The design of your children’s picture book is vital to its success. If you’re an indie author with text and/or images, Old Mate Media can use those to build your book.

At its core, the design of a book involves the placement of images and text so that one page flows to the other. However, there is so much more to it than that, especially with picture books. This is a genre where the image and the text needs to work together in harmony. Where the placement and presentation of both is critical to the enjoyment of children and parents. Using fonts that enhance the book’s theme, maximising the image quality and positioning the text so it doesn’t hinder the visual experience, are critical.

At Old Mate Media we design books for publication in print and on digital services. We can design bespoke experiences for each form to maximise the strengths of the format. And customers leave with the complete design files for use however they see fit in the future. You get the source files.

Here is what you can expect from Old Mate Media’s children’s book design service:

• World-class design
• Maximised image quality
• Photoshop work if required to correct issues
• Help selecting the best fonts for your theme
• Separate bespoke design for print and digital distribution
• Advanced digital features such as interactivity and audio
• Optimisation of ePub’s digital weight (its size in MB)
• A completed book in multiple formats
• Transfer and ownership of all the files to you

Children’s Book Design Service Price Expectations

The cost for the design of your book will be influenced by a number of factors. The size of the book. The quality of the images that have been provided (assuming we're not getting the illustrations done for you). Whether you need us to source additional elements for advanced digital features. How many formats you’d like created. And whether you want different designs for digital and print.

While not as expensive as creating art for your book, design can be a relatively significant cost. It’s worth noting as well that digital books can be updated and improved at any time. So you can add advanced features in the future, or adapt the book based on reader feedback. The cost of implementing these changes is a fraction of the original design expense and is assessed independently on request.

For more information on this service and to get a quote, please email us.

Paperback to eBook conversions (or vice versa)

One of the common ways indie self-published authors use our design service is to adapt print books into digital formats. Such conversions are often a fraction of the cost of designing a book from scratch. And having a digital version of your book not only offers more income streams, but some great marketing opportunities, too.

We can do a world-class conversion for as little as US$100, but we will need to provide a bespoke quote. This is because the time required for us to redesign your book for digital formats (or vice versa) is dependent on what files you have. Often we come across self-published indies that don't have access to the original design files, which can make things more complicated.

(This is one of the reasons why we give all source files to our authors, so this won't happen to you again!)

You may also want to take up our keyword and category optimisation service. This can give your new digital book it's best chance of finding organic sales one it goes live.

Hard Copy Book Design for Print

Designing a children’s picture book for print differs significantly from digital design. With print, the quality of an image, such as its resolution and dpi (dots per inch) are vital. This is because that quality defines the maximum size your book can be before the images begin to blur. In addition, print books appear as double-page spreads, so you cannot design each page independently of the next. There must be a relationship from page to page or it doesn’t look and feel right.

With your book designed for print publication, you have multiple options available to you. You can use print-on-demand services. Order your own print-run to sell at markets or distribute around your local community and shops. Or submit to a traditional publisher for consideration as a completed experience.

Check out our Publisher Services for more information.

Book Design for ePubs and Digital Sale

Designing a children’s picture book for digital sale comes with its own set of strengths. You can opt to use the same design as you would for print, but that is doing the format a disservice. With touchscreens, speakers, retina resolution and other such features available, there is so much more you can do with digital book design. At Old Mate Media we like to maximise the digital format. We include interactive elements, audio effects, spoken dialogue, animations and other magical elements. These amaze the kids and immerse them deeper into the world you have created.

You can see an example of these elements in action in The Fastest Kid in the World.

These advanced design features are a part of our standard process, they’re not extras. However, we should note that not all digital formats can handle all the advanced features. For example, Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t handle many of the features that are not a problem for Apple’s iPad and iPhone. So we just maximise each version of the book for its host format.

It’s also important with digital ePub book design to keep the file size down. Some online retailers, such as Amazon, charge a fee that is based on the size of the book. A digital novel which is mostly text has very little digital weight, but picture books use big images on every page. So it is important in the design to maximise the image quality, but not to overshoot the capabilities of the technology. You don’t need a high-end 16MB image when a 1MB version displays at the highest quality the viewing screen allows.

You should check out Publisher Services for more options on what you can do with your book once it has been designed.

Here are our other services; and remember that we can bundle a few together depending on your needs:

Writer – Step 1
Editing – Step 2
Art – Step 3
Publishing – Step 5