From Sketchbook to Published Book

Author: Alison Hazel   –   Updated: May 2025

Coastal Inspiration

You may know that I live on the west coast of Canada and I’m pretty close to the beach which I get down to probably once or twice a month. I have sketched many seascapes and features around the coast my most recent one being the concertina sketchbook, but I also did an acrylic over painting of English Bay.

Intertidal Pool

A few months ago, I was working in my grid art sketchbook and on one of the topics I started drawing was of an intertidal pool. An intertidal pool occurs when the high tide comes in and it fills up pockets of water along the beach in amongst the rocks. Then as the tide goes out, the ocean water remains and there are some sea creatures that are caught there, and they must wait in the pool until the next high tide if they want to escape.

Of course, many of these animals live in this beach area anyway. You get organisms like crabs and sea stars, little fish and all sorts of things within these intertidal pools. They are sometimes in amongst the rocks in a small pocket of water along the beach where boulders are as well.

So, back to my sketchbook…

I did six little grid sketches of an intertidal pool. One with a cross-section through the whole thing to see how its lies on the beach. Next, a couple of other views from above and to the side. Then I added a little tangerine sea star.

Sea Star

And if you don’t want to sea star is, it used to be called a starfish, but these days apparently, they are now called sea stars. Which is the correct way to refer to this little 5-pointed (or more) friendly little animal. I continued in my grid art sketchbook doing some more pages, but I kept coming back to this sea star page. Then occurred to me that I could perhaps write a story and make a little children’s book about this little sea star.

The Story

Research

I did a little research and discovered that with children’s books, you have to be in the right age category. For my idea of creating a picture book with perhaps one sentence on each page, I would be in the kid’s age group of three- to seven-year-olds. Now in this clutch, mom is reading to them, and she shows her little darlings the words by pointing with her finger, so it has to be pretty simple. It needs a simple vocabulary, but with a delightful story to it.

Friendship

I probably spent about three to four weeks working on my story. It’s pretty straightforward from an adult perspective, but from a child’s view, it is actually a story about friendship. And to be quite clear, I’ve never done anything like this previously. I’ve never written children’s stories or any fiction whatsoever, but being a hobby artist and creative person, that didn’t stop me. 

So, I worked on my story.

Images

Once I had my story 95% completed, I began the layouts for the artwork that would go in the picture book. Now I knew I was going to self-publish this on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) with Amazon. They have some specific criteria for sizes of the pages and the number of pages which have to be in the book of that size and so on.

Dimensions

To be honest, this is quite a complicated topic, but the instruction are all laid out there on their website and you’ve just got to plow your way through it all. I decided to work on a book that would be 21.5cm by 21.5cm (8 ½” x 8 ½”) which is actually a square.

Page Count

I was required to have at least 48 pages. This meant that I had to do 48 original art pieces, one for each page in the book. Once I had drawn the individual art pieces for each page, I could then add the words, on top of the image.

Procreate

To draw my digital images, I used Procreate on my iPad. This is a hugely popular art app and you can draw things with your Apple pencil which is where I drafted these initial images.

Color Palette

I worked the pages back and forth for quite a few times. Then I decided I need to stabilize my palette to make sure that I was using the same family of colours and repeating things from page to page to page. This is a simple story set on the beach and an intertidal pool.

I didn’t want all of the view points on the pages to be exactly the same, but many of them would be. So, I laid out a few basic backgrounds for myself, with the sky at the top, the sea in the middle, and the beach at the bottom.

Then choosing from my selection of colours I was able to lay in those three main horizontal features of the sky, sea and beach. Next, I did a few more close-ups where I was going to zoom in on my sea star and the things that were going on within the story. At this point I still did not know what I was doing, but I pressed forward anyway. I continued tinkering with the images for the story and by this stage I was adding the one sentence to each page or each double spread.

As not every single page has words on it for example, on a double spread, the words could either be on the left-hand page or the right-hand page. I worked on the words of my story to make sure that it made sense and flowed forward. And I’ll tell you, this process really took a while. I was probably four to six weeks working on this.

Laying out of the whole story, fiddling with the images and making sure that the words were telling the story took time. I wanted to get my tone right and for the story to be friendly, easily read and understood by the children.

Front and Back Matter

Front Matter

I then turned my attention to work on what they call the front matter. This is all the stuff that goes at the front in the book. There are specific things that you must have on this page.

This Book Belongs To

I did an optional “This book belongs to…” page because children love to write their names in their books. In time, when they become beloved books, the readers continuously return to them even later in life.

Title

It has to be the name of the book that matches the listing on Amazon.

Copyright

You can add a copyright statement if you choose. For my book it says, “© 2024 Alison Hazel all rights reserved.”

ISBN Number

An International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is the number of the book, and here you can let Amazon give you a number or you can get your own. My ISBN is 978-1-7389045-1-8. Note: Research this yourself as there are some strings attached to a KDP ISBN number. I got my own ISBN number for this book from Libraries and Archives Canada, but you will no doubt have an institution in your own country that handles ISBN numbers. For example, in the USA it is Bowker for your ISBN numbers.

Back Matter

Blank Pages

At the back of the book there are a couple of pages because there is typically a double blank page at the end of a KDP book anyway. You need to make sure that your book ends correctly.

Characters

Once the story had completed, I added another fun page which listed all the characters who appeared in my book. This page says, “Meet Your Rock Pool Friends.”

My main characters are:

• Sandy the sea star.
• Crabella the crab.
• Fin the Fish.

Here I did a little sketch for each of the characters and wrote their names next to them so the children could learn their names in a different context. It’s a way for the kids to be reminded of who are the creatures in the story. Then the moms can ask things like, “Can you find the crab, can you find the fish?” and it’s another way for the little readers to interact with the book.

More Books in the Series Page: Still Blank

I had planned to finish off with an author’s page listing myself and any other books that were in the series. It suddenly occurred to me that I could do a series of children’s books and maybe have three or five other books related to Sandy, the sea star. Still waiting… The blank page is ready and waiting for additional books to be listed if I ever do any.

Cover

Layout

The cover must be one large image as a PDF that covers the lot. The spine is down the middle, and the front cover part on the right and the back cover section is on the left. There are specifics that are required for your cover. On the front cover, I had the title and a nice friendly image of the star of the story, Sandy the sea star.

Author

The author’s name on the front is optional with KDP, so it’s up to you if you display it or not. I chose to have my name, Alison Hazel.

Back Cover

On the back cover (left side) you must leave a white space for the bar code that Amazon will put on by itself automatically. I wrote a little blurb about what’s in the book, this is a little preamble if you will, a little taste about what’s going on in this book. Next, I had a paragraph about who the book is for which is really for the person who buys the book, i.e. parents, friends, aunts and uncles or bookstore owners. This information is crucial for someone who wants to know if the book will be suitable for little Alex who is turning five next week.

Uploading

Two PDF Files

When you upload your book, you need two files.

• One file is the body (manuscript), which is all your pages as one PDF.
• The second file is the full cover as a PDF.

Body Upload

So first I uploaded the body of the book. It took a couple of goes because Amazon is very strict about bleed on the edges. Bleed is making sure that the colour goes right to, and beyond, the edge of the page, and here I had to make some adjustments as well. Additionally, I made a few modifications to the actual placement of the words on the page because the cut was very tight. But these are things you learn as you go along.

Cover Upload

The cover upload was something different too. It is difficult to know how thick the book is going to be, and therefore how wide the spine will be and therefore, how to place to the words on the front cover center justified. Now this took quite a bit of fiddling, particularly to align the title of the book on the front cover in the middle.

It took, I don’t want to say how many goes I had, to get this right, but it really depends on how many pages you have, how thick the book is, and therefore how wide the spine is, and consequently how to align the words on the front page as well. So, it was not as tricky on the back (left side) because I have things left justified there and it’s easier to move that text block around.

Timing Approval

This will take time. Every time you upload a manuscript, Amazon chunters through it all and it’s like you’re putting things in a meat grinder. You can go away, make a cup of tea, come back and it’s still working at it. Now obviously they’re overwhelmed with lots of people trying to upload their books at the same time, but really it takes time to get it uploaded. Once I had finally got my body pages file uploaded and I had the cover accepted by the gatekeepers, that was a big step forward. 

The next thing was to put all the other information like the pricing, what have you and where you want to sell it on Amazon. You have to click all the buttons and make sure you’re the original author and it’s non copyrighted and all of those little pesky details that Amazon needs to know. So that also takes a little while to get sorted out.

Blurb

At this point you’re also adding your blurb which will show up when people search for children’s books on Amazon. This is a paragraph or two as selling copy.

Publish

When you’ve entered all that information, you can then click through and say, publish. Now, the very first time your masterpiece goes through to publish, it takes at least 48 hours for any approval or comments to come back from Amazon. And I understand that when you are uploading for the first time, as a new author, or when you are uploading a new title such as this was the first time, they actually have a human look at it.

Amazon doesn’t want me to say I’m doing a children’s book about sea stars and inside there’s something about how to make a bomb or something nasty like that.

I believe, they do get a human to go over, or flip through, what you’ve written, what the story is about, what images you have within your book and the actual content of it, which then gets clicked for approval. Finally, you will get an e-mail saying yes, your book was published and it’s all good. Or yes, we checked your book, and you’ve got errors here and there because your pages aren’t right. Or you need to fix the colours going over the edge or something. Or you didn’t choose the right paper, or they can’t do this in glossy or something like that.

Adjustments

Every time from here on in, when you make an adjustment and reupload the book for approval, it takes at least 48 hours to hear back from them. Now the first time it got approved, I flicked through it online and made sure everything was lining up, that I had my words the right way up and the pictures went back to front and everything like that.

I wanted to make sure that my double page spreads were spreading at the right point and not going over the edge to the next page. This all took time. On it went, I uploaded and edited, uploaded and edited and on and on the saga went. 

When I thought I’d finally got it right, I was fine. I was flicking through then lo and behold, there was a typo. I had made a spelling mistake, which I hadn’t picked up. So once more I had to get the spelling correct. On the page I’d written sea start, not sea star. I mean, it’s an easy enough error to make and of course my spell checker wouldn’t pick it up because start is a word, even though it was supposed to be star. Then I did a second double check on my spelling, punctuation and the grammar and I went through it with a fine-tooth comb at this point because I couldn’t have it uploaded publicly with a spelling mistake.

I mean, really?

Author Copy

Finally, it was uploaded to my approval and once it is live you can order an author copy. Now the benefit of ordering author copies straightaway that you don’t get charged any profit. It goes on at the at the basic rate, so you get it as cheap as possible at all you’re paying for is the cost for Amazon to manufacture it and the shipping. It gets delivered to you, if you’re lucky, within 10 days.

Customer Copy

But I’ll tell you a trick. If you do order an author copy, there’s a big flag printed across the front of the book that says author copy right across the book, so you can’t really see. Although it’s cheaper and it’s for you to check for your spelling and what not, I find that I don’t like doing it that way. I actually prefer to order a full-blown copy the exact same as a customer would order and see what arrives from Amazon. I ordered my customer copy, sat back and waited. And kudos to Amazon, I would say I had it within three days because you know once they get going, they can get the stuff out to you.

Book In Hand

Delivered

The book arrived.

Faded

Once I got it, I realized that my colours were slightly too faded. I really needed to step up my colour palette, the sky, the sea and the sand were rather muted. That was the one thing.

Paper

The second thing was that the paper that Amazon prints on is rather thin and there’s not much you can do about that because that’s the paper they are using. So, I thought, I’d have to live with it, what can I do? I made the book as a softcover, a paperback, and that was fine.

The cover was fine, it was smooth and glossy and everything, but again the colours were quite muted. Now, if I wanted to step up these muted shades to a more vibrant colour palette, I would have to go through every single art piece for every page for all the 48 pages and adjust the colours. I asked myself, “Do I want to do this?” I hummed and hawed and I thought, well, yes, I need to fix it because it wasn’t working.

I had to go back to the drawing board and adjust all the colours for all 48 images in Procreate. Then once more I uploaded each page image into my master PDF document. This took time. When I was ready with the final colours, I once more reuploaded the manuscript, a new cover then I ordered another customer copy. The book duly arrived, and I was quite delighted with it.

Final Thoughts

First Copy

When I got the second book in hand, I was able to show it to my daughters because they knew I was working on something, but they hadn’t seen it. They were amazed that their old mom had done this and honestly, so was I. Fun at the Rockpool with Sandy Sea Star is never going to be a best seller, it’s not that sort of book. What it did do was offer another creative outlet for me as a hobby artist. It’s an extra way for me to put my art and my ideas out into the world.

Series

Will I make a little series of these books? Well, to start with I thought that was exactly what I would do, but as time has gone on, clearly, I’m not going to create another one soon. Honestly, I don’t see my future in children’s books.

Genesis

Takeaway

But what I want you to take away from this long story of my process is that it all began in my sketchbook. As you perhaps know, I have multiple sketchbooks which I use for different things, but this is the first time any image from one of my sketchbooks has developed into something else. It grew into a children’s coloured picture book.

Original Sketches

If I had of spoken to you about this before this ever began, I would have suggested that I might have done a sketch and then made it as the basis for a painting. So, here’s the sketch in the sketchbook. I think, “Yes, that’s my concept art. Let me now move on and do the actual painting.” That’s what I thought would have happened. But what did occur was that I took my six grid art journal page and used it almost as a storyboard. I was able to flesh out the grid into a story for my children’s book.

The Path

I think it just goes to show that, even as a hobby artist, you never know where your art is going to go. You never know where the journey is going once you start putting pen to paper and you’re sketching, painting, creating or collaging to create something beautiful. I mean, do you have to kiss 1000 frogs to find your prince?

Daily Art Practice

The point is that with daily art practice and working in your sketchbooks, as I encourage you to, something beautiful could grow from one of your images as well. I don’t know what it will be, and I had no idea I was going to do a children’s book. It was not on my horizon at all when I started, but it developed, it seemed the logical thing to do and once I started, I just pushed on.

Images

I’ve showed you several images from this book.

Just a reminder, this book is called Fun at the Rockpool with Sandy Sea Star by Alison Hazel. It is available on Amazon, and you can see the type of work I have done as my very first children’s picture book. Who knows what the future will bring?

Overarch

Sketchbooks

I encourage you to use sketchbooks, do your art as often as you can and lean into your creative life. I believe all humans are creative and it’s good for the soul. I’d be interested to know if any of your sketches from your sketchbooks have leaped off the page to become something unique in their own right. I would love to hear from you.

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Author Bio: Alison Hazel

Alison Hazel is a hobby artist and she shares her ongoing journey about becoming an artist later in life. She creates simple art that anyone can make. She hopes to inspire you to reach your creative potential in the area that suits you.

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