Artist Selected!
I have selected an artist to work with!
The winning entry is pictured here, and I was very happy with how it turned out. The centipede is larger and more menacing than I planned, clearly showing the danger. This artist uses an anime-like style to his work, which suits my taste and should make the illustrations appeal to a wider audien
I will not post the losing entries because one of them was terrible. Well, terrible is probably unfair, but it appeared to be targeted at a pre-school audience. The other losing entry is quite good, so I will probably work with the artist on some different books in the future.
The winning illustration is one of many I will need for the current book. I have not broken the story into chapters yet, but I imagine there will be at least fifteen. I will also need chapter images for the second book because I plan on having book two available for pre-order when book one goes on sale.
I should discuss the finances a bit, since my original budget of $1000 per book was grossly optimistic. Roughly speaking, I need to budget $400 per book for interior art. Editing will cost around $1000 per book, perhaps $1500 if I order a full developmental edit. Professional covers are going to cost about $400 per book, and formatting (for print and kindle) another $100 per book. This means that I will need about $2000 to publish each book, not counting any overages, promotions, or ad spend. I plan to dedicate a few posts to detailing the financials in more detail.
Anyway, I ordered another illustration from the winning artist, and plan spread the orders out to one per week so that the artist is not overworked between now and December.