A decent start up with a lot of room for professional growth.
I hired Split Arts to illustrate my children’s book after finding them on Facebook. I’m giving them four stars because the final product looks good and I do think they’re capable of strong work. But the road to get there was much harder and more draining than it needed to be.
Communication started out organized and reassuring, but once more people joined the project, things slipped fast. Notes got lost, deadlines moved, and even basic fundamentals turned into avoidable problems. Page bleed wasn’t accounted for. My spreads weren’t aligned correctly. Characters kept getting placed right in the center fold where the book bends, and I had to flag it repeatedly. These aren’t niche, high-level design quirks. They’re entry-level book layout basics, the exact things you hire a company to oversee so you don’t have to think about them.
I ended up having to know enough about layout and printing myself to keep the project on track. Honestly, they’re lucky I understood the process, because a brand-new author wouldn’t have known to look for any of this. These were the headaches I hired a company to prevent, and instead, they created more of them. And here’s the part that really floored me: we’d only completed a few illustrations when I caught the mistakes, and the first response I got was that they “couldn’t” make adjustments because I had already approved the images. I had to put my foot down hard and ask for a supervisor. Magically, the thing they couldn’t fix became something they were able to drag-and-drop in minutes. That moment told me everything about where the real problems were coming from.
On top of that, I dealt with pushback about honoring the price I was originally quoted, and a project manager who argued more than he collaborated. I was told more than once that I needed to be more “practical,” even though everything I asked for was within the scope of what we’d already discussed. A perfect example is the final page of the book. I envisioned the main character surrounded by thought bubbles, each showing a small moment of something he accomplished. Instead of creating new illustrations, the project manager said it was too much work and planned to recycle pieces from other pages. When I disagreed, he raised his voice and talked to me like I was a child.
The inconsistencies didn’t help. Some pages looked like they were done by different artists with different styles. A lot of the revisions came from mistakes on their end, not wild requests from me. I eventually started sketching my own rough drafts just so they could re-work what I needed more accurately and stop derailing the timeline.
At one point, after a long stretch of delays and misunderstandings, I told them I didn’t want to continue because I felt unheard. The tone of the reply I got was strangely passive aggressive, making a comment about how interesting it was that I was “giving up” on a book called "Keep Trying!" Not exactly the energy you want while creating something meant to inspire kids. Passive aggressive and unprofessional.
To the owner’s credit, once I finally reached my breaking point, he stepped in and worked with me directly (a very nice guy by the way). Things moved smoother after that, and we got the project wrapped up. But by then, the excitement I should’ve felt was replaced by exhaustion. I haven’t even promoted the book yet because of how heavy the process felt.
They also push a lot of add-ons. Split Arts offers animation, advertising, printing, and more, but the pricing is noticeably marked up. I don’t mind companies offering extras, but I didn’t appreciate the aggressive upselling, especially the push for a digital billboard campaign. I said that was a vanity expense I couldn't afford to which I was instilled with fear tactics about how my book wouldn’t succeed without it. Meanwhile, I sold a huge chunk of my inventory just by showing up to a local book fair I found on my own.
Here’s the bottom line: Split Arts can deliver a finished book that looks good. But the journey there is not as seamless as they market it to be, and if you’re a first-time author, some of the things I had to catch would’ve completely blindsided you. They have potential, but they need stronger internal organization, clearer communication, and a real understanding that authors hire them to simplify the process, not to become the source of the stress.
No matter what you do, get EVERYTHING agreed on in advance, including timelines, and get it in writing.
