Books published with Artwork

[Androxine Vortex]

I like the concept of maybe every twenty pages or so, have an illustration of some sort. But I've noticed that hardly any books i ever pick up have any art in them. I suppose publishers think it's unnecessary and extra money. Is it possible/probable at all to try and include illustrations in your books?

 

[skip.knox]

It's purely cost. If you are going to publish it yourself, and you're an excellent artist with a track record of making book illustrations, then by all means go for it. If you are going the tradpub route, I doubt you'll get very far. Even huge bestsellers have trouble getting much art into their publications.

 

[Devor]

My copy of Harry Potter has a sketch at the front of every chapter. I'd be surprised if you can get further than that.

You can get a nice piece of art for about $50. Every 20 pages in a 200 page novel would mean 10 pieces for $500, which is in the range of pricey but doable if you expect the book to have some success. I'm not sure how much it adds to the costs of printing, but it shouldn't mean much for an ebook.

The thing is, if you had an extra $500 to budget for a book, I can think of a number of things I should think you would need it for ahead of interior illustrations. I think you'd be better off using it to spruce up a website.

 

[2WayParadox]

You could use illustrations from a website that has a huge repository of images, or get some from deviantart. It is possible to include pictures in e-books, but you'll to have good HTML-skills to keep them from messing up your e-book. Also, I'm not sure anymore, but I think that .mobi (amazon) doesn't support images very well. I suggest you look into it further.

Take pride in your eBook formatting: Guido Henkel

This is a decent starter's guide on e-book formatting. I haven't read his book yet, but I'm sure it's full of more advanced tips on e-book formatting, such as adding pictures etc.

 

[Smiddlesworth]

I just self-published my first novel, and I did the artwork myself. By no means am I a professional artist, but I think I'm alright, and it was something I wanted to try and do. The problem I ran into is this; some e-book publishers charge a .15 cent fee for every Megabyte in your uploaded novel, and thats on top of their original percentage share. Pictures, even if you compress them, can end up being 2-4 Megabytes in all, especially if your novel is long. Mine was. That's .30 to .60 cents. That may not seem like much, but if you are an unknown author its probably best to keep your novel inexpensive, in my opinion, and under $2.99, since people tend to have the mentality of, 'I could buy my coffee for the day with that." Since most of us are unknowns, or started out that way, people are going to choose their coffee over you.

Now, in my case, I wanted to charge .99 cents for my novel, but since I had pictures, I wasn't able to do this. I had to charge $2.99 in order to not be in the negative in certain markets, those outside the US. So now, on Amazon I have my novel for $2.99 an then .99 cents on Smashwords and its affiliates (Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.).

All in all, I probably won't add pictures in my sequel novels because of this e-book problem, let along the traditional publishing hardships discussed above. I will probably make a second edition and remove the pictures, that way the price can be the same on all self-publishing sites.

I wish this was different, but the industry is the way it is. I personally like books with pictures in it, because it adds a richness to the story-line and allows you to get inside the author's head more and see the world that he/she envisioned. Unfortunately, for now, it seems only children's books and cook books are predominately picture orientated, and they tend to be very short because of it.

 

[TAGallant]

My observations: A $50 piece of art isn't often worth publishing (unless it happens to be a labor of love that is really worth a whole lot more than you paid).

For myself, I like my ebooks and paperbacks to pretty much match, and for me paperback means print on demand. And the tech is just not there to do illustrated books at a reasonable price point. Even black and white illustrations suffer with what CreateSpace and Lightning Source do with black and white. I've done it, but it's not great. (You get much better quality with their color interior offerings, but since they do not yet have a way to mix color and black and white within the same book, it's very expensive.)

In my forthcoming book, I'm publishing the map inside, but although I would love to have illustrations too, I just don't think the rendering would justify it. I'll save that sort of thing for bonus material for people to look at on the web site.

FWIW.