Illustrating your Book: Tips and Tricks behind Art in your Manuscript

Are you a writer who spends every spare second imagining what your characters look like?

Or how about this: are you a reader who searches the internet for fan art for whatever new book you’re reading?

Illustrating your Book!

Both these questions go hand-in-hand! All over social media, we see new kinds of books grasping onto readers. Not only are these unique genres taking hold of the literacy world, but there are more artistic designs coming onto the page as well. On the pivotal BookTok, self-published authors fill their pages with custom art showing off their main characters and the tomfoolery they get up to. Their chapter pages have flowers, thorns, weapons, and veils. Everything is doned with new kinds of art meant to snag the reader's attention before they even know what the story is about. 

While illustrations have always been a way to spruce up your novel, recently it has swept off to a new level. The only drawings I ever saw in books growing up an avid reader was in one of my favorite series, The Imaginarium Geographica by James A. Owen. The first in the series, Here, There be Dragons, has artwork every few chapters. The vintage-like line art style was very unique and captivating, I had only ever seen it in Owen’s books. 

Within the last few years, the ever-growing BookTok has seen countless novels take over the feed. Whether I was peer-pressuring myself to include art in my book or I actually had an inkling for it, we might never know! In the end, a few months before The Halls of Valhalla was scheduled to be released, I decided I could whip up some illustrations to include in the final product. That being said, I never put my art out there like that before. After taking a few drawing classes in high school, I didn’t continue it further, and decided drawing would be a fun hobby when I felt like doing it.

I’m one of those authors who can spend hours daydreaming about what my characters look like. Even though their faces could be as clear as day in my head, what I put on paper was never exactly what I imagined. 

That being said, we are our own worst critic!

I decided to make three illustrations that would sit at the beginning of the three sectioned “parts” of the story. This gave me the ability to choose a scene from each chunk of the book that was the most important, which would be a total of three drawings. All of them were purely line work, with only shading to be the coloring. 

One big tip to know that if you’re looking to put illustrations in your self-published book, make sure you are paying attention to the guidelines provided by your indie printer. Primarily, I used Amazon’s KDP service, but I also published through IngramSpark. Each printer has their own set of rules to follow when it comes to formatting your manuscript. There are margins to consider, the kind of paper you’d like, whether or not there would be color, and so much more. Paying attention to all these rules will help make the publishing process five times smoother when there are no mistakes/errors that need fixing. 

Amazon is quite a tricky place to get your illustrations through - be warned! If there is the slightest bit of a copyright issue, Amazon will be the first company to call you out on it. So if you decide to use clipart in some shape or form that is available to you, triple-check the rights on it. It’s best if you own everything that is put in your book. That being said, if you purchase art to use with a commercial license, you’re golden!

The most important thing to remember throughout this process is that the final product is yours. Only release anything when you are 100% happy with what you have produced. While artwork and illustrations are becoming popular through the spread of social media, don’t feel like it is something you need to include. Readers only want something real, something they can tell has had a lot of love poured into it.

And believe me when I say, that a true reader can tell. 

They can tell the difference between a book used to make a profit versus a book bred from years of hard work. In the end, that’s what they want. They want to look through the pages of a book and see the map of an author’s brain. They want to see into the world brewing within your soul, they want to step inside your imagination and take something home with them. Invite the readers into your world through artwork if that is what you please. Whether or not you include it, there will always be someone there, geared up and ready to dive into the masterpiece you have built.

Thanks for tuning in. See you soon :)