Turn your illustrations into a picture book you can print and sell

We built Inkfluence AI to take a book from an idea or a manuscript to print-ready files, and for picture books it also paints the pages if you want it to. When the art is already finished, the job is different: the book has to be built around your images without touching them. That is what "I already have my pages" does. It is our first recommendation for an author-illustrator who wants Amazon-ready files without learning a layout program, and here is exactly what comes out of it.

KDP sets the page range by ink and size. For colour picture books the number that matters is the ink: Premium Color starts at 24 pages; Standard Color starts at 72. A 10-spread story is far short of 72, so short picture books print on Premium Color. Black ink starts at 24 too, if your book is line art. The count must be even.

Inkfluence counts the pages the way the printed book has them: a title page (you can switch it off), a copyright page, then one page per picture. If that is under 24, the KDP export adds blank pages, as many as Amazon allows: up to 4 before the first picture and up to 10 at the back. Amazon refuses more than 4 consecutive blank pages at the start or in the middle and more than 10 at the end, so a very short book cannot be padded all the way. With the title page on, 8 pictures reach 24 pages; with fewer, the export window tells you how many more pages to add.

Blank endpapers are normal in picture books, and readers do not notice four plain pages at the front of a 24-page book. If you would rather fill them, add a dedication page, an "about the author" page or a final scene: each extra picture replaces a blank.

Many illustrators letter the text into the art, which keeps the typography exactly as designed. That works as it is: a page with no typed words prints as the picture alone. The only rule is the trim. Keep every word at least half an inch from the outside, top and bottom edges (Inkfluence's own advice, and inside KDP's 0.375 in minimum for bleed books), and keep it clear of the spine edge too, where the binding curves the page.

If you would rather add the words afterwards, type them on a page in the editor. Typed words print over the picture the way they do in any Inkfluence picture book, which is handy for a translation or a second edition with new text: the art stays the same and only the typed words change. A picture book's word count is usually small; our guide to children's book word counts gives the ranges by age.

For an ebook, lettered art behaves like a photograph: the reader cannot resize the words. On a phone, small lettering gets hard to read, so test the Kindle preview before publishing, and consider slightly larger lettering if most buyers will read on a phone.

Smaller files. Images smaller than these sizes still make a book. The checker above and the upload form both estimate the print resolution and only flag a picture that is likely to print soft. Size up a scan rather than an already-small file: enlarging a small image adds pixels, not detail.

Ordering. Name files page-01, page-02 and so on (or 01-cover-scene, 02-...). Files go in by name, and you can drag any page to a new place before you create the book or reorder pages in the editor afterwards.

Your first page starts as the cover picture, with the title and your name on top, so the book never begins with a placeholder. Most author-illustrators paint a dedicated cover, and you can drop that in through the cover designer instead, adjust the title type and its position, and write the back-cover blurb.

The KDP package includes a full-wrap cover: back, spine and front on one sheet with bleed, the spine width worked out from your page count and paper. A 24-page book has a thin spine, so KDP does not allow spine text below a set page count; our KDP cover size and spine calculator shows the numbers if you build the wrap yourself, and the guide to book cover design covers type and layout. Printing through IngramSpark instead? Its cover template differs; the IngramSpark cover calculator explains how.

Finishing the art is the long part, and the steps after it are short but easy to get wrong. A practical order:

The same route works for a fridge door's worth of a child's drawings. Photograph each drawing in daylight, crop it, put them in order with a title like "The Dragon Book by Mia, age 6", and make a square book. Ten drawings make a 24-page KDP book with blanks at the back; a dedication page and a short "about the artist" page fill it nicely. Order one proof or a few author copies, or print the PDF at a copy shop. For gift books written and painted for a child instead, see the personalised children's book maker, books for grandparents and Christmas books for kids. Teachers turning a class's drawings into a book will find more on the teachers page.

The switch has two sides. "Write and illustrate it for me" writes the story and paints every page from one character sheet so the cast looks the same throughout; see the AI picture book maker, the children's book illustrator, how we compare in the best AI children's book creators, and the walkthrough how to make a picture book with AI. You can also mix: make the book from your finished pages, then add pages later in the editor with your own images. Alphabet books have their own maker: the ABC book maker, and line-art books the colouring book generator.