My first children's picture book is now on sale!

 

I've been stuck at home for the past couple of days due to an ice storm, and I decided to finally finish a children's picture book project that has been a decade in the making.

See the Dancing Animals is an original nursery rhyme that I made up to entertain my older kids when they were still small. We had a little Noah's Ark playset with a fabric ark and plastic Noah and animal figurines. I would wave the little plastic animals in front of them and chant a rhyme: "See the dancing animals, dancing in a row/see the dancing animals, watch those animals go!" 

Eventually around 2014 I expanded the rhyme and set about trying to turn it into an illustrated picture book. The problem was, I never could find an illustrator I could afford, and I'm not that good at drawing cartoon animals. For years, the book languished on my computer as a demo PDF file with terrible rough sketches. In the intervening time, I took up writing as a serious hobby and gained experience in self-publishing with my Jerry Copperpot novels.

When I found out about the new free AI image generators recently, I was finally able to create colorful and cute, albeit somewhat surreal and bizarre, images of what I wanted to see, within my illustration budget of zero. They still needed some work-- I had to remove quite a few extra limbs here and there in MS paint, and add another ear to a very cute one-eared rabbit, and move a misplaced nose and eye on a giraffe for example. For a couple of pages I had to painstakingly copy and paste several of the characters onto a background because I couldn't get the AI to generate them together to a satisfactory degree.

Otherwise, it was a pretty straightforward process of digging up the right Word template and assembling it with the text. Amazon recently came up with a children's ebook creator that allowed me to convert straight from a PDF, making the ebook process even easier. I'm grateful for these technological advancements that have allowed me to create a decent-looking product with limited time and money in just a few days.

The Amazon Kindle ebook is now available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTP518JJ and the paperback will probably be available within the next week or two, after I have a chance to look at the proof copy.

I hope your kids will enjoy this rhyme as much as mine did!