Before I start finished artwork, I need to understand the story, the characters, the intended audience and how the book is going to work as a whole.
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For a picture book, I normally start by working out the visual story. Where should the characters be? What should the reader see on each page? Where are the important moments? What should be revealed when the reader turns the page? These are initially thumbnails. Low resolution and sparsely detailed. We don't want to get into detail at this stage. We're playing with shapes. Where to fill the space and where to leave white space. White space or nothing as we used to call it can play an important role in a picture book. That space equates to a pause. It helps slow the reader before a reveal or gives time to digest what just happened.
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Character design is another important part of the process. A character might look wonderful in one illustration but become difficult to draw consistently if their design hasn't been properly thought through. And you only have to look at an AI illustrated book to see what happens when your character looks like a different person on every page. I'm getting that in now before AI learns how to do this properly :/
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Then there's the actual artwork. Compiling all we learned in our development sketches. Our back and forths with the author and adding in the finesse. Then there's the book design. You've identified your target audience, now you've got to make it feel like a book for them. Typography. Are you going traditional fonts, fun design fonts or handwritten text? The cover!! This is the face of your book. If it's no good, no one's gonna pick it up. After all that's done we have preparation of the finished files for printing. There are many hoops to jump through to ensure what you send to print delivers what you expected to see, or hopefully, more than you hoped to see.
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That's why I think it's important to look at an illustrator as part of the process of making the book, rather than simply someone you send a list of pictures to.