A few months back my daughter and I were talking about what we could do as a project together. She wanted to find a way to make money for “college and horses”. She is only 10 but I love the way she thinks. If you would like to see her final product, click the image below.
As with most children of divorced parents, my daughter struggles with intense emotions and frustration due to having two lives and two homes. This project has turned out to be a great source of connection for the two of us and it helps to develop my daughter’s entrepreneurial spirit.
How To Write a Book with Your Child
- Choose a topic
- Develop the story
- Gather pictures/sketches
- Illustrate
- Publish
Choose a Topic
There are many ways to choose a topic but what worked for me was to just listen to my daughter talk about things that are important to her. We talked about horses and unicorns, outfits, camping, and her dog named Zeus and my dog named George.
She decided that she wanted to write a book about her dog Zeus and how he doesn’t like taking a bath. On weekends that I see my daughter, she likes to go with me to wash the dogs. The act of taking the dogs to get washed gave her a storyline to talk about.
Develop The Story
Developing the story is the fun part of this process. Having my daughter tell me, from her perspective, the story of taking the dogs to get washed was an exciting event.
It really is the small things that matter in life. Hearing the perspective of my child and paying close attention to what makes her happy or sad, worried or excited, is a benefit for both of us. I think that we often miss details that children pay attention to. Our “adult” lives are full of chaos and complexities, but the mind of a child is often simple and to the point.
Once I wrote down all the details that she expressed in our story session, I consolidated it into short sentences that got to her main points. For this first book I had to keep the story short to fit into my budget for illustration but in the future, we plan on including all of the minute details that she pays attention to.
Gather Pictures and Sketches
This phase of our project was a fun one. I gave my daughter a blank sheet of paper and some pens. She drew the characters and scenes, describing what was important to her in each setting.
We also compiled a few pictures of our dogs to provide the illustrator to create some relatability. When my daughter finally saw what the illustrator created, she laughed with excitement at how much the characters looked like our dogs and showed emotion.
Illustrate
I am by no means a good artist, so I turned to some of my favorite sources to find an illustrator for our project, Fiverr and UpWork. There are many options out there but these two are my go-to because they are easy to use, and they have thousands of options available.
I put out job applications on multiple platforms and sifted through a number of potential illustrators until I found one that did the type of work we wanted for our book.
The process of illustration took a bit longer than I originally expected. If you decide to take on a project like this, just be ready to exercise a bit of patience. Expect to go through multiple revisions until you reach your goal!
Here are a few excerpts that we ended up with.
Publish
The final phase of our project was by far the most complicated. We decided to use Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing for our publisher.
In the future I will write a post on the process of using Amazon KDP for publishing but for now you can take a look at this video if you are curious about the process.
I also used Canva to create our book cover. Formatting and sizing guides can be found on Amazon KDP. This is another process that I will need to create a separate post about because there are a number of details that must be followed.
Canva is an excellent resource for all things media. I use them for Facebook posts, business logos and much more. Check them out here.
Once we got our final edits complete and our content sized to the Amazon KDP print requirements, we were ready to publish!
Doing a project like this takes quite a bit of time and learning but it is well worth the investment. Now my daughter has a book that she wrote and is available for purchase on Amazon! She is an author and very proud of it. We had a ton of fun doing this project together and she is excited to have a possible stream of income to go towards her future education goals.
If you are interested in doing a project like this with your children, please feel free to contact me with any questions. I would love to help point you in the right direction or answer any questions along your journey.
You can check out our final product on Amazon here or at the link below. I hope this post has helped inspire you to spend some time doing a project with your kids. It is well worth your time and investment. After all, it is projects like this that create lasting memories!
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