The goals of this formative experiment were threefold: (a) to teach the story/visual elements and characteristics of picturebooks to pre-service teachers (PSTs) from the classroom teacher education department and to help them use these elements with elementary school students, (b) to enable the PSTs to create original self-published picturebooks (SPPBs), and (c) to receive the elementary school teachers' and students' opinions about and responses to these SPPBs. In total, 299 PSTs created 191 SPPBs and received responses to these books from 165 in-service teachers and 2132 students. The results revealed that a majority of the PSTs used parallel storytelling for Grades 1-2 and interdependent storytelling for Grades 3-4. The students were fascinated by the SPPBs, and they paid special attention to the SPPBs when they heard that these books were created by the PSTs. It can be concluded that because of this formative experiment, the PSTs were transformed into authors, illustrators, and publishers of picturebooks.