Storybook Photo Books: A New Adventure

How a storybook photo book is born

Everybody is familiar with how storybooks look. Typically they consist of a single bigger story or multiple shorter tales, illustrated with drawings or stills from the source material. For this reason, many people think that creating a storybook only requires a tale and pictures to accompany it. However, coming up with a coherent story, finding the right words for it, and illustrating the tale with the corresponding pictures can be quite tricky – unless you plan everything carefully.

The right story

The good thing about stories is that they can come from the most unexpected of places, so long as the tone matches the overall lightheartedness of traditional storybooks. This requirement is easy if you have children around because their imagination is an endless source of amazing stories. In fact, their contribution could make the would-be book even more personal as not only do children often feature themselves as the heroes of their own ‘adventures’, but these stories can also be accompanied by their drawings that could serve as illustration for the tales.

But even if your little storytellers don’t feel like following in the footsteps of Andersen or Dr. Seuss, there is another, less obvious way of coming up with a good story. Remember that each of your pictures have something to tell – which is especially true for family photos – so just add some fictionalized elements to past events a bit and voila, the story has presented itself.

The writing

Although it may seem as though the story you have is ready as it is, it’s actually a skeleton. To give it proper life, the story first has to be put on paper, which can be a frightening task for those that have never done such a thing before. But it’s only the beginning that’s hard, and once you get the hang of it, the rest will come naturally, especially seeing how stories possess the same, easily reproducible characteristics.

In other words, just use the old, trusted formula of basic story writing. Combine this with the concept of your tale and after editing and spellchecking it in a word processor, the story is ready to be added to the storybook.

Drafting the book

Putting the necessary pieces together with an online photo book builder is an easy job, but since storybooks and photo books are entirely different mediums there are a few things to pay attention to. For starters, picking the right editor is important, so be sure to choose one that provides textboxes and/or has text-only layouts.

Also, remember that the story itself is the focus of the book, so it’s the illustrations that have to match the text and not the other way around. However, there is no need to include illustration on every page. In fact, the traditional storybook format is best maintained if there is a full-page spread picture followed by one or two pages with only text on it.

But as for other features of the book, such as the number of pages, the size, the coverand so on, all this is down to your preferences.

Publishing

For many people, ordering multiple copies of the storybook and then distributing them among family members and friends is usually enough. But in the case of certain photo printing companies like Blurb and Mixbook, there is also the option to publish books on the company’s own webstore to make your creations available to more than just your close-knit audience. However, there’s no need to worry, if you would prefer to keep the storybook for your own amusement, then the book will be stored in your own personal account, waiting to be reproduced whenever you want.