Tag Archives: how to make a book

Fantastic Free Family Online Event – Sat 3rd Oct 10:00am UK Time

Join amazing childrens’ author, Viv French, and wonderful storyteller, Renita Boyle and myself on Saturday when we will be creating a story LIVE! with your help.

So, WE NEED YOUR HELP!

It’s not just the audiences who are missing the Wigtown Book Festival this year – the authors are missing the audiences too!

In this fun-filled family hour, three of Wigtown’s most devoted and adored children’s authors take on the 60-minute book challenge. That’s right! Taking up their roles as author (Vivian French), illustrator (Shoo Rayner) and storyteller (Renita Boyle) they battle towards creating, illustrating and telling a story based on Wigtown in just one hour. But they need your help – tune in to help shape the story and make your mark on Big Wig history.

How on Earth are we going to do it when we are in completely different parts of the country? Tune in to find out!

Sponsored by The Old Bank Bookshop

How to make children’s books – live chat with Vivian French

If you want to know how to write and illustrate children’s books, ask an expert – and Viv French is certainly the right person to ask!

She has written over 300 titles and is a best selling children’s author worldwide, as well as teaching the art of illustrating picture books at the Edinburgh College of Art.

In this live interview we chat about illustration and Viv, as a master storyteller, with many tales to tell, imparts tons of wisdom and advice.

Check her website at https://vivianfrench.co.uk

See you next week at 4:00 pm Uk time. We go an hour forward this weekend so check the time.

How to design a Children’s Book Cover

https://youtu.be/2S-iV_Xb768

I am relaunching my Scaredy Cats KickStarter project see it here – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shoorayner/scaredy-cats-funny-scary-stories-for-children

One thing that bothered me, once I had launched previously, was the cover. I loved it, but after a while I realised that it was probably not the right cover. The style of the cat on the front of the book, did not fit with the illustrations inside.

Publishers often recover books with different styles, but I thought maybe it was also a bit too sophisticated for the age group the books are intended for and said something different to what was inside.

So I spent some time trying to do a watercolour version, but couldn’t get that right. In the end I decided to do a hybrid. Take the elements I loved about the first cover and add them to a physically drawn version.

The moral of the tale is that the first drawing is not necessarily the finished version. You can keep tweaking the design and a little time and distance is good – allowing you to see the design with free eyes.