Many of you already know of Dawn Griffin, creator of ZF Comics. I’ve recently come across extremely busy times with a new job, school, STC (of course) and a couple of new commissions that I’m having a hard time providing the added content to the site that you’ve gotten used to. So I put the call out to a couple of my comic buddies. Below is a write up of something Dawn’s been working on for the last several months.

Adventures in Kid’s Book Publishing

If you’re a cartoonist, you have probably thought about illustrating a children’s book. I took 2 kids book classes in art school that I loved. A decent writer/cartoonist can create a kids book, it’s just getting a publisher to pick you that’s the pain. That, or knowing you will have a long, rocky & expensive road of self-promoting, while trying to draw/write NEW books for your series. It’s tricky.

Well, about 3 years ago, my mom approached me with a script from a coworker of hers who wrote some stories, but needed an artist. I figured, what the heck. The story was cute, it had a moral, and was relevant to little girls today, plus she had a good 3 or 4 other ideas for future books. The writer & I tooled away with character designs and over a couple months, I hammered out the first book, “Abby’s Adventures: Picture Day”. Abby loses her tooth the morning of her school picture day, and innocent cute hilarity ensues as she tries to find ways to hid her gaping hole in her smile (including sticking a mini marshmallow in there, lol). We were both very happy with the final piece and packaged it up for publishers, optimistic and probably naively so.

Then reality sunk in. Big publishers do not want a “package deal”. Publishers want writers to send in their work, and illustrators send their samples, & then they get to play puppeteer and match ‘em all up. This of course leads to some writers not being very happy with how an illustrator depicted their character, but at that point, the writer has no say. The old “You want it published or not?” deal. (My writer has friends in the business with this very issue- 8 of 11 books she’s not happy with). It’s very similar to some of the headaches that comes with being picked up by a syndicate. “You want to play in the big leagues, you gotta play by our rules– we know best, not you”.

Fast forward 2.5 years, and out of the blue, my writer stumbles on a small publisher who loves the book, the series. She has 2 girls, who adore Abby and want MORE! Just from 1 book! A flurry of reformatting the book, size adjustments, logo changes, and other revisions.. And POOF. It’s on amazon.com and target.com, and listed with Barnes & Noble. And I have a pile of stories to illustrate, haunting my every spare moment. The thing with a series is, you cannot leave people wanting more for too long, or they lose interest. So, these next books in the series need to be cranked out ASAP. All I have to say is thank goodness for coffee, red bulls, and my flex-time work schedule. Oh, yeah, and my love for cartooning!

“Abby’s Adventures” is still in it’s baby phase. It could take off with the right promotions and advertising… And if I can friggin’ get these new books done quickly enough. We’re finding some promotional ideas will only work once we have a fanbase, and others are simply too expensive and time-consuming. It’s all about baby steps, and word-of-mouth at this point. But it’s a start, and there’s nothing more flattering than a rave review from a 5 year old who wishes Abby were her best friend!