Where Is Smelly Ann Skunk? Interview with Children's Book Authors Janet Hill and Chris Thillen

Janet Hill

About ten days ago or so I met Janet Hill at the Scott House near Wrenshall during the Roundabout Art Night in Cloquet/Carlton. It was fun to see the various venues linking arms, coordinating an evening of events for arts enthusiasts. Duluth began its most recent iteration of the Downtown Arts Walk in the spring of 2018, but Duluth artists have a long history of formalized and informal multi-venue events.

Likewise, across the bridge ("Get over it.") in Superior there have also been similar opportunities for artists including the Phantom Galleries and Goin' Postal multi-venue shows.

Because I have produced a children's picture book, and watched the success of Chris Monroe, I was interested in interviewing a relative newbie to the craft, my aim being to get insights for others who may be interested in this kind of expression. Janet and Chris delivered this in spades. (Thank you!)

Here's something amusing. The past two days I have been working on this blog post about Janet Hill and collaborator Christianne Thillen. This morning Amazon.com sent me an email that said, "We've found something you may be interested in." Naturally it was Where Is Smelly Ann Skunk? What a coincidence.

EN: What was Christianne’s motivation to write and publish this story?

Christianne Thillen: I have always enjoyed writing, and doing a children’s book is a longtime goal. I love Janet’s painting style; the scenes she imagines appeal to me in many ways. Examples are showing the animals doing everyday things that people do: having a party, playing board games, dancing in folk costumes, and so on.

The story idea came to me after a phone conversation between us in November 2018. Janet said she wanted to try creating a children’s book but was having trouble coming up with a story. I said I’d try to think of something. A few days later, the plot of a story came to me—something simple but interesting for children to hear, or to read by themselves. When I called Janet and told her my idea, she loved it and invited me to write the story.

Janet was involved in the story development too, as it turns out, though we stuck to my original plot. She critiqued my contributions to the text, and I critiqued hers. I also suggested ideas for illustrations, or just offered my thoughts about the ones Janet had painted. Then the story took on a life of its own, as they magically do, and we had a ball in the process.

EN: What is your background in illustration? Do you do art in other kinds of media?

Janet Hill: I don't have formal art education. I began painting in my late 50s and I learn whenever I can, in whatever way I can. I take workshops and classes from Minnesota artists I admire, and learn from books and online tutorials. I collect old children's books, and use them as a reference and for ideas. I keep a drawing journal to sketch out ideas and characters. But mostly I just keep on painting, learning as I go.

As for media, I've tried oils and acrylics, but I prefer watercolor. I discovered that I don't have the discipline to keep things clean when using oils, and although I enjoyed acrylics, I tended to waste a lot of paint. For years I avoided watercolors because they sounded so hard to master, until a friend invited me to a watercolor workshop taught by Sue Brown Chapin from Carlton, MN. I told my friend I would go, but I fully expected to not enjoy it! But I discovered my medium at last; I love watercolors and now paint exclusively with them.

EN: What tools did you use and what was the surface you painted on?

JH: I paint on Arches cold-press 140# watercolor paper. I first sketch ideas on a large sketch pad using a mechanical pencil and a General's Tri-Tip eraser (the little pencil erasers on mechanical pencils are way too small for me!). I use Google Images for reference when needed (which makes me admire the old artists all the more, who didn't have this great tool available.) When I'm happy with a composition -- usually after lots of erasing and redrawing -- I lightly trace it onto watercolor paper using a light- table or sunny window. I then finish the pencil drawing on the watercolor paper, adding as many fine details as I can before starting to paint.

For paints, I use Daniel Smith watercolors, and some Aquarelles, just because they're the ones I initially started with, and I understand them and like them. I generally use the same 4 sizes of round brushes, ranging from 3 to 12. Once I start the painting portion of an illustration, it takes me about 3 days or so to finish, adding glaze layers, outlining with ink, and adding dimension. I usually run the final illustration past my husband, Gary, to see if he sees anything I failed to see: an awkward position of a character, elements that don't make sense, etc.

EN: What was the biggest challenge for you, the illustrator?

JH: There were many! It started with the story itself, as my illustrations were the inspiration for Chris's story idea. The first challenge was to flesh out her cute idea of a baby animal who gets lost in the woods and needs to be rescued. It's a simple plot, but we had to decide what kind of baby animal to use, how he or she would get lost, discovered, and rescued, what kinds of animals would be involved, and what they would each do. Would the animals talk? Would they have clothes on? Lots of things to decide. While fleshing out the story, we kept in mind a few technical rules: the Rule of 3, choosing words no higher than a 3rd-grade level, and keeping the word count under 1000 (the typical number for picture books).

When our story was finally settled, we spent about a month working on a storyboard. I would sketch thumbnails of each page, and run them past Chris so we could hammer them out together. We had to make sure that each page would have an interesting illustration to carry the story forward. We looked for ways to cut words by illustrating a concept instead of writing it out. We also wanted each page turn to be somewhat suspenseful, to keep little kids wanting to turn pages to see what happens next.

The storyboard process also helped clarify what gender each animal would be. Our bear and moose, for instance, were both females initially. But the moose, as it turned out, had to be male in order to have big horns that a squirrel could sit on. When the female bear fell from a tree and the male moose looked down at her, we realized it might look like a male animal was bullying a female animal. So we had to make the bear a male, too, to equalize that encounter. And so it went!

We decided early in the process to use the traditional children's book page count of 32 pages, so we had to pace the story to fit on 30 pages (allowing for a title page and copyright page at the beginning of the book). After much wrangling, we eventually settled on a final story board, and I was able to start working on the full-size illustrations.

At first, I thought I would completely finish each page before moving to the next. I quickly realized that this method wouldn't work -- that I had to work on all of the pages at the same time to keep the characters and colors consistent throughout. When it was time to begin painting, I laid out the pages and painted all the similar colors -- for example, the greens of the underbrush -- on the same day.

After about five months of illustrating the pages in this way, I was ready to finalize it all. I knew it would would eventually need to be scanned for the book designer to add text, so I scanned all the pages and used Adobe Photoshop to fix little glitches in various illustrations. I learned during this process that it's much easier to finish everything with real paint than to depend too much on Photoshop, as Photoshop is very time-consuming.

EN: What kinds of things have you learned through this project that would help others who may want to produce a children’s book?

JH: I hardly know where to begin. There's a lot of information out there on how to create a children's book, and it's good to take a look at it, but ultimately we decided to do things pretty much our own way.

Deciding the quality and quantity to print
Early on, we visited the children's section of an independent bookstore and looked at the possibilities for bindings and cover designs. The people who will be buying our books will be parents and grandparents & aunts & uncles -- not children -- so we wanted our book to have a high quality feel, no glitter or gloss or gimmicks. So we decided to include a dust jacket, and to use matte, soft-touch finish for the cover, so the book would simply feel nice to pick up.

We opted for offset printing rather than print-on-demand. The former is more expensive, but you have more control over the quality and we wanted our book to be the best it could be. We sent for bids from several book printers in the U.S. and some in Asia, and to our surprise, the one that came in lowest was right here in Minnesota: Bang Printing, in Brainerd. With them we were able to save on shipping costs because we could pick up the books ourselves. (I even got a tour of their print shop, which was impressive! They even have a machine that puts dust jackets on books.) We decided to order 1500 books, to keep our per-book cost low. It's a LOT of books, but if we can sell enough to cover our printing and book designer cost, we will be very happy. Because the main reason we wanted to write this book was to share our story and illustrations with little kids; getting rich was never our goal, which is a good thing!

Business stuff
We chose to print our books under our own publisher imprint (trade name), to make it look less like a self-published book. No one is fooled by this (and everyone does it) but it lends a little "authority" to have publisher name on the book cover and spine. We also got a sales tax ID number from the state of Minnesota (sadly, a necessity), and registered as a partnership so we could handle money with a joint bank account.

We decided to hire a book designer for the cover and for laying out the pages according to the printer's requirements. He was costly ($1500) but for this we got a professionally designed cover and back cover, the dust jacket design, and the text added to the illustrations. He also provided us with all the digital files of the book, which come in handy for sending to reviewers and competitions.

We purchased a set of ISBN numbers from Bowker. You have to have a separate ISBN for each version of your book: hard cover, soft cover, and ebook. Although we printed our books, we also have books available as print-on-demand through IngramSpark, so libraries and bookstores can order it. We paid $85 to be listed in IngramSpark's catalogs for a year; we're not sure if this will pay off or not, but we were willing to give it a try.

We had a built-in editor (Chris is a textbook editor) so we didn't have to hire one, but hiring an editor is crucially important.

Deciding how to sell
We both read "how to" books on writing for children, and we both joined Facebook groups of children's book writers. There's TOO much advice out there, really, some of it not all that great. One popular piece of advice as we were going to print was for self-publishers to use a service called Amazon Advantage to distribute their books. We made our printing choice based on the idea that Amazon would help us store and distribute our books. As it turned out, the same week I went to sign up for Amazon Advantage, Amazon pulled the plug: no more Amazon Advantage for new sellers. By then, we had 1500 books in production, and had to figure out how to sell them! So we put our heads together and came up with these avenues to sell:

• We approached a handful of independent booksellers about having our books on consignment with them, to give some gravitas to our image (as in, "You can find our book at Red Balloon Bookshop!"). We decided to not try to get into a large number of bookstores, as it's hard to keep track of inventory when it's all over the place. And book sellers take a hefty chunk -- about 40% -- so selling on commission at bookstores isn't nearly as lucrative as selling directly or through places that don't take as much commission, like gift shops. So we only have our books at a few indie bookstores: Red Balloon in St. Paul, Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis, Zenith in Duluth.

• As our publication date neared, we sent an email to our personal distribution lists, including as many people as we could think of. We described the book, and told them various ways they could purchase it. We also set up a Facebook page titled with our book title, and posted about once a week about the upcoming publication date, to generate some interest.

• Soon after our book arrived from the printer, we threw release parties in both areas where we live: in northern Minnesota for me, and in the Twin Cities for Chris. For each party, we invited as many people as we could, and encouraged them to invite their friends. We set up a table and bought some giveaways -- coloring pages of one of the book's characters with free mini-boxes of crayons for the kids, pins with an illustration of our main characters, bookmarks with a brief description of the book and our contact information (this can double as a business card), wrapped candies. We each had a cake decorated to celebrate the new book, and we offered beverages and a few snacks. Both were lucrative for us. • Seeing as how we're unable to take advantage of the convenience of Amazon.com for online sales, we set up an Etsy shop to have an online presence, so buyers can use their credit cards or Paypal to buy books.

• To help get the word out, I'm learning how to use Instagram. I'm still new at it but hopefully it will steer some buyers our way. They say it's a powerful selling tool; we shall see.

• We serendipitously timed our book to be released in late summer, which means we had the entire holiday season ahead of us to sell. We sell at art & craft fairs, and have book signings whenever we can. We're pushing hard during the holiday season, and figure we'll slow down after the holidays and think of what to do next to help clean out our inventory of books. One publisher told us it takes him about 3 years to sell an inventory of 1500 books.

• We rented a table at the Minnesota Book Fair at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in October, and it was reasonably successful; our sales paid for our table rental, but more importantly, a lot of book-types saw our book.

• We entered some regional book contests (although we won't find out the results for few months yet).

• We set up print-on-demand books via IngramSpark, and we have a Kindle version, but we're not really pushing that part of our sales.

• I joined some groups that offer perks to members: Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) is a good one, Midwest Independent Publishers Association (MIPA), Independent Book Publishers Assn (IBPA). Some offer discounts to purchase an ISBN, others have contests and other ways to promote your book. It's also a great way to see the competition!

For Chris and me, it took about eight months from initial story idea to sending the finished pages to a book printer, then it took two additional months for the printing to be completed. This is apparently pretty fast (some folks take years from start to finish).

What has been the response? Chris says, "Very positive! Lots of positive comments not just from family and friends, but from people at shows who see the great illustrations and high quality of the book." Janet says, "It's been great! One of my favorite things is to watch a child look through the book and touch various illustrations. It's pretty powerful to see that."

EN: Are you and Christianne planning a sequel? 

CT: We’re thinking we should focus on “Smelly Ann: The Movie” first! Joking, of course. At this point I’d say we’re not inclined to do a sequel; selling is hard work for creative people who generally aren’t all that outgoing.

JH: I think once we sell all these books, we'll probably chalk it up as an educational experience, and get back to our normal lives, because this has been much more work than either of us thought it would be. But it's so gratifying to know that our book is being used at story time for lots of kids, and that was our main reason for writing it in the first place. So we've achieved that."

Related Links

Link to their Etsy shop  
(for offset printed book with dust jacket and illustrated endpapers. Free shipping on orders over $30). Link to Where Is Smelly Ann Skunk at Amazon
(for print-on-demand hard cover -- no dust jacket or illustrated endpapers -- or soft cover book, or ebook)
Good article in today's Duluth News Tribune about Lake Superior Writers
My own first children's picture book: A Remarkable Tale from the Land of Podd