I can safely say that bigger is not better.
Originally I picked 8.5" by 11", the standard letter size, to be the
size of my first children's book, Bobby's Biggest Bubble. The reasoning: it is the most economic and largest size to print a children's
book. I wanted the bubble in the story to appear bigger than life. But the 11"
by 8.5" format makes the images too wide, creating too much filler background.
Too much background = the focus on the bubble is diminished.
I was also having technical troubles with the 2-page spread pages. When making
22.25" by 8.75" images at 300 dpi on a computer (each image having
about 12 layers of line work and coloring) the computer hits a memory limit
and the workflow starts to slow down. Especially since I would often have
several pages open at once for reference, keeping the style, lines and colors
consistent from page to page.
The solution was easy:
Changing to a slightly more compact format of 10" by 8" for the inner
pages makes the workflow faster with an overall better composition for the
story - this simple change makes the book look better. (The overall size of the
hard cover will be about 10.25" by 8.25")
Since this is my first try at self publishing, I'm looking over
everything, learning as I go and I can safely say I like how things are turning
out. It’s been awhile since I shared some of the artwork. Below is another sample of
page 21 from the book in the new size format, where Bobby is just beginning to
find out that making the biggest bubble isn't as easy as he thought it would
be.
Originally I picked 8.5" by 11", the standard letter size, to be the size of my first children's book, Bobby's Biggest Bubble. The reasoning: it is the most economic and largest size to print a children's book. I wanted the bubble in the story to appear bigger than life. But the 11" by 8.5" format makes the images too wide, creating too much filler background.
