Make Your Book Stand Up and Come to Life

When you were young and your parents introduced you to books, what kind of book did they read to you? What did the book look like?

I doubt if they read you anything with large blocks of text and no pictures. Even if they read to you from the newspaper, many of the articles had pictures that broke up those blocks of text.

You most likely had picture books—with illustrations on every page and only a few words. When I was young, one of my favorites was a book of illustrated poems. It was called A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson.

 I also loved a very old book of stories my Great Aunt Mamie had. It wasn’t a picture book. But every story had its own illustration—just one sometimes—that visually enriched the plot and helped me imagine the action.

The illustrations were black-and-white, but beautifully drawn. I studied those illustrations carefully to see if I could figure out how they were done so I could try to duplicate them. (At the age of 9, I never came close to doing that.) The book was published around 1910.

Adding pictures to books was much more difficult back then than it is now. 

In fact, adding color pictures to books nowadays is very easy and not terribly expensive.

Walk into a bookstore or library today. Why do many — if not most — of the books on the bookstore shelves have no pictures inside? How many of those books could have been made more interesting or expressed concepts more clearly if they only had photographs or illustrations?

Creatives involved in the book industry a hundred years ago would be asking the same question. If it’s easy and relatively inexpensive to publish a book with illustrations, why aren’t more people doing that?

Why indeed?

Our team at Soul Sonshine is made up of artists and writers whose focus is to create more books with illustrations. We specialize, not only in children’s books, but also in memoirs, cookbooks, Christian devotionals, poetry, non-fiction, and other hard-to-format books. We also publish books those that would be more clearly understood by using photographs and illustrations.

It’s been said that, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” As an example of how much one simple picture can enhance a book, here is a passage from my memoir. It would have brought my daughter to life for the reader with the addition of this picture.

My book has already been published, so it’s too late for me.

But it’s not too late for you!

 

Book a call today to see how adding photos or illustrations can make your book stand up and come to life!