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More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.

Making books is a very specific kind of activity. It's not really a collection of your best pictures - although it is - but it's also a way of presenting your work so that it's not repetitive, so that it flows, and so that it makes sense in a book.

Books is our main type of content, but we include user-generated content and will include other verticals such as scientific papers, sheet music, and comic books.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

As an artist, as I design and lay out a page, the less-important things, things I want you to spend less time looking at, I draw them very small, maybe even silhouette them. The more-important pivotal scenes, I draw them larger, maybe even a double-page spread.

My outlines can be 10-20 pages in length and focus primarily on the physical active plot over the emotional plot.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or seven pages on a very good day; the average is probably three pages.

I want a nice picture book with 12 pictures - I do my best with that format.