Ask a small child to save the planet and you may get a puzzled look. Ask them to help a girl whose mum is poorly and you have their attention. That is the gentle trick at the centre of Gemma Yu’s Helping Earth. Earth is a little girl in a polka dot dress and an orange headband, with a pet snail riding on her palm, and her mum is Mother Earth, who is unwell. The story asks young readers to help, one job at a time.
Even the title lettering carries the argument. A digger is parked on top of the E, a car puffs smoke along the R, and teal water rises inside the letters below. A book with that message deserved paper with a clear conscience, so we printed the cover and inside pages on FSC certified silk. The questions below are the ones Gemma’s book answers for anyone planning a picture book with a cause.
Which paper suits an eco children’s book?
Paper that can show where it came from. Both stocks in Helping Earth are FSC certified, meaning the fibre comes from responsibly managed forests: 300gsm silk for the cover and 170gsm silk for the 28 inside pages. When a story asks children to look after the planet, the object in their lap shouldn’t contradict it.
Silk also partners well with Gemma’s artwork. She paints digitally in Procreate, and the brush grain survives the trip to paper: you can see texture in Earth’s hair, soft washes across the hills and ripples in a navy sea crowded with floating plastic. The smooth surface keeps colour clean and doesn’t throw back reflections the way gloss can.
Her enquiry had suggested a lighter text weight. Our quote moved the inside pages up to 170gsm, which gives each turn some substance for small fingers and builds a 3mm spine, enough for a neat, square perfect binding. Comparing paper for a picture book of your own? This guide to choosing trim, page layout and paper for young readers sets the options side by side.
Is a 210mm square right for a picture book?
Here, yes. Closed, a 210 x 210mm book is small enough for a child to carry about. Open, each double page spread becomes a wide panorama, which suits the painted landscape of Mother Earth stretched across the gutter, with its road, its river, its felled logs and its rubbish.
The square also gives Gemma room for type that behaves like illustration. A big red STOP sign takes over a page. A yellow sticky note reads “Arrange a Solution”, and PLAN is underlined in red marker. Elsewhere a sheet of lined notebook paper peels back like a curtain so Earth can talk straight to the reader. The snail keeps turning up, perched on a mound of bin bags or beside that STOP sign, so younger readers get a hide and seek running alongside the story.
Matt or gloss lamination for a white picture book cover?
Matt, in this case. Gemma’s cover is mostly white space, with one block of lettering and one character. A matt laminate keeps that calm and glare free, keeps the red brush lettering soft, and still adds a protective layer that shrugs off jammy fingers and the bottom of a school bag.
Gloss has its place on saturated, high contrast covers that need to shout from a shelf. On a gentle, painterly cover like this one, matt looks more considered, and it photographs without hot spots for online listings.
What files does a perfect bound picture book need?
Gemma’s first contact was a Helping Hand form describing the book she had in mind. She then went away to finish what she called the “bitty pages” (title page, front matter, back matter) and to buy her own ISBN. A month later she returned with a question plenty of debut authors ask. She had 12 double page spreads and a finished front cover. What did she need to send?
Harriet’s answer: two PDFs. The first holds the cover spreads, with back cover, spine and front cover side by side at 210 x 423mm including the 3mm spine, plus 3mm bleed on every edge. The second carries the inside pages one by one, in the order they’re read, so page one is the first right hand page. Our page on building a cover spread around the spine shows the same layout.
Gemma built everything in Procreate, as she had for her previous book, and sent work in progress for a free check. The inside pages came back, in our studio’s words, “absolutely spot on”. The cover needed its 3mm of bleed adding, and we offered to open InDesign and sort it if she preferred. One last catch: the front illustration was creeping round onto the back. Mike stretched the back cover artwork slightly and nudged it across so the image stopped cleanly at the spine. Gemma signed off the cover proof the same day.
Can a picture book give children a job to do?
This one tries. Alongside the story sit an Earth Warrior page and a checklist for children to fill in, and Gemma’s website stretches the idea into an Earth Warrior challenge of daily missions. Gemma is an early years teacher turned storyteller, writing for ages 3 to 8, and it shows in the pacing: problems arrive one at a time, rubbish on the land and plastic in the sea, before the story turns to a plan.
That structure is worth copying. A page that asks the reader to do something keeps the book open after the last line has been read aloud. Got a cause driving your picture book? Then ask for a children’s book quote on FSC certified paper.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100