Last week I had an idea about a dog. This week there’s an ISBN.

Max Waits is a picture book about a Newfoundland who works as a lifeguard on a beach. Every other dog on the sand is fetching, zooming, catching frisbees. Max just sits and watches the water. Everyone thinks he’s the laziest dog there — right up until the wind shifts.

It’s out now on Amazon. But the part I actually want to write about is how it got made, because I went in knowing nothing and the pipeline turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

The stack

Everything I used was free except the print cost:

  • GIMP — scaling and prepping every image, plus the cover typography
  • Scribus — page layout, 30 pages, PDF export
  • Amazon KDP — print-on-demand, zero upfront cost
  • AI image generation — all the illustrations

No InDesign, no Photoshop, no subscription. Total spend to get a live listing: nothing.

What actually went wrong

The resolution ceiling. My image generator capped at 1536 × 1024, and KDP wants 300dpi. On an 8 × 10 page that’s 2400 × 3000 pixels. I was short by more than half.

The fix was to stop fighting it — I framed every image inside a white border rather than running it to the page edge. Smaller image, fewer pixels needed, and as a bonus it gave the text a guaranteed clean place to sit instead of hunting for a quiet patch of sky on every page.

Then there’s the trim size trap. I built the whole thing as a 9 × 6 landscape book. KDP caps custom widths at 8.5 inches. Rebuilt it as 8.5 × 6 — and hit a 72-page minimum for that size. Rebuilt it again as 8 × 10 portrait. The lesson is to check the trim size constraints before laying anything out, not after.

On the AI illustrations

The pictures are AI-generated. I’ve declared that to Amazon, and I’m saying it here too.

I’d love to have commissioned a real illustrator, and if this one finds an audience that’s where the money goes next — a full picture book runs £2,000–5,000, which is real money for a first attempt at something I wasn’t sure I could finish. The writing is mine. The story structure, the pacing, every line of text. The pictures came out of a machine and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Worth knowing if you’re considering the same route: some retailers won’t stock AI-illustrated books, and the copyright position on AI output is unsettled in the UK. Go in with that understood.

What I learned about picture books

A few things that surprised me:

Picture book text is short. The whole book is under 500 words. My first draft of page one had three sentences describing a dog walking, and all three had to go.

Never write what the picture already shows. If the illustration shows a crowd cheering, the text saying “the crowd cheered” is dead weight.

The story structure is load-bearing in a way a novel’s isn’t. Fourteen spreads means fourteen beats, and you can’t waste one. Mine runs on a refrain — “Max waited” — that repeats until it breaks at the climax. That single line is doing most of the work.

The maths

Print cost £3.24 a copy. Listed at £8.99. KDP takes 40%, so I make about £2.15 per sale. Realistic expectation for a self-published picture book by nobody in particular: dozens of copies, not thousands. I made it because I wanted it to exist.

If you’ve got a kid between about 3 and 7, it’s here. There’s a note at the back about rip currents and what to do if you’re ever caught in one, which is the bit I’m most pleased about.