has some kind of small illustration

at the beginning of the chapter.

So could you talk about that, that all the different types of

illustrations that you can do that it's not just different styles, but

it's also different types of books.

Yeah, absolutely.

So interestingly, the very first book I landed for, Get Your Book

Illustrations, was a non-fiction book, quite advanced, it's about technology

and how it's affecting humans.

And I was like, and it was this huge project with 80 illustrations

and not at all children's book.

It was very editorial.

Almost a little bit like the newspaper cartoons.

But the more editorial ones, so that's where it really started, ironically.

We do the majority picture books and of course, picture books you get for the

younger age group, so you can go more like really young illustration or a bit older.

And then it's not, quite I don't wanna call it as cutesy, but

that's the word that comes to mind.

But yes.

Then you we do sometimes middle grade, which of course the kids are older

and you definitely get out of that kind of cute and fluffy vibe more

to what, 12 year olds would like.

And we do some other nonfiction.

The nonfiction is generally most people actually go for this kind of

black and white, more editorial look.

It doesn't have to be, but that's what seems to work quite well.

And we've done a couple of like young adult fantasy sci-fi even where the person

wanted, where the author wanted to add five illustrations or ten illustrations.

So yeah, it can be pretty much any illustration that you want in a book

and that you see, if you go into the library or on Amazon or whatever,

and you see a book in a certain genre with a certain kind of illustration.

How about covers?

Do you do covers also?

We don't generally do only covers.

We do cover design normally when we do it as part of the project.

We've done one or two cover illustrations.

If someone approaches us just to illustrate their cover, then

of course, yes, we'll do it.

But mostly, almost everybody who approaches us will want

more than one illustration.

Yes.

Yes.

And it's, I think it's interesting you seem to allude to the fact that

it's not just the illustration, but it's also the layout of the page.

So is it the complete package, that once I have my manuscript done, that I can come

to you and say, okay, I need to have this whole thing not only illustrated, but also

laid out so that it can be print ready.

Is that right?

Exactly.

You can basically walk in with your edited manuscript and walk out with

your ebook and your print book.

Wow, that's impressive And it's affordable.

I happen to know that too.

We've looked at the prices and they're really like compared to just finding a

local illustrator or even someone online, it can get very expensive, very fast.

Especially when you're talking about picture books, cuz they're

typically 32 pages, right?

So you can have, 16 spreads.

It can be a lot of illustrations that can get very expensive, but

your service is quite affordable.

That's really important to me and I believe that, especially for

picture book authors, as you say, your biggest investment should

really be the illustrations.

That's just the way it is.

And skimping on them is a really big mistake.

But at the same time, most people don't have $5,000 or more for illustrations.

That's really a lot of money, especially when you are a new author.

Maybe you're gonna sell seven copies and you dunno how you're gonna sell

more and you're gonna see what's gonna happen and, or it's a passion

project or something like that.

I think, it's almost I wanna say it's, you have to be realistic

about what people really can invest.

No doubt.

That's exciting.

I'm really excited that you have this service.

I really don't know of many other people that have a service like this.

I think you are right now one of the go-to people on the internet for really

quality children book illustrations.

And where can people find this?

We've talked about the website, getyourbookillustrations.com, but

what happens when they go there?

What should they look for?

Yeah, so definitely that is the website, as you said.

And then when they get there, you can look around, of course, anyone

who wants to see our illustrations.

You can look at all the different styles and really you can click on any one of

them and it will show you a whole bunch of illustrations in that one particular

style, so you can see what you like.

I definitely, there's a process page, which I always recommend people go to.

Because it explains our whole process, but it also explains the four step process

that we use when we illustrate your book.

Which even if you end up not going with us, that will really help you because

it's really good to understand the steps that an illustration project should

ideally go through to get the best result.

And then we have a pricing page cuz our pricing is completely

transparent and fixed.

I dunno, I guess maybe I'm on dangerous ground to say I hate it when you

have to ask a quote and you have no clue what it's gonna be like.

I wanna have some idea what it's gonna be, right?

So people can check out the pricing page, but really in short, when you

look around and you go, I like I see.

We have a book a free consultation call, pretty much, all over the site.

So you can just book a free consultation call and it's obviously obligation free.

And then a consultant will chat to you about your project, what your

vision is, what your needs are, and then we can tailor some kind

of proposal for you from there.

That is fantastic.

That is awesome.

Love it.

All right.

Thank you so much for coming on and telling everyone about this.

We, again, we just love the service and so glad you're doing it and and

we look forward to having you back soon because I know you're also

gonna talk about the Children's Book Mastery Conference, you've coming up.

And so we look forward to that.

That'll be in a few weeks now.

And so thank you, thank you again for joining us.

No, thank you so much for having me.

All right.

If you've enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe,

share it with someone else who, maybe needs to get some books illustrated.

And and go ahead and like I said, rate and review, because

that helps other people find it.

Until next time, don't forget we're not in this alone, because together, what?

We have writing momentum.