I found another section of Amanda Hall's website where she discusses how she started out as an illustrator and how she gets here work seen by publishers. She describes how she got here start as quite haphazard. She describes her work being seen by someone who worked at a book shop who put her in touch with a publisher and that acted as a catalyst for her illustration career. I have seen stories like this from a number of illustrators but one thing they all seem to have in common is they keep producing work and keep getting involved with projects to get their work seen by as many people as possible. She talks about the pro's and cons of displaying work online, saying she used to spend a lot of time walking round London to show her work to publishers picking up jobs here and there. Now publishers can view your work through a website so you can get in touch with publishers all over the globe and complete projects without having to change location, the downside is that publishers have become less accessible possibly due to being inundated with work from a huge number of illustrators worldwide that can now contact them easily. She talks about having your own website being a useful tool to showcase your work but also using sites such as childrensillustrators.com as they have large a pre existing audience. The downsides are that it costs to show work on the site and you will be showing your work alongside a large number of other artists. You would have to weigh up whether the outlay was worth it based on the jobs it helped you to get. I could see this being a bit of a leap as you could not know how much it would benefit you before spending the money, it would be good to talk to illustrators that use sites like these and see what their opinion of them was. It would be a good way to build confidence if it worked out, knowing your work was being chosen when showcased with other practitioners but could be quite daunting.
She mentions a book called Children’s Writer’s and Illustrator’s Market that is released every year. The book contains lots of advice on how to set up as a children's book illustrator and talks through how contracts work as well. The law is different in the UK to the US but this could still be a very useful book to look at. She says that a good way to find out information about the industry is to try and find any groups of illustrators in your local area. Hopefully these groups would have illustrators that are at different stages in there career and whose practice varies so you could find out about a large range of aspect of illustration all in one place from people who have more experience than you and have no reason to push you in any specific direction.
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