Children's Publishing Packages

A picture book is typically 500 to 1,000 words and 32 pages. Almost none of the production effort goes into the words.

What it goes into is illustration: character design, a consistent visual world, spread-by-spread pacing, and the page-turn decisions that make a story work when read aloud. This is why Foundation is rarely the right package for a picture book — it does not include illustration, and commissioning art separately without art direction is where most first-time children's authors lose both money and time.

Signature is our usual recommendation. It carries the design phase properly: character sheets approved before full spreads begin, a storyboard signed off before finished art, and a fixed number of revision points so the project cannot drift indefinitely. Laureate adds series art direction if you are planning more than one title with the same characters.

Production matters too. Children's books are colour books, and colour printing behaves differently — screen colours shift on paper, and a cheerful yellow can print muddy. Our colour-managed production and printer proofing exist for exactly this. Age banding, reading level and trim size all affect where the book gets shelved and sold, and we set those with you rather than defaulting them.