Illustrate your own book

In addition to being a writer, I'm also an artist. And I don't want artists or illustrators who read this post to think I'm trying to encourage others to bypass their services. Not at all. But if you're a writer and you're on a tight budget for production, here's an option that might fit the bill until you can afford to enlist the help of a professional illustrator. Take a look at this:

The image on the left is a a sketch I created from a photograph of my granddaughter. You might notice the resemblance to the girl on the cover of Scary Night Music. (Coincidence? Not hardly.) You can click that link to see an actual photo of the cover model and check the resemblance.

This software is from a company called Akvis. They have a complete line of art and photo manipulation software. The software I used for this example can be downloaded for free (trial version) for either Mac or PC platform.

There are a lot of variables you can change that will allow you to create the type of illustrations you're wanting to put into your published book.

Now that I've experimented with it, I need to do some more photos for the interior pages and then transform them into line drawings. After that, I'll need to import them into the Word document and upload them to Amazon again. Whew. What a lot of work. And what a lot of fun.

Here's another example.

If you'd like to give it a try yourself, here's the LINK to the site where you can download it. Be creative and enjoy yourself with this one.

I'm also embedding a video from YouTube that has some basic instruction (which I should have watched PRIOR TO experimenting.) I'll embed that video at the bottom.

Meanwhile, if you've found another program that works for you, let us know. Just leave a comment below.