As a freelance illustrator is not uncommon to be asked to illustrate a book or some other material that’s intended for children. When looking around at illustrators portfolios you often notice many that refer to themselves simply as a ‘childrens illustrator’ as if to imply that is all the work they do. Indeed some artists will work solely on childrens material, it’s important however not to lose sight of what being a commercial illustrator is all about. For most illustrators, children’s or otherwise a commission is a commission and not to be sniffed at.
Back on the subject of childrens book illustration. There are thousands upon thousands of childrens books out there, some so hugely successful that ever man woman and child in the western world have heard of them, others so marginal it’s a wonder they ever got published. It’s always important to realise that what you are trying to create has to appeal to someone on a totally different wave length to those involved in the production of the product. While illustrators, writers and publishers know what they want in terms of creative and commercial means, they are by their very nature grown ups, not children. Therefore they need to make sure they dont lose sight of their target audience.
Many publishers of childrens books will organise focus groups and informal sessions with groups of children to try and get as much feedback as possible. Indeed it’s not uncommon for a publisher to show children a range of artworks and ask them to choose their favourite. The artist that gets picked the most times will often get the comission, or at least be asked to quote on it.
While we can often get deeply involved in the commercial side of publishing it’s important to stay focused. Thankfully most illustrators can remove themselves from the heady business of publishing, costsings and printers and concentrate soley on the artwork at hand. There is still a child lurking deep within many of us, for many of the most successful childrens book illustrators this inner child becomes their art, it’s when this happens that the artwork will do it’s job perfectly, appeal to those it’s intended for.
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That is, optimise your website for which of the five? Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask or AOL? Obviously Google has the greater share of search traffic - but the rest combined are more than equal. The problems are: Google is the golden shot, but it’s also the hardest to impress. If it were just a matter of Google or the rest, then ‘the rest’ would be the choice. But each of them are Google wannabees and have different criteria to rank highly. What’s the pecking order and what do they each like? It’s Google followed by Yahoo, MSN (don’t know why - they have bizzarre results), Ask and AOL. Going for gold,.. sorry,… Google…, also has good results with Yahoo - both value external links and good internal structure, wheras MSN, Ask and AOL value factors which it has to be said are sub-optimal - the domain name is a significant factor which favours early domain name speculators and companies with mucho vonga to buy them. It has to be Google. They ‘get it’ and the others don’t. They’re not just ahead - they’re way ahead - so far in the distance that the others just won’t reach them easily - and not in the forseaable future.
Sound weird huh? What? If I make site (particularly front page) changes - will my website search engine optimisation be positively affected? In SEO, I was never of that persuasion - indeed I always felt that it was unfair that old sites with an early start appeared to have an unfair advantage when people unwittingly linked to them after a trivial request and Google unwittingly compounding the advantage by favouring aged links. If it’s true that changes please God - sorry, I mean Google, then it would be an accurate means of ranking among the thousands (some say tens of thousands) of factors.
One of our clients are chess sets retailers. Having ranked at #1 for ‘chess sets’, ‘chess set’ and a good number of other related phrases (largely through our use of RSS as an SEO tool), ranking at #1 for ‘chess computers‘ became even more important than for ‘chess sets’ since it is a market where people will largely seize the first result they have for a chess computer that fits their requirement. Lower priced units will have sales through some subsequent searches, but our client didn’t want to compete on price - needing healthy margins, and so would realise few sales if they were both lower than the first result and higher priced. The genre is fiercely competitive. Making regular site changes appeared to be the factor that meant #1 or #2 and lower. Every time the Google bot visited - if it saw changes the site was returned to #1, if not it was relegated or retained at #2 or #3. Any ideas?