Creating, Financing and Publishing Your Own Artbook
By Neil Blevins
Created On: June 21st 2018
Updated On: Nov 1st 2025
Software: None

Ever since I was a kid, I've loved artbooks, whether art of a film, the artwork of a particular artist, or picture books that combine art and stories. So after many years in the entertainment industry working on other people's films and games, I decided it was time to make my own artbook. That journey led to 4 books and a 5th on the way. So today I'm going to share my artbook story to hopefully inspire and instruct you on how you can do the same for your own work.

While I will talk briefly about the creative side of making books, the talk will be mostly focused on the organizational, business and manufacturing side of things, to give you a roadmap for making your own similar projects.

What is an Art Book?

An "Art Book" can mean many different things. It can be a Portfolio book, a Graphic Novel, or a Narrative Artbook. Here are my 4 books and their types:



For this lesson, we will be speaking about the making of all 4 books, but with a focus on my first book “Story Of Inc” as an archetypal example.



1) Inspiration

So you're an artist, and you've decided to make your own art book. Fantastic! That's exactly what I decided to do in the middle of 2013. I had worked for close to 2.5 years on the Pixar film "The Good Dinosaur", the film had just stalled, and I watched 2.5 years of my work disappear in a flash as we started the film all over again from scratch. It was a turbulent time, a sad time, a stressful time, and I decided that I needed a new personal project, something of my own to take away the sting of my work situation.

Over the years, almost all of my personal artwork were little one off paintings, none of them particularly connected with each other. I decided it was time to do a larger work, a set of interconnected places and characters. I had loved series like The Transformers and Goldorak (the french translation of Grendizer) as a child, and now it was time to make my own universe to tell stories in.





Making a film, even a short film, was a tremendous undertaking, so inspired by other books such as Steambot's "Exodyssey", Doug Chiang's "Robota" and Alec Gillis's "Worlds", I decided to make a scifi book that fused story with paintings.



Looking over my past paintings, I decided I would take one of them and expand it out into a larger story. The painting I ended up choosing was of a man and his robot, walking through a brutally hot coral desert. It already seemed to have a narrative buried in there: who were these two? what was their relationship? where were they headed? Pretty soon I constructed a little narrative forming.

I decided to loosely base the relationship of the two main characters off of the Manga "Lone Wolf and Cub", another inspiring story. It seemed to fit the bill of the initial painting of two characters wandering the barren wasteland.



2) Reference

I then went about gathering tons of reference. I watched films (for example, the film Lawrence Of Arabia), I started collecting directories of imagery from favorite artists and real photos that could inform the story I wanted to tell. I then started organizing the reference into an Art Bible. Go here to learn more about the Inc Art Bible.



But even more importantly, I decided to travel to a location to take reference photography, which I could use for 3d textures and for matte paintings as well as inspiration. As well as desert, I also wanted large and strange rock formations, so the closest location to California where I could get all that was Utah. A family vacation was planned, and we went off to visit 3 National Parks and 2 state parks. We took approximately 5000 photographs of ground, soil, rock, dirt, caverns, and canyons.







Since the desert in my story had been underwater at one point, there would be giant alien coral forms left behind. So I bought dozens of pieces of coral from ebay, and took tons of photos, again, for reference, and to use for textures and matte painting.



Here's a quick example of where these references were used in the book. Here's a photo from Canyonlands...



I extracted the rock that person was standing on from the background and painted in photoshop the parts that were missing...



Then used this in a painting for our heroes to stand on...



For a poster for the project...



For my Megastructures book, gathering reference included many scientific papers and articles on space and science. Also, lots of NASA photography. And the best part is Nasa photography is copyright free (since it's technically owned by the US people), so you can use those images as photobash elements in paintings without the need to license them (But I still added a thanks in the front of the book in the stock imagery section).



3) Setting Up The Team And Project

While doing a book all on your own may have a sort of artistic romance to it, there are many advantages to working with a team.
For "The Story Of Inc", I started with bringing my friend Bill Zahn on board. While I do environments, robots and vehicles, I rarely do humans, and Bill was an amazing character artist I met at Blur 20 years ago, and have since worked with at Pixar. Bill had spent the last several years writing screenplays, so he seemed like the perfect person to help hash out the story as well. I told him the ideas I had, he said "That's cool, but maybe we could do this instead". He took many of the elements of my original story and changed things around, improving my original idea immensely.  Then our friend Stephan Bugaj came on board to help shape the story. After that, I decided to start adding some more friends to help with the art. My old buddy from Blur Jeremy Cook was next. The newest version of the story had a pirate spaceship, and Jeremy seemed like a perfect match for the job. Now that more people were coming on board, it was time to start getting everyone organized, and set up legal documents.

For Megastructures, originally the book was going to be written by a real astrophysicist. But they got too busy, so I ended up writing it myself. Added 5 more artists who helped with the paintings.



4) The Story

For "The Story Of Inc", our goal was to make a concept art book for a film that doesn't exist. And after poking at the story, we came up with this basic description:

"Inc is a scifi story that centers around a man and his robot trying to survive on an almost waterless desert planet. Their lives change dramatically when they come across a giant alien artifact that provides plentiful water, and a society that guards the resource and is not interested in sharing with outsiders."

As mentioned, we went with the narrative artbook format. In the future, it might make more sense to make a graphic novel, since it's easier for a publisher to “get” and market because its a more standard format. But the artists (including myself) were more comfortable doing key art than comic art, so we went with the best format for the people involved.

We decided the book would have 3 parts, Illustrated Novel, World Of, Making Of.
Now it was time to write the story. Bill, Stephan, and I started designing the narrative. While maybe some writers just sit down and write, we are more used to film production, where you get together and write a short synopsis for each scene to the story. Then we'd discuss what needs to happen: What is the heart of the story? What do the characters want? What are their motivations? What are their flaws? How would they react in their world? Then we'd revise the scenes. And we revised them again, and again, until we had the skeleton of a story. Then we divided up the writing work:
As we developed the project, we decided on a few story guidelines.


5) The Artwork

I designed and built the Robot "Inc" for the project.



Bill, as a great human character artist, designed and built the human Landis.



Most of the artists used a workflow that involved 2d painting, 3d, and photo manipulation. A set of guidelines sort of evolved. If the character or set appears in lots of images, make a 3d model. If it will only appear in a few images, hand paint or photobash in 2d. Use whatever technique gets you the best looking image the quickest. It didn't matter how you got there.

Since this was a book, and the final result would be 2d images, we used simple rigging systems to help pose 3d characters. The rigs got us a long way, but they weren't perfect. We painted out interpenetrating joints, and other problems, in 2d.



Wow, the rigging job on that elbow is horrible! No problem, just paint it away on the final 2d painting.



Here's some designs for one of the robot bad guys, inspired by Ray Harryhausen and a statue in the De Young Museum in San Francisco.









Then I got together a list of all the major elements we needed to design and then paint for the story. This is the list of categories we came up with:
As mentioned in part 3, the work was divided up among various artists. For the most part, we tried to give an entire category in the list above to a single artist.

Simple concept briefs were made for the artists. Go here to learn more about writing Concept Briefs.


Art By Jeremy Vickery


Art By Jeremy Cook


Art By Mohammad Modarres / Gio Nakpil


Art By Christina Davis

Final Stats for "The Story Of Inc":

    • All artwork was done in 1.5 years in our spare time (we all had day jobs)
    • 10 Visual Artists + myself total, with 5-6 working at any given time
    • Total artwork by all contributors: 526 images
    • My contribution: 309 images
    • Rest of Team: 217 images
    • Total artwork in book: 225 images

Megastructures consisted of 109 paintings / diagrams and stock images. Here's some of the people who contributed.


Art By Andy Proctor


Art By Jeremy Cook


Art By Ken Fairclough

6) Publishers

So you have two basic paths for publishing, either to go with a publisher, or to self publish. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.

If you decide to find a publisher, you'll need a way to sell your book to them, so you'll need a Book Proposal, which is a document where you give a formal outline of what you plan on making, including ab Overview, Authors Bio, Comparable Books with Sales Figures, Chapter Outline, Sample Chapter, Schedule, etc. To find out how to write one, visit this page: The Complete Guide To Writing A Book Proposal.

Some of the bigger publishers won't even talk to you unless you have an agent. So finding an agent can be helpful to sell your book idea, but not necessary, especially if you're seeking a smaller publisher and hitting a more niche market.

If you do decide to go with a publisher, here's a few things to consider.

The publishing timeline:
From handing in materials to landing the book on a bookstore shelf can be anywhere between 6 months to 2 years. So don't expect the process to go quickly. It won't. And of course, if you decide to self publish, you will have to do all of these things yourself.

A few details about a publishing deal: A standard publishing contract gives you 7% of book's sale price, or 15% of net. So if your book sells for $20 at the bookstore, expect to make about $1.40. $10 goes to whomever is selling the book (the book store, Amazon, etc), and the remaining 43% goes to the publisher for doing all of the things in the list above.

For "The Story Of Inc", we talked to 5 different publishers. Several didn't want to publish the project, but offered us great advice.

In the end, we decided to go with publisher X (name withheld, you'll see why in a minute). At first, everything seemed to be going great. There were issues and disagreements, but they seemed pretty small in the grand scheme of things. But as we continued to work with them over the course of 2 years, we slowly started to realize that Publisher X was not as enthusiastic about the project as we'd hoped. We figured out that publishing our book was something they kinda felt compelled to do, as opposed to being excited about it, and it showed in how they handled our project. A publishing deal is like a marriage. Don't get married with someone who thinks you're just okay. Get married to the person who loves and understands you. That doesn't mean refuse to compromise, though. Publishers have lots of great ideas. I know you believe that all of your ideas are pure genius, but trust me, they aren't. It's good to have an objective, outside view to make your project stronger. But at a certain point, if you don't see eye to eye on the big things, it's time to move on.

This is the first place that having a lawyer really helped out. Before signing with a publisher, have your lawyer read over your contract CAREFULLY. Having a great contract was what allowed us to pull our book from our publisher when we decided that we were going in different directions. Otherwise, they could have chosen to kept the book, and possibly never released it. In our case, the publisher gave us the book back without a big battle, and we managed to come to a reasonable parting agreement, with our lawyer helping along the way.

After Inc, we decided to self publish everything so we could retain maximum creative control (even if we may have lost out on some sales).

7) Editing

So now comes the editing process, you have you art, you have your story, now it's time to decide what artwork really should go in the book and have a serious look over your text. Our publisher did the initial edit, both discussions on artwork, then normal story editing and then copy editing. This book didn't require it, but you may also need a fact check edit, for example, if you're writing a hard scifi novel and want to make sure that the physics behind some of your tech is actually feasible. It's also time to prep those extra pages in the book, such as the dedication, the copyright info, the index, a forword perhaps, the bio section, artist credits, web address etc. And then finally, it's time to get together credits for all of the stock images you've used. As concept artists, we frequently make our artwork using photobashed elements, and many of those elements have licenses that state you need to give credit to the provider of the stock elements in the final product. So we added a section at the beginning of the book outlining all of the stock sources that contributed to the final book.
8) Layout

Layout is the process of taking all the text and artwork and placing it on the page. It's not nearly as simple as it may sound. We knew the process wasn't simple, but after we went through it, we became even more respectful of how difficult this job is.

What format should be book be? Portrait or landscape? We went with landscape because this was an art book for a movie that didn't exist, we wanted it to feel cinematic, which meant a landscape format like a widescreen film. And how large should the book be? We decided to do a book approximately the same size as the Pixar "Art of" books.



As we worked on the paintings and text, I made a rough layout to get an idea what parts of the story need more illustrations, and what size illustrations we needed. I did my rough layout in Photoshop, which is almost certainly not the right software to use, but I was familiar with it, and this was a rough layout, so it didn't need all the bells and whistles of professional page layout software.

The final professional layout is frequently done in Adobe InDesign. However as with all Adobe products, this is a subscription, and can become quite costly over time. Megastructures and all books afterwards were laid out in Affinity Publisher, which is $40 pay once, and it's 95% of full featured as InDesign, so I highly recommend checking it out.

Once we had a first draft of the professional layout, I went to Kinkos to photocopy the book at the correct size. It doesn't matter if the quality sucks. This is to verify that this is in fact the right size of book, the fonts are big enough to read, and that the page layout feels good.

Also, take a look at the 2nd or 3rd page of most books, which contains all the book info such as ISBN number, Edition, Library Of Congress Number, etc. Use that as reference for your own page of credits and book information.

A professional layout, if the publisher doesn't do it in house, will cost between $3000-5000. Anything lower, you're not getting a good job. So if someone says "I can do it for $1000", walk away.  Don't be stingy on the layout. The layout is just as important if not more important than the artwork itself, it can make or break the entire project.

On Megastructures and beyond, I did the layout myself and didn't rely on an outside source.

The final layout for the Story Of Inc



My kinkos test print for Megastructures...



If you do decide to do the layout yourself, two things to consider.

First off, learn about Rich Blacks. Basically, if you do a CMYK print, and an area is regular black, it will only use the Black Ink cartridge. But it will not appear as black as it could be, it will seem more like really dark grey. A Rich Black contains just a touch of the other 3 colors, like C, M, or Y, and this will create a darker black result. For Inc, we tinted the blacks a little red (since it was a desert book), and for Megastructures we tinted the blacks a little blue (for space). Read more on the subject on the web, lots of more detailed explanations out there.


Plumgrove

And finally, consider the book's gutter. If you have a wide image, only place it across 2 pages if it doesn't interfere with the image.



This is a bad image to use on a 2 page spread, the focal point of the painting will be lost in the gutter. Put this on a single page.



This is a good image to use on a 2 page spread, the gutter area doesn't have anything of large importance to the painting.

9) Kickstarting

After we left our publisher, we decided to self publish, so we'd print and distribute the book ourselves (we also did a major revision to the layout of the book, paying for a professional layout artist to do the fixes, thanks Paul!). We needed money to do it, so we decided to put the book on Kickstarter. Doing a successful Kickstarting campaign is a whole topic unto itself. If you're interested in the subject, there's tons of websites to offer advice. I'll give you a few tips that we learned from our Kickstarter.
Here's some of our rewards for the Megastructure Kickstarter.



And one of the rewards for the Inc Kickstarter.



With a kickstarter, you tend to get a large portion of sales on the first few days, very little in the middle, and a ton on the last few days. See our graph below for the Story of Inc Kickstarter, we thankfully had better progress than many in the middle of the campaign, but in broad strokes our kickstarter was pretty similar to others.


We actually ended up doing 2 Kickstarters. The first lasted 3 days, and then we received a cease and desist letter from a well known company that claimed the robot in the book looked too similar to theirs. This is where a lawyer saved our butts a second time. Our lawyer told us that there were basically two categories of companies that send these sorts of letters, companies looking to make a quick buck, and "true believers". The first type of company would likely go away quickly if they received any resistance (like a carefully worded email from our lawyer). The second type of company believes they have created something that is truly unique, and will fight till the bitter end to prove that you stole their idea. After discussing the case, it was pretty obvious we had a true believer on our hands. The lawyer told us that we'd certainly win in court, however, it was likely to cost us between $15,000-$20,000. We really didn't want to spend that kind of money, so we went back and redesigned the robot, and re-inserted him into the paintings. While I'll always have fond memories of the original design, many people like the new design better, and over time the new design has become the character, even more so than the original (at least to me).

Then we did a new, second, Kickstarter, which was a huge success! We raised $11,640 of our $10,000 goal from 230 backers, and selling 243 books! We ended up printing 1000 books, so the remaining 757 books that weren't presold in the kickstarter were sold at comicons and through our website, and I'm happy to report we sold out of all books in 2023, 6 years later.

For ideas on how to perhaps set up your own book kickstarter, feel free to check ours out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/artofsoulburn/the-story-of-inc-narrative-artbook

For the later books, one successful kickstarter gives people confidence in a second kickstarter, which can lead to more sales. I don't think Megastructures would have been as successful without Story Of Inc funding and shipping.

Here's the final results for the Megastructure First Printing Kickstarter in 2021.



We asked for the same goal of $10,000, but got over $50k, with 942 backers!

Years  later, after Megastructures sold out, people kept asking for a reprint. So we decided to do another kickstarter to see if there was enough interest in a second printing. Turns out there was...



And here's where the people who pledged for this kickstarter came from, Twitter (at the time, 2024) was the #1 single source of referrals after "Misc".



10) Registering

Once you have your book, and its getting close to final layout, it's time to registered your book. These rules may differ in other countries, but here's the 3 things you should do in the USA.


11) Printing

There are a number of ways to print a book. The main two are...
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of each...

Offset Printing
Digital Printing
Here's an example of the print quality difference...



Next, you need to decide where to print your book. While it's nice to print everything locally, the price difference between that and printing in China can be substantial. The advantage of local printing is that it costs a lot less to ship the books to you. The downside is that our research showed that to print the book locally would be 2x3 times more expensive than China. So most books are printed in China. There are plenty of websites out there that can give you an estimate on how much it would be to print and ship your book from China, just give them the number of books you want, number of pages, etc, and they'll give you a full quote. This number is helpful when deciding how much money you need from your kickstarter, and how much to sell the book for.

We used offset printing for Inc and Megastructures to have the highest quality color reproduction. So we printed those in China using On The Mark printing http://www.onthemark.net/ after a friend recommended them. They were great, they really care about quality, they had amazing communication, and they put up with all of our annoying questions.

Since my sketchbook was black and white sketches, we didn't need the amazing color, so we used on demand printing from Amazon, printing as we needed more instead of pre-printing a ton beforehand.

The printer will need the book layout from your layout artist, also the cover for the book, which they will likely give you a template for. Then they will print a proof, a test of how the book should look. For our first proof of The Story Of Inc, we did a proof with the Digital Printer (even though the final book would be printed with Offset Printing), and the results looked really desaturated. So we paid a little extra and did a proof using a process much closer to the final Offset Printing process, and that proof turned out great. And it was almost identical to the final printed book. So even though it's a few hundred dollars more, go with the Offset Printing proof, so you really see what the final product will look like.



Inc cost approx $15 per book to print in 2017 (168 pages, 10.25" x 8", 1000 copies), which includes printing, proof and shipping to our distribution center via cargo ship and truck.

Large publishers can get better deals on per book cost.

Also related is how much should you charge for your book?
    • Most customers are used to $30-55 for a top quality professional artbook
    • Have seen several $80 books on kickstarter fail to fund, so as of 2025, would recommend keeping it below $55.

Our printer suggested doing two edition of the book, the regular, and the special edition. The regular has a normal book with dust jacket, the special edition was in black cloth with a shiny gold emblem. We printed 750 regular, 250 special, and sold both as different rewards on the kickstarter.



Turns out people really like having the choice of regular or special edition, so we did the same for Megastructures...



We also decided to go with using bumper boxes, per our printer's suggestion. These are simple form fitting boxes that really protect the book from damage. It added to the cost of each book, but can really be a life saver, with fewer returns due to damaged books. Also, remember to put a sticker on the outside of the bumper box with your ISBN number, so when they are distributed, they don't need to be opened to confirm it's the correct book.

Bumper box:



The Special Edition of the book, in a bumper box:



Finally, once you're sure everything is perfect, flick the switch and the books will be printed and shipped to you in the US.

A tiny warning, since we were bitten by this. Make sure you're not printing your book anytime around Chinese New Year (Jan-Feb). The whole country shuts down for a month and your book won't get printed or shipped until after Chinese New Year is over. Now we make sure to get all our books printed in the summer to avoid this.







12) Distribution

Now that you have your book, it needs to get distributed. We already had pre sales through Kickstarter, so step 1 was to send the books to the Kickstarter customers who paid for to them. Then we'd do an online store to sell copies of the book (we used Gumroad for our online store), and went to brick and mortar book stores to get the book sold as well (as well as conventions).

Rather than ship "The Story Of Inc" ourselves, we decided to go with Fulfillment by Amazon. All the books are kept in an Amazon warehouse, and when we make a sale, we give Amazon the address to ship to and they do, charging us once a week for the shipping cost for all the books shipped that week. This has a number of advantages.
One of the downsides is it's very complex to set up. Amazon is very picky about how you list and ship the books to their warehouse. But once you've set it up, it takes all of 60 seconds to ship a book, so every time you get a new sale on your online store, just go over to your Amazon sellers account and give them the name and address. We followed this tutorial to set up our Amazon account: https://gameswithoutstrings.wordpress.com/2014/07/16/using-amazon-fulfillment-to-ship-your-kickstarter-product-part-1-of-4/

For Megastructures and after, we used a company called Fullfilrite instead of Amazon, they were easier to setup.



A lot of the books were also sold at conventions. I'd sold prints at conventions before, but books sell a lot better than prints. This is likely because...
Here's some percentages of books sold by format:
It's so nice to see people still love physical books! No reason not to sell digital anyways, it's almost free money, and help international folk who don't want to pay for expensive shipping, but making a physical book is certainly worth it from a sales perspective.

As far as sales go, I usually sells about 40-50 books per convention when I'm only selling a single book, and when I have 2 or more books for sale, I usually sell double at 80-100 because people buy both.

13) Publicity

Now it's time to publicize the book. The Kickstarter was a great first step at publicity, but to keep the book selling...
This is one area that a good publisher can help, if they believe in your book, they can do a lot of marketing, and reach a lot of people that you are unlikely to reach on your own. So self publishing can be a disadvantage in this regard.

Timeline

Here's a quick timeline that shows when the major events of the project took place. This will give you some idea how long different portions of the project took.



Conclusion: The Hard Monetary Reality Of Selling Books

So before we end this little article, here's a little harsh reality for you of how much money you are likely to make.
So let's do some math.

Profit From Using A Publisher:

3000 books x $40 (160 page book) = $120,000 USD (all prices are in USD for the remainder of the example)

Where the money goes:
So in this example:
The artist gets $9,000.

I did the majority of production on our book from Oct 2013 to Sep 2015 = 23 months = 100 weeks x 14 work hours a week = 1400 hours of work. If you add the time spent by the other artists and writers, it's probably double that, or 2800 hours of work to make the book. That's 2800 person hours of work, divided by 52 weeks x 40 hours a week, which means the book took 1.34 person years to produce.

That comes out to making $3.31 an hour

So if I worked on projects like Inc full time with a publisher, I would make $6,716 a year.

Profit From Self Publishing, distributing in a Bookstore:
Profit From Self Publishing, Personal Sales:

    • Don't split money with publisher or bookstore (double yay!).
    • Printing price is higher because you don't get the deals a publisher can get
    • you have to do all the work a publisher would normally handle, so that increases the number of hours spent on the book
    • without a publisher marketing your book, or a bookstore distributing, you reduce the total amount of units to 1000
    • say 1000 books printing cost is $20 per book
    • artist makes $20 per book, or $20,000 total vs $9,000 with publisher
    • still not enough to live off of

Another way to look at it, say you need $100,000 a year to live a comfortable life. With the above figures, I'd have to sell 44,669 books a year. So my book would have to sell as well as an art book for a major motion picture or videogame to make a decent living.

What I'm trying to tell you is, while most of us have the dream to work exclusively on our own artistic vision and get paid a living salary for it, that dream is very unlikely.

So the next best dream is to find a company or set of freelance projects that you enjoy and can believe in, make enough money off that to live comfortably, and find some time to make your own books on the side. Or else move to a location in the country where your rent is ridiculously low. :)

We were very lucky to have sold over 3000 units of Megastructures.

But don't fear! There are upsides to making a book, even if money isn't one of them. Some of those upsides include:
Anyways, hopefully this discussion inspires you to make your own book, and doesn't scare you away from doing it :) Perhaps some of this information will give you a head start in your own project, so you don't have to learn everything through trial and error.

If you're interested in purchasing any of the books you see here, please visit the Book Section of Neilblevins.com. And thanks for reading!

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