That children's book again

Wow, one page takes a long time to finish (I have been working on the rest of the book all drafts are done and I'm now starting the good copies).

This is a culmination of the advice received in these threads: http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/530053-a-childrens-fantasy-picture-book-images.html http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/531916-a-very-short-passage-250-words.html

A big thanks to the people that helped out.

Anyway, I think this page is complete and will be sent off with the dummy work as an example of what it should all look like.

Just to be clear, there are two pages here, the left and right with the gutter being roughly where the journal page ends (slightly offset to accomodate image loss).

I'm seeking final critiques before this gets printed out at a print shop and sent away with the rest of the book. I showed my wife and she was pretty critical about the colour choice of the right-hand page, saying it was too bright.

I'm also unsure about the flying creature I threw in the top right corner. It was a bit of a space filler, though I've been tempted to wipe it and leave the space blank.

The image is around 1MB so I will post it as a link. You may need to zoom in to view it correctly.

Cheers

http://www.lukewebster.net/pics/first2pages.jpg

Hi Luke

We don't usually like links in Critiques, but I think in the circumstances it's probably best here.

Re the journal:

wandering through the... forest... getting lost and killed -- as written, this means they all were killed!

before we could unload our last remaining wagon -- this implies that they'd arrived there and unloaded other wagons previously and gone back for the last one. Is this what you meant?

Unfortunately, we lost most of our pickaxes fleeing from the twisted witch Esme (as well as one of our party... ) -- as written this means they fled from Esme and from one of their party. You need to invert the sentence so it's something like "Unfortunately, as we were fleeing from the twisted witch, Esme, [commas needed, by the way] we lost most of our pickaxes, as well as one of our party..."

me and Jeorg -- your narrator is quite well-spoken in his/her writing, so this rather jarred. It really ought to be "Jeorg and I".


Re the pictures:

It's a shame you lost the original layout with the border, as I liked that. It gave it a Noggin the Nog feel!

The colours are a bit bright for me, too -- I'd have liked them to look a bit more hand-coloured, rather than computer-generated.

The nearby village suggests that they're not quite as far removed from people as 182 days of travelling through the forest would appear. Unless the villagers play a part, why not change that to Esme's house in a clearing?

I didn't like the flying green creature, either. You have hardly any birds -- couldn't you put in some more -- a big eagle or something?

All good stuff, though. Good luck when you send it off.

I love this. I'm also insanely envious of the art. The Judge picked out everything I saw with the writing, so I can't really say much there. Maybe consider adding specific dialogue. I know it's told from one person, a bit like a travel log, but some of it came across as dry, and adding some immediacy may change that.

I like the right hand page and for me the colours were fine. I particularly like the man buried underground. The dragon-thing confused me. Are there such creatures in this world? Are they going to be featured? If not, I'd lose it. Like Judge says, you can throw some birds in without it looking out of place. I'd be inclined towards a vulture - spread a bit of doom and gloom!

Congratulations.

I'm not going to complain about the writing or the artwork as to me there's enough of work there to prove that you'll be able to produce a proper children book for the geeky families. I especially liked the flying cthulhu monster at the upper right corner. Nice touch. There's so much details in the forest that a children will get lost in there for quite some time. However I'd have liked hand painting and inking over cgi.

Thanks for the tips. I'll get rid of the green monster.

The Judge, thanks for the corrections. Some pretty obvious things there, but I think I've just looked at it too much to notice. It's always good for someone else to check.

The Judge said:

The colours are a bit bright for me, too -- I'd have liked them to look a bit more hand-coloured, rather than computer-generated.

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I experimented a lot with different techniques. Originally I was going for a painted look, but found that it was too time consuming and didn't give the desired effect. The other thing that I had to be mindful of is that the physical copy will be smaller than what you see on screen, so some of those bold lines won't be so noticeable.

I think with the colour I'm going to run a few different variations out of the printer and see what they look like physically. One of the issues I've had with this is that my graphics tablet does not share the same colour scheme as my monitor (which is a lot brighter), so I end up with two different colours.

The Judge said:

The nearby village suggests that they're not quite as far removed from people as 182 days of travelling through the forest would appear. Unless the villagers play a part, why not change that to Esme's house in a clearing?

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This plays a major role in the story. There's a couple of scenes later on that show how the human village turns into its own city, and brings about a final conflict with the dwarves.

RcGrant said:

I particularly like the man buried underground.

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That's Gimli. Although I could probably argue that there's some symbolism there about the old dwarves being dead and buried and the new dwarves arriving, if I'm being honest I only put him there because I thought it would be funny.

It's really nice to see this again and see that it is still being developed.

I liked the humour in the writing, and can't see anything I would change in it (other that what's already been mentioned) apart from the "shelf ornament" because i had to think on that a moment before I realised what you meant.

I really like the aged paper effect on the left hand page, and the line drawings are great. I like the green blobs to stick the photo on, much better than the old version with sellotape. But I feel that the photo looks to crisp and new on the background of the crumpled yellowed paper. Plus why has the female dwarf got her leg up in the air, like in an old film when people kissed, is it supposed to make her look a little dim witted? And what is that in the bowmans hand.. I thought at first he had a strangely bent finger, but is it a snake?

The right hand page, I agree the flying monster looks odd so glad you are thinking of removing it. I can see you don't want to do pen and ink style on both sides, and while i would personally prefer that, I like the brightness of colour as a contrast to the left page. There is still lots and lots of detail on the right page, which I love, especially the frog on the toadstool and the hunter with the deer in the background. I'm probably nit-picking here, but do you need a pile of stones that have been excavated? I can see you have a dwarf with a wheelbarrow full of stones, but is he taking them off the page?

Overall, I think its great.

You know, I just noticed the question at the end of the other thread, and while it may be too late to bother commenting on it, I have to tell you that there are plenty of landscape-formatted books out there. I really think this one would benefit by being landscape instead. I keep trying to scroll over to see what else is on the pages!

Off the top of my head, we have a Polar Express book in landscape, and LMNO Peas, and Sendak's Brundibar, and all the Clifford books, and about half the books we check out at the library are landscape.

On the other hand, to be fair, the page style with the photos stuck on reminds me of the Detective LaRue books, and those are portrait. But when you say that your pages will be smaller, that surprises me -- most books that yours remind me of are quite large, generally of a 9x12ish size (I'd have to go measure, and I'm not at home).

All that aside, I think this is absolutely beautiful work, and I hope I can buy one for my daughter sometime soon!

The entire delivery and content of this is top notch, well done. I could see it sitting on the shelves at work quite happily.

Hi Luke, I'm with Dozmonic - this would sit in any booksellers very nicely and enhance it (and the good ones would be glad to have it in situ). Ref. landscape it could go that way - your artwork seems to lend to it - but it's harder to display esp if a bookseller relies on spinners and dumpbins to give space. Really nice, a pleasure to look at.

I'm glad you're getting rid of the green monster, because it does look poorly drawn compared with the rest. I'm with TJ about the colors; I don't really like them. The effect is harsh.

But otherwise, I think the artwork is wonderful.

I should add that if your target audience is the 7-9 range, then the colours and artistic style are pretty apt in my opinion. If you chose to merchandise this, you'd be able to port that style directly to an online format - it screams to be made into interactive flash games.

Sorry for the thread resurrection, but I've changed up the layout of the left page a fair bit in an attempt to lower word count and make the book more marketable.

These two panels are sitting at close to what I expect the finished product to look like, and they'll be the chosen samples I'll be sending to agents with the query letter (assuming they are okay with attachments of course).

I was really hoping for someone to give the text a look over and get some feedback on the writing as that's a real weak point in the work.

Cheers





Is it still too text heavy? And do you think it will appeal to a middle grade audience? Can I add more humour to it?

Direct links:

http://www.lukewebster.net/images/panel4.jpg

http://www.lukewebster.net/images/panel5.jpg

Again, sorry for bringing this up from the dead, but this is the last lookover before I use them to start seriously submitting to agents, so any things that can be picked up beforehand will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

I won't comment on the text, because I think you'd need a MG expert to know how to change it. It seemed OK to me. But by Crom, those pictures on the right hand side are amazing!! I love all the tiny funny details there are to find, all the stories there are to be inferred or made up. The first pages you originally put up were very sparse by comparison -- are they still, or have you reworked them? Because to me, it's the endless detail and number of sub-scenes and things to pick out that are the real strengths here.

I have an eleven year old that does regular beta reads for middle grade stories - I'll get her to look at it when this twitter thingummy has finished . If I forget (I have ME) please nudge me.

The illustrations are superb - absolutely love them!

But - I don't see much connect between the narrative on the left hand side, and the narrative on the right hand side. Additionally, each of the images above has a significant frame on the left to name certain characters - but again, I don't see how this is adding to the story?

Even more of a concern is that I don't see an easy narrative flow between the two left-hand panels - each one covers a year, but doesn't seem to offer much in terms of storytelling.

In general - I'm not overly familiar with the middle-grade market, so my comments may be utterly irrelevant. However, I will say that your artwork is fantastic, and that there is definitely a story in there worth selling - my concern is simply whether your story follows the right format to properly work to show off the best of your wonderful artwork.

Absolutely wonderful, Luke. My only regret is the dwarves no longer look quite so dwarfish as in the original versions! For that reason I'm not so keen on the "photo" of them fighting, but I love everything else.

Re the naming of the characters, are you still having a mystery/whodunit for the children to work out? If that's the case, then you do need the pictures of them, but each of the characters then needs to be seen in the right hand picture, I think, (they may well be there, already; I haven't checked!). In addition, you need to make that clear somewhere. Not necessarily here, but the first time it happens, so the children know to look for the new arrivals, and perhaps a reminder once or twice thereafter. That will then serve to integrate left and right hand sides a little more.

Re the writing, I'm no judge for that level (I'm not even sure what age it covers), but I wondered if the tone of the last bit where the box is taking him over is a bit dark/strong. The only thing I would specifically point out is the "Capitol" (have I mentioned this before?) -- spelt with a capital letter and an "o" it means either the Capitoline Hill in Rome, or a specific building such as where the US congress is housed. If you just mean the capital city, it's lower case and an "a".

God luck with it. Your work is marvellous and deserves a wider audience.

I think you need specialist advice. You're putting a lot of time into it and the market is tiny and specialist. I think you need to find out about word count for ages/about number of panels/etc. Maybe check out are their specialist forums for MG, like the #UKYA approach? But you risk spending time adjusting things only to find they need more adjustment.

It's also worth noting that normally the illustrator and writer are paired by the publisher. Unless you really want to do both, maybe sell it based on the pictures only? I think they're the stronger, most unique, part of your work. Later, when someone's interested you could have the conversation about writing it yourself?

Anyway I pmed you with a suggestion. See what you think?

springs said:

It's also worth noting that normally the illustrator and writer are paired by the publisher. Unless you really want to do both, maybe sell it based on the pictures only? I think they're the stronger, most unique, part of your work. Later, when someone's interested you could have the conversation about writing it yourself?

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Yes, but I think in this case, he really has to be the one to do the story. Otherwise, it would simply be sending a portfolio to sell himself as an illustrator for publishers to pair up with other people's stories, and that wouldn't sell these illustrations at all. Nobody else is going to write this story, and no other story would go with these illustrations. They're very much a package deal.

Ah, didn't phrase myself well. I'm thinking of the getting an agent and grabbing their attention and saying the whole doesn't have to be presented at once. The pictures might have more of the wow factor and agents are used to getting subs of just one or the other. It might be enough to show the pictures with 'The story depicted is' and talk to the agent later about the details. But this is where I think we're all shooting in the dark - it's a specialist world and hard to know what's the best way to go.

springs said:

it's a specialist world and hard to know what's the best way to go.

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Totally, and this is worth underlining. My wife's working on a series of children's picture books, and it's been difficult for me to get much information specific to that market. One surprising thing I have come across from those in the industry I've spoken to is a general disbelief that an individual can be both writer and illustrator on a piece, except in rare exceptions - as rare as hen's teeth, to quote one.