Create a Children's Book With Aaron Mason

How To Work With Illustrators, Self-Publish, and Promote Your Book

Nov 1, 2008

Interview with a fantasy author about how he works with illustrators, his approach to self publishing, and also how he markets & sells the book.

Suite101 spoke with Aaron Mason, writer and creator of the fully illustrated fantasy book series The Bafflegagging Blundernagging Brothers. He shared with us his experience with bringing his fantasy book to life.

Suite101: What was it like collaborating with an artist on an illustrated book?

Mason: Oh it was wonderful. My writing partner Doug Warr and I had found the artist Jason Walton. He was doing a graphic novel for us and we told him about the brothers’ story and he loved it and started doing concept drawings for us. The great thing about Jason is that he’s sharp as a whip and got what he was describing right away. He brought so much to the table, so many things we didn’t even think of he contributed to the story on the animation side. As we gave him changes, fix this, move that, change the color of this bush, whatever the changes were, more often than not, he got the changes done on the first pass.

Suite101: What has been your past experience working with artists in the past?

Mason: I’ve worked with other artists before and usually I’ve worked with artists before and you have to hold their hand and guide them through what you want to see on the page. But Jason was ahead of the curve and he really got it and championed the artwok and made it pop. And he took it personally, making it as good as he possibly could as you can see by the illustrations.

Suite101: How is your book formatted differently than other books and has that help?

Mason: The book is kind of avante gard. It’s in landscape format so the book is different than most people are used to. The people who like the high-end collector’s book really like it and we’ve been pitching and selling it to ages 8-80. We’ve sold to kids, adults, girls, boys and they all love it. They think it’s wonderful and the response from people who get it is extremely positive.

Mason: The strange thing is that the book publishers don’t like it because it doesn’t fit into any of their predetermined categories. We self published and printed 3,000 books through a company in China. We had to go overseas because our book was so costly to make. If we printed in the US, we would have had to sell the book for $100 instead of $30. And thought it's a great book, I don't think people would pay that much for it.

What we wanted to do was establish our brand. The brand of the book, the look of it, the vibe of the book, and to do that, we had to self publish it. What Doug and me wanted was to have a book that we wanted as a kid, that was our mantra. And a lot of people felt the same way because they really like it. We also get to keep more money in our pockets because we're not splitting the profits with a publisher.

Mason: For promoting, we've been going to book shows, fairs, and comic events to sell it. And actually we’re doing pretty well. We've even gone to some book fairs that were'nt fantasy related, but because of that, we stood out more being one of the few fantasy books at the event.

The copyright of the article Create a Children's Book With Aaron Mason in Writing for Children is owned by Joe Lam. Permission to republish Create a Children's Book With Aaron Mason in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.