Hi Im new here!
I have drawn a childrens book in a sketchbook and want to computerise and publish it but i have no idea where to start! Im new to tablets as well and want my sketches to be my own work rather than an other illustrator can anyone help? 
Hello @Harmony and welcome to the forum 
Iāve edited the title of your topic to make the subject more clear.
There are people on the forum who have created and published childrenās book and Iām sure theyāll come along to give you advice in the near future.
A quick search for āchildrenā shows these topics that you may want to read:
Search results for 'children' - Krita Artists
My suggestion would be to scan your sketchbook, one illustration at a time with a .png output selected at a high resolution of at least 300 dpi.
Then open each one separately in krita and redo any lineart that needs to be cleaned and/or made better.
Then you can do colouring of the lineart.
I know nothing of the layout or publishing side of things but other people here will be able to advise you about that.
Theyāll also be able to give you advice on methods and techniques. probably better advice than Iāve given you so far.
It would be useful if you can scan a couple of your sketchbook pages and upload them here. (Max filesize is 3MB for uploads.)
Or, you could take good quality photographs of the pages and upload the photographs.
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Hello @Harmony and welcome to the forum!
This is not necessarily my specialty, but if I wanted to transfer existing images into the digital world, I would either stick the individual sheets onto my graphics tablet and then trace them, i.e. trace the contours of an object with a pen, in order to transfer them onto a canvas in Krita, which can then be edited later in order to color this framework or, in the case of black and white images, to shade it.
Another way to get an image into the PC would be to scan the image with a flatbed scanner in order to load it into Krita and then finish it there. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, also depending on the type of further processing, but I would start with that.
I think that you will receive further and better qualified contributions from other users on how you should proceed here.
Since Krita is a very extensive program with a steep learning curve at the beginning, you will most likely have questions about Krita that we will be happy to answer. But I assure you, the initial effort to get to know Krita is worth it. You may curse at first, but you will learn to love Krita if you use it regularly.
Therefore, if you have any difficulties with Krita, do not understand a function or the like, please open a new topic for each question that deals with a singular problem. This will help us to help you in a more targeted way than in a topic where you have seven questions on five different topics, as the helpers would then have to answer the questions asked in a confused manner and it would quickly lead to chaos.
I would also like to refer you to Kritaās detailed and usually easy-to-understand manual. You can call it up from within Krita by pressing F1, or you can open your browser with this URL:
https://docs.krita.org/en/index.html
And as usual, @AhabGreybeard 
was a little faster than me, nonetheless Iām posting my text, maybe you will find something useful in it.
Michelist
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Hi Harmony,
You be surprised how easy it really is to do. I published my cartoons in a book that is now on Amazon.
Before diving too far into your book, I would take some time to select a book format that you are comfortable using. Research what book sizes publishers like to print first. Your cartoons and illustrations need to fit an acceptable size.
After finding a suitable book size, then I would render my drawings accordingly. Will they be in boxes or freely adjusted to non specific floating images? Mine were in strips and had to be four strips per page and so the layout had to fit each page.
After selecting my format, I then used Scribus to layout my pages in a book format. Each cartoon flowed into frames until all my cartoons were inserted. After that, I created a final pdf file and ran it through Amazonās pdf check (preproofing) system until all the errors (if any) were corrected. Once I passed all the checks, I had a book printed to āproofā the final layout. After my final approval, I gave Amazon the okay to publish the book. The rest is history as I collect royalties from book sales.
I also designed the front and back cover using Krita.
All my drawings are larger than the book so I can scale them down to maintain print quality. I recommend 300 dpi as most print publishers use that for print.
Hope that helps.
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First I would say, choose your publisher. They may have their own slightly different sizes on what they print. Iāve published 3 books so far with KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) which was straightforward. I used Krita for the entire thing apart from the very end where I used Adobe Acrobat to convert the finished files to one PDF document ready for upload.
For the process of transferring your sketches to digital, the simplest way may be to scan your drawings, or take a photo of them and import, and then trace over them in Krita and add colours, background, text etc.
Have you ever used Krita before or are you new to the programme?
I canāt comment on the process for any other publisher, but this is how I created my books for KDP:
- For childrenās picture books, a popular size is 8.5 x 8.5 inches.
- Create your canvas the same size as the page upload requirement. For this it will be the page size plus some additional for ābleedā. KDP have full size guidelines on their website but if you get stuck let me know as I have saved Krita templates for 8.5 x 8.5 single page, double page spread and front cover with margins already set for the bleed and āsafe spaceā.
- Keep all important aspects of the page such as main characters and text within the safe space margins.
- Export each finished page as a single page, not a double page spread.
- When you have every page exported, convert all pages (in the order they are to appear in the book, including any blank pages) into one single PDF document. This is the document that you will upload for your book contents.
- The front cover is a separate document which is a full front and back spread. KDP have templates for these you can download.
- You can publish with KDP for completely free which is nice and they will provide you with a free ISBN number if you wish.
I appreciate that was a whole lotta data dump. But if you have any specific questions, just let us know. 
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Hi. Thank you so much for your message! All this advice is amazing! I am new to krita and have yet to use it. At the moment ai am in the process of tracing all my work onto another sketchpad as I had already coloured the pages in.
I would love to know more about KDP and the saved files you have about page sizes and safe margins. I would be really grateful.
Just starting out as its my first book too! I also have some other sketches i want to try and make into digital art/ prints and cards. Do you have any tips for using krita? I tried adobe photoshop and it was way to complicated!
Thank you for all this information! It really helps! I hadnt thought about page sizes and interested to know about scribus. Its going to be a bit of trial and error but will get there! Still got to design my front page and back page.
Krita may also seem complicated to you because it has many tools and facilities.
Itās why itās so powerful. You donāt need to use all the tools and facilities if you donāt want to
Iād suggest basic lineart drawing/erasing by using a small number of different brush presets, making layers and simple Fill colouring as a starter point.
As well as that, youāll need to learn about creating a document, saving it as a .kra file, exporting it as a .png file, changing its size if needed, and stuff.
Those items should all be dealt with by separate Support and Advice topics as you need to learn things.
I say, dive into it and try all the tools, brushes, pens, etc. Do some doodling and practice as much as possible. I run Krita on a tablet and take it everywhere I go in case I want to try different things. Plenty of folks here can help you with your questions. Krita is complicated too and very powerful tool set. My biggest hurdle when starting out with it was ādeselectingā after making an edit. Things seem to stop working until you ādeselectā. LOL, you will find out. 
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I have created a new topic in the Resources folder with the .kra files for size 8.5 x 8.5 inches which you should be able to download from Google Drive. The thread is here.
Itās quite a large programme, but once you get the hang of it, itās simple enough. I would say use the layers to your advantage; have one for the line art, one underneath for the colours, different layers for different objects so you can move them around without having to re-draw the whole thing. Youāll get the hang of it when you have a play about.
Oh, and perhaps, download some external fonts to get some better suited for childrenās books. I like this website for free fonts. Be sure to chose from the green ticket ones for free commercial use.
Edit: When you create a new file, ALWAYS āsave asā as the .kra file. If you save it as a jpg or png, then when you open it again youāll most likely find itās gone all flat and your layers have merged. Always use the .kra files for editing and when youāre finished and ready to save the completed picture, go to File - Export and export as JPG or PNG etc. Always leave your original .KRA file as you may want to go back and change something.
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Thanks! Yes ive been figuring out the deselect today! I was also finding it wasnt selecting the bits i wanted to colour it would click on a nearby part i had already coloured, thinking it might be layer thing as i fully worked out the layer thing yet so most of it is on about 3 layers. Ive been enjoying olaying around with it today though!
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Thanks for this post!
Since you didnāt post any images, itās hard to get a clear idea of how to explain it to youā¦
I can tell you what I did when I didnāt have a graphics tablet: I used scratch paper, the very cheap kind, to make sketches. I tried to keep the pencil lines smooth, so I could easily erase and make corrections.
Then, Iād clean them up on a sheet of bond paper. If you want, you can skip this step and trace the final outlines of your drawing with a black pen on the paper you sketched on. Then, just scan it and finish the work in Krita, cleaning it up and coloring it.
I did this over twenty years ago and used a primitive Photoshop.
Hereās an example from an old tutorial of mine. Krita has similar, and even better, tools than the ones I used back then.