Hi Kate! I am the author of the Book that Jane-Holly mentioned,
Twisted Tales for Tacky Children. Twisted Tales is an illustrated children’s book that is currently in production at the Quill level. I think I have some "lessons learned" that will be helpful for you. The first is pricing. When I was selling pre-orders for my book, I priced it at $30.00 for a hardcover book. I’m glad I did, because it was really important to me that my book had color illustrations. Because I only reached the quill funding level, there was some question about if I would be able to include color illustrations, but because of the way I had set my pricing, this worked out. The Inkshares team was great to work with on this front, and always responded to emails quickly. If in doubt, I recommend writing to them. The second thing I learned with my inkshares page, is that the "preview" chapter feature didn’t seem set up to feature a kids book in the way I wanted to display. I solved this problem by creating a
website for the book (I used wix-- they are free and looked really professional.) Whenever I sent out a reader update to my followers, I’d say something like "I’ve posted a
new poem here" and include a link to a poem and illustration. I liked this much better, and it made my inkshares page look way cleaner. Other tips I learned were to clean my illustrations up in illustrator before posting them (I’m a watercolorist, and the illustrations looked much more professional without the textured white background in the negative space) and I also discovered the amazing (and free) website Canva where I created my book cover and marketing materials. I have zero graphic design experience, and all of these were things that were easy to learn as a beginner. I hope this information helps, and congrats on your kids book!
