Why You Shouldn’t Hire an Illustrator Until Your Manuscript Is Finalized

Hiring an illustrator before your manuscript is truly finished can turn relatively simple revisions into expensive production changes.

Before an illustrator starts sketching your characters and scenes, your story should be structurally sound, professionally edited, and ready to become a book.

For many picture book authors, illustration is the part they can’t wait to begin.

You’ve imagined what your main character looks like. You can picture the world of the story. Maybe you’ve even started collecting examples of illustration styles you love.

So why wait? Here’s why.

Your Manuscript Determines What Needs to Be Illustrated

An illustrator can’t simply start drawing a picture book without knowing what happens in the story.

The manuscript determines the characters who appear on each page, the locations needed, the sequence of events, the important actions, and the visual opportunities throughout the book.

Change the manuscript and you may change the illustrations.

Imagine that an illustrator has already completed sketches for several scenes when you realize the beginning of your story is too long. Three scenes really need to become one.

That may be a fairly simple manuscript revision, but those three scenes may already have three separate illustrations created.

Now the change affects the artwork too.

The later you make significant changes to your manuscript, the more likely those changes will affect other parts of production.

Editing May Change More Than the Words

Authors sometimes assume editing means correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

That’s only part of the process.

Depending on what a manuscript needs, editing can uncover much larger issues.

Perhaps your protagonist isn’t actively solving the problem. The middle of the story may need stronger escalation. Two characters may serve essentially the same purpose. The ending may happen too abruptly. Several scenes may need to be reordered, combined, expanded, or removed.

Those aren’t cosmetic changes. They affect what happens in the book.

If an illustrator has already started working from the earlier draft, revisions to the story may mean significant revisions to the artwork.

That’s why developmental and structural questions should be resolved before illustration begins.

Picture Books Need Visual Variety

A story can read perfectly well on a computer screen and still create problems when you begin planning the illustrations.

Consider a story in which two characters have a long conversation in the same room.

The dialogue might be charming, but if that conversation occupies several pages of the finished book, what will the illustrator show?

There are ways to create visual variety through composition, perspective, expressions, and other artistic choices, but the illustrator shouldn’t have to manufacture all of the book’s visual movement because the manuscript doesn’t provide any.

Before illustration begins, look at the story scene by scene.

Are characters doing things? Do locations change when appropriate? Are there opportunities for humor, emotion, action, reaction, surprise, or discovery? Does each part of the story give the illustrator something meaningful to contribute?

A picture book is told through both words and pictures. The manuscript needs to leave room for both.

You May Be Telling the Illustrator’s Half of the Story

There’s another problem that often becomes apparent when a manuscript is prepared for illustration: the author has written things the pictures should show.

For example:

Max was a small brown dog with floppy ears and a red collar. He sat beside his blue food bowl and looked sadly at the empty bowl.

An illustrator can communicate most of that information instantly.

The text might only need to tell us something the illustration can’t:

Max had been waiting for breakfast for a very long time.

Now the words and pictures can work together instead of repeating one another.

Identifying opportunities like this can significantly change a picture book manuscript. It can reduce the word count, improve pacing, and give the illustrator more creative freedom.

It’s much easier to make those decisions before the artwork exists.

Your Page Count and Story Pacing May Change

A picture book shouldn’t simply be a manuscript with pictures added afterward.

The story eventually has to work across physical pages and spreads.

Some scenes deserve more room. Others may need to be condensed. A dramatic reveal might work best after a page turn. A quiet emotional moment might need two pages.

When the manuscript is evaluated with the finished book in mind, pacing problems can become much easier to spot.

Maybe too much of the book is devoted to setting up the story.

Perhaps the middle moves too quickly.

Maybe the ending is squeezed into too few pages.

Solving those problems can change the number and type of illustrations needed.

If artwork has already begun, the author may feel pressure to preserve a weaker structure simply because money has already been spent illustrating it.

That’s not a good reason to keep something in a book.

Character Decisions Should Be Made Before Character Design

Before an illustrator develops your characters, you should know who those characters actually are.

That sounds obvious, but manuscript revisions can change more than dialogue and action.

A character may be removed. Two characters may be combined. A supporting character may become more important. A character’s age or personality may change as the story develops.

There may also be details that need to remain consistent throughout the book.

Once character design begins, the illustrator starts making visual decisions based on the information you provide.

The more settled those decisions are beforehand, the easier it is to create consistent characters that truly fit the story.

Illustration Changes Can Cost Money

This is the practical part authors sometimes discover too late.

Illustrators are professionals, and their time has value.

Your agreement with an illustrator may include a certain number of revisions at particular stages of the project. Major changes outside that scope may cost extra.

And there’s an important difference between:

“Could you make the character’s shirt blue instead?”

and:

“We rewrote this part of the story, so we no longer need this scene. We need a completely different illustration.”

The latter isn’t necessarily a revision to the illustration. It’s an entirely new assignment.

If the change happened because the illustrator misunderstood the approved brief, that’s one thing.

If the change happened because the author changed the story after approving the artwork, that’s another.

Completing the manuscript first reduces the likelihood that you’ll pay to create artwork you ultimately can’t use.

Finished Doesn’t Mean You Can Never Change Another Word

There’s an important distinction here.

A “finished manuscript” doesn’t mean that no words can ever change again.

Small adjustments can happen during production. Sometimes seeing a sketch reveals that a sentence is unnecessary because the illustration communicates the idea perfectly.

Occasionally a line needs to move or a few words need to be trimmed to work better with the layout.

That’s normal.

What you want to avoid are changes that alter the fundamental content of a scene after the illustrator has already begun creating it.

Restructuring a sentence is one thing. Changing the action that happens on the page is another.

What Should Happen Before You Hire an Illustrator?

Before moving into illustration, you should be able to answer some basic questions confidently.

• Who is the main character, and what do they want?
• Does the story have a clear beginning, middle, and end?
• Does the main character play an active role in what happens?
• Does the story move forward from scene to scene?
• Are there enough different visual opportunities throughout the book?
• Are you allowing the illustrations to show things that don’t need to be explained in the text?
• Does the manuscript sound natural when read aloud?
• Has the manuscript been professionally evaluated and edited?

If those questions reveal problems, that doesn’t mean your book isn’t ready to become a picture book. It means there’s still work to do before illustration, and this is exactly when you want to discover that.

Build the Story Before You Build the Book

Illustrations can make a picture book magical, but beautiful artwork can’t fix a story that isn’t ready.

Give yourself, your editor, and eventually your illustrator the best possible foundation by finishing the manuscript first.

1. Develop the story.
2. Evaluate the structure.
3. Edit the manuscript.
4. Read it aloud.
5. Think about how the words and pictures will work together.
6. Then move into illustration.

You’ll enter the process with a clearer vision, your illustrator will have a stronger foundation to work from, and you’ll be far less likely to spend time and money redoing artwork because the story changed underneath it.

Your illustrator should be bringing your story to life.

Make sure the story is ready first.