Making A Living as an Illustrator: Balancing Career, Values, Income, & Play with Susie Ghahremani

Susie Ghahremani is an award-winning artist whose work is licensed, exhibited and sold internationally under the brand boygirlparty. She's also a RISD alum whose children's books include STACK THE CATS, SHE WANTED TO BE HAUNTED, as well as many others. 

In Susie's session she shared examples of the many streams of income she's set up and how they do or do not fulfill her personally, professionally, financially and creatively. This was such a helpful way to think about prioritizing and assessing one's own potential income streams. Susie shared a ton of great, personal career information while walking us through how and what she works on. 

Besides making children's books Susie also makes her own products, takes part in art shows, does editorial illustration, takes commissions, runs an Etsy shop, licenses her art, teaches, and on top of all that makes things just for the fun of it! Susie has a Patreon where she's graciously set up a blog post answering all the Q&A audience questions from her SCBWI conference session. (I've already asked (demanded) she consider hosting a class series expanding on this session, so whenever that happens I will update this post with that link here 😗). 

Susie's books

A sample of Susie's latest products

Susie broke down how each income stream positively or negatively impacted her career, values, income, or opportunity for play and creativity giving attendees an excellent framework to use for themselves. 

Here Susie shows how personal work and public events align for her:

Susie gives some tips on working on your own products vs. working with a team/publisher/collaborators. There are a lot of risks with making your own products and work, but it's also full of really big joys and unexpected wins. Making books with a publisher lets them take on more upfront risk and can also be full of big joys and unexpected wins, but most books do eventually go out of print and that's sadly not in your control.

Self care for long-term career and physical longevity (Ott lights!), taxes, and so many great tips in general are touched on!! Susie has had to battle copyright infringement (she was interviewed on NPR!) and does an amazing job in the session of helping attendees understand how to protect their work and themselves (this could be a standalone class all on its own).

Susie touched on overwhelm with juggling so many different income streams. She has found a balance that energizes her, but doesn't expect anyone else to follow that. She recommends knowing yourself and accepting where you are at—everyone has different physical, emotional, and mental capacities to consider when figuring out life and career goals.

Susie’s next release will be the picture book MEMORY GARDEN written by Zohreh Ghahremani (her mom!), publishing in 2024 with Godwin Books / Macmillan. 

Thank You, and Save The Dates For The Virtual New York Themed Mid-Winter Conference February 21-22, 2021

On behalf of myself, Jaime Temairik, Jolie Stekly, Don Tate, Leah Henderson, Mike Jung, Susie Ghahremani, Gaby Rodriguez, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, and Winsome Bingham,

Thank you for joining us for this #SCBWISummerSpec journey!

Remember that the full recordings of the panels and keynote conversations (as well as the portfolio showcase and the conference bookstore!) will be available to everyone registered for the conference for the entire month of August.

And save the dates:

Virtual New York SCBWI Winter Conference
February 21-22, 2021

SCBWI's annual winter extravaganza will take place online in 2021. Faculty, program, and a full schedule will be available in late October 2020.

This beautiful image, and the creation animation above, are by Susie Ghahremani

Thank You! (And Save The Dates For #NY18SCBWI and #LA18SCBWI

Thank you for following along for #LA17SCBWI with us!

Team Blog #LA17SCBWI: from left, Sona Charaipotra, Jaime Temairik, Lee Wind, Jolie Stekly, and Susie Ghahremani.

And here are the dates for the 19th Annual Winter Conference in New York City: February 2-4, 2018.

With full-day intensives for both writers and illustrators
Juried Portfolio Showcase with grand prize
Network with top editors, agents, and publishers
Be in the center of the children's publishing industry
Workshops, Keynotes, networking, and much more!

Online conference registration will be posted in October at scbwi.org

And for the 47th Annual Summer Conference in Los Angeles: August 3-6, 2018.

With over 75 workshops and 15 keynote speakers
Monday post-conference intensives
Special hands-on workshops for illustrators, Craft intensives for published, self-published, and pre-published authors
Individual manuscript or portfolio critiques
Juried portfolio showcase with grand prize and mentorship opportunities

Online conference registration will be posted in March 2018 at scbwi.org

Using an Outline as a Safety Net: Michael Stearns, Upstart Crow Literary

Michael Stearns is the founder of Upstart Crow Literary, an agency specializing in children's literature. A former editorial director for HarperCollins, he has edited hundreds of best-selling, award-winning novels and picture books for children, including A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly; Gone and Hunger by Michael Grant; Whales on Stilts! By M.T. Anderson; the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane; the Chet Gecko mysteries by Bruce Hale; and a whole slew of books by Bruce Coville, Jane Yolen, and others. He also runs a book packager called the Inkhouse, where he co-created the #1 best-selling series Fallen, the international best-selling Bliss bakery trilogy, as well as a dozen other titles. Under the pen name Carter Roy, he is the author of the award-winning middle grade fantasy adventure trilogy the Blood Guard. www.upstartcrowliterary.com

Are you a "pantser" or an Outliner?

Michael Stearns says authors tend to identify as one or the other -- writing by the seat-of-his-pants, or the kind of writer who doesn't write a word until the entire story is mapped and structured. He equates creating an outline to building a house, but not decorating it or filling it with your stuff. He argues that an outline can allow you to solve problems before you begin. Paraphrasing his words: "You *will* wrestle with story problems, and it's easier to look at those when you have it structured over a couple pages rather than at the scale of a full book."

I think this logic applies to both picture books and longer form writing: planning what you're trying to accomplish for the reader can make it easier to decide *how* you're going to accomplish it.

Michael suggested -- after you have your characters, premise, and snippets of dialogue and personality -- try breaking your book into chapters, and plot the arc, dilemmas, and character growth of your book starting at the end with your tidy conclusion.

He suggested drafting on a whiteboard so chapters and moments can be moved around to be cohesive and fluid, and demonstrated this by taping a possible way to play with your outline on the wall!

I took a lot of notes. (see below)

I was thinking, even if you're not an author, this kind of panel -- although not specifically annotated for illustrators -- could also be used to map an evolution of the mood of your images as the book progresses.

So, are you a pantser? I might not be in the future!

Michael's a "former editor and editorial director, agency head, book packager, writer of novels for middle grade and Other Things" -- His approach seems useful across industry to look at our storytelling from a different angle.

Agent Jennifer Laughran's Portfolio Showcase Tips

SCBWI Team Blog #LA17SCBWI member Susie Ghahremani interviews Jennifer Laughran and gets the scoop on how an agent looks at portfolios in the show -- there's lots of great advice in there (like including a page turn, and remembering that illustration isn't just needed for picture books!)

Check out the full interview here.

Meet illustrator Susie Ghahremani, SCBWI Guest Team Blogger for The Summer #LA17SCBWI Conference

It's super to have Susie on the team for this 2017 SCBWI Summer Conference!

Check out our interview here.