Looking for an illustrator for your children’s book?
On the Morning Media Menu, we caught up with author Hillel Cooperman to get advice about finding an illustrator.
Cooperman serialized a beta-version of his self-published young adult book on Facebook. Now the whole book is available on Amazon.
Press play below to listen, but here’s an excerpt:
There is an illustrator named Caroline Hadilaksono, she’d done these Harry Potter travel posters and Star Wars travel posters. She does all these stunning watercolor illustrations. When it was time to find an illustrator, I was on Dribbble, I kept seeing this work that spoke to me and I knew that this was the right illustrator to do my book. I contacted her.
He continued:
Contacting her was a forcing function for me to finish the book. I had the outline for this book and the rest of the series, but I still had quite a bit of work to do. I wanted to convince her with what I had already written that it was a worthwhile project. For an illustrator as talented as she is, it’s not just about the money. It’s about something that she gets excited about. That was the first step, convincing her that the project was exciting and that she could add a lot of value.
Cooperman concluded:
We spent a year trading chapters and illustrations back and forth … for the final pre-launch activity, we’re going to start publishing the book in beta on Facebook. Every day we’re going to put out one new chapter and one new illustration–we’ll serialize it over 26 days and gather feedback via Facebook. At the end of that whole process, we’ll reveal the cover and launch it in all the regular places like Amazon and iBooks.