Writing Your Own Children's Books

I tell stories to my daughter nightly after we read a few books. Usually she's a character in the story, whether she's the pink princess dolphin swimming through the ocean rescuing friendly sea creatures, or the beautiful princess who goes on adventures in the forest (she's ALWAYS a princess). I love telling her the stories, and she loves hearing them - often providing her own input as to the storyline. For quite some time, I've been wanting to put one of these stories down on paper, do a little bit of digital artwork, and have it professionally printed so she can see herself in the book.

As the subject of printing out one of these books has come up over the years, I've done some internet searching. Searching for custom book printing inevitably leads to any number of Vanity Book Publishers which after much research I have decided that most of them are some sort of scam and not really what I'm looking for (though LuLu seems like a reasonable option for many people).

These services are primarily directed at budding authors who can't find a publisher for their work, and not really at a Mom or a Dad who just wants a single copy of a book for personal use.

I have found several Photo Book services, however, that warrant further research. These companies do professional full color printing with good ranges of price and quality to fit within a reasonable budget - and most of them will allow you to share a book online so that your family members can order an additional copy if they would like one.

Primarily, these companies focus on Photo Books - which I haven't put much thought into myself, but it is a great idea to do some sort of family yearbook, or have printed an annual photo album. Printed pages and professional binding give the books a different feel than photo albums. A great scrapbooking project may yield some more interesting and creative results, but for those of us lacking in scrapbooking skills, these are a decent alternative.

20 page books can be as cheap as $10 plus shipping, and as much as $70 or more, depending on the size of the book, whether it is soft or hard cover, if you have a custom cover sleeve or a cut-out cover, which kind of binding you want, etc. One thing is for sure, there are a lot of options.

The downside is that most Photo Book printing services require that you build the book using their software. While it makes things simpler for most people, I happen to have a pretty decent sized library of graphics design and page layout programs that provide me with finer control of the end product. Viovio actually supports pdf format files, so they are winning the contest for my business at the moment. The other services I liked are PhotoWorks and Picaboo.