Printable Children's Books

by Steve Barancik
(Tucson, AZ)

Self publishing printable children's books

My self publishing adventure began with stories I wrote for my daughter.

My screenwriting career was winding down. I felt like sharing these stories with other parents, to share with their children. However I didn't feel like soliciting agents and/or publishers. I was burned out on trying to please the powers that be.

Self publishing was the answer, right?

Well, no. I didn't feel much like doing all that detail work and self promotion either.

Besides, I didn't see these as traditional picture books. I saw them as picture book texts that kids themselves would illustrate.

So the thing to do, I decided, was build a website. The easy way out! I wanted to slap those books up on the web as downloadable, printable children's books and just wait for buyers to flock to me!

Well, I got my website up. But the flocks were slow to come. In fact, NO one came.

And why should they have? I expected Google to send me buyers, but that's not Google's job. Google's job is to send searchers to precisely what they're looking for...

And no one was looking for me. So I started thinking. Google sends out tons of traffic. But what does it take to get those coveted top listings? The ones one the first page of search results...not the 200th!

Well, like I said, it takes giving your prospective buyers the resource they're looking for. Who were my prospective buyers? Parents. What were they looking for? Children's books.

Not MY children's books. Just children's books.

Meet Best-Childrens-Books.com.

Now, I'd be lying if I said I made that huge conceptual leap on my own.

I started by Googling terms like how do you get traffic? I ignored the results that sounded like snake oil and went with the guys who assured me it could be done but it wasn't going to be easy.

If it was easy, as they say, everyone would be doing it.

I came to the realization that the task in front of me wasn't about getting my printable children's books online. It was about attracting the kind of visitors who might be interested in my books.

(And, if some of them weren't interested, finding other ways to "monetize" them.)

So, since my printable children's books had a behavioral bent, I sent about building a website with a similar approach.

Want to hear something funny? It was a couple of years before I ever got around to making my books available. I was too busy writing content for the website that was making me thousands of dollars and attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year without even selling my books.

Why? Well, that's kind of embarrassing. You see, I got so caught up in writing my site that I forgot about my books.

But they're there now. I call them my Children's Behavior Books, printable children's books that children illustrate. Each book features a character struggling with a problem behavior - the same behavior that the parent who purchases is hoping to correct in their own child.

I price them at $3 because anything more feels like highway robbery. After all, they're just a bunch of unillustrated electrons. I use PayPal to process my transactions - saves me the trouble and expense of a shopping cart - and I net about $2.60 on each sale.

When I got started, like so many author/self publishers, I thought my books were my only product. But it turns out that my writing is my product, and all the traffic it attracts. My little books - the reason I started this whole internet business in the first place, might comprise 3% of my revenues. Meanwhile I sell thousands of dollars worth of other people's books every month, collecting a sizeable commission. And I lease screen space out to Google Adwords for advertising and share with them in the revenue. I even review books for pay and contract out my critical talents to aspiring authors looking for professional feedback.

Maybe it's the law of unintended consequences. I still love my little printable children's books; I love knowing that children around the world are reading them and drawing in them, and I love knowing that parents believe in them. But I also love that I stumbled into a business that will be providing me income for the rest of my life...even when I stop working on it.

When you start dealing in e-books, you start dealing in the e-world. You discover that traffic is traffic. It's hard to come by, and getting it requires some real work. Throwing up a shingle that says, "Printable Children's Books for Sale," doesn't work. You have to instead create an information resource that the search engines will value and send people to...THEN you can tell those people about your books.