Behind the Books

 "Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." — Emilie Buchwald One of my favourite memories from elementary school is sitting on the carpet during story time and looking up at the book while the teacher read aloud. Long before I could read many of the words myself, I loved studying the illustrations on the cover, searching for details, and wondering what clues they might hold about the story inside. I'm sure that's  one reason I enjoy designing book covers today. A cover is often a reader's first introduction to a book. Before the first page is turned, before the story begins, the cover gives readers a glimpse into the world waiting inside. Over the different series I've worked on, these different books call for different approaches which was a bit of a surprise as I thought I would only do full wraparound covers for all my kids books. For my first book,  Bye-Bye, Boobies , I chose a wraparound cover. Rather than treating the front and back as se...

"There are many little ways to enlarge your world. Love of books is the best of all." — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Just over a year ago, I started this blog and incredible journey of creating books. I've had so much support from around the world and that means everything. My family and friends have been there every step of the way and I appreciate each and every one of you. Behind the Books Begins People sometimes ask why I share so many books that aren't from my own press. It's a good question and t he answer is simple. I love books. They have always been my happy place and children's books have a special place in my heart.  Long before I started writing and illustrating my own stories, I was reading picture books with my family, collecting favourites, and paying attention to the stories that stayed with me long after I turned the last page.   So that's why you'll find more than just my books being talked about in my posts, on our website and in our s...

"Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence."  — George Steiner The Original Bye-Bye, Boobies Poem When I first wrote Bye-Bye, Boobies , I wrote it as a rhyming picture book as that is how it flowed onto the page for me and how I thought about it as I was walking the dog.  It reminded me of how much those types of book almost felt like a song when I read them out loud and how the toddlers I'd read to would join in. So for me, the rhythm and repetition felt like a natural fit for a story about weaning. It's safe to say that young children often enjoy hearing the same words and phrases again and again, and rhyme can make a story fun to read aloud which was my goal. The Adapted Version of Bye-Bye, Boobies As I continued working on the book, however, I began thinking about readers who might prefer a different format and even some of the people who read the book mentioned that they have so many rhyming books at home. Not everyone enjoys rhymi...

“When the artist removes the text, they invite readers to decode the pictures for themselves.” — David Wiesner The term “picture book” gets used often, but it has a more specific meaning in children’s publishing than people sometimes expect.  At its core, a picture book tells a story through both images and text. The illustrations are not simply there to decorate the page, they carry part of the story themselves, adding information, emotion, and context that the words alone do not always explain. Shared Reading Time Picture books are also designed to be read aloud. The pacing, sentence structure, and overall flow are shaped by how the story sounds when spoken. This shared reading experience is a big part of what makes picture books feel engaging for both the child and the adult reading with them. These are often the books that are read during circle time at school or at the libraries. Length of Picture Books They are typically short and focused, often meant to be read in one sittin...

  The Camel’s Nose is now available in hardcover and softcover! The Camel's Nose Book page . This classic picture book fable for children ages 4–8 is Book Two in the Monarch Tales collection, a growing series of traditional and original stories adapted for modern family and classroom reading. In The Camel’s Nose, a traveler settles into his tent for the night when a camel asks for a small kindness: just his nose inside to escape the cold. What follows is the steady unfolding of one of the most enduring cautionary tales in traditional storytelling. The simple premise makes it accessible for young readers, while the layered structure makes it ideal for read-aloud discussions at home and in early elementary classrooms. When I was researching this book, I found that while often attributed to Aesop, The Camel’s Nose is not one of Aesop’s original fables. Still, the story has appeared in classic fable collections for generations and remains widely referenced in literature and educa...

How It Started I started with one simple goal. Publish a weaning book for toddlers and their families. See It was a board book... until it wasn't  for details.   Then people started asking questions about what I was doing, and somehow that launched an entirely different project. With Lauren’s help, Shelved came into the world. After that, things escalated in the best possible way.  What was meant to be one book somehow turned into an astonishing shelf of them. Books Published This Year Here is everything that made it into the real world from our fantastic team. Shelved A practical reference guide for authors who want to understand libraries, metadata, PLR, and how books end up on actual shelves. Co-authored with Lauren Hoste. This book was accepted into the Indie Author Project, which was one of the biggest surprises of the year and we are both honoured to be included in that curated collection. Bye Bye, Boobies - the original poem version Released in multip...

  Buy The Fox and The Crow on Amazon.com The Fox and the Crow has been one of my favourite stories to bring to life and we had fun making some of the parts of the images from oven-baked clay at home, including the logo! See our post  Introducing the Monarch Tales to see that process. Of course, I'm also using Krita to help make the illustrations for these books just as I did for my Bye-Bye, Boobies book and I shared in this post .  We all know the tale, the fox wants the cheese but how can you get it from the crow high up in the maple tree? Inspired by Aesop’s classic fable, it’s my Canadian retelling and part of the  Monarch Tales collection. The hardcover edition has been out a couple of weeks and has been joined by a new more affordable softcover version, perfect for families and classrooms. Teachers and homeschool parents can also find a free Educational Guide for this title, filled with discussion prompts, a seek-and-find activity. It’s been wonderful to s...

"If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.”  - Wendy Mass This week I am so excited to be sharing the logo for Monarch Tales . I made it as a small clay piece, a red maple leaf with a monarch butterfly on the edge using FIMA oven-baked clay from a design that I made in Krita. I ran out of plain red clay and ended up with some glitter if you look really close you can see it sparkle. The photo includes a Canadian toonie to show the actual size once it was finished. I then photographed the clay and brought it into Krita to clean it up a bit so I could use in print and online. I debated "fixing" the letters but decided that I couldn't do that and so they stay just as they are in the books. For these stories, some elements stay exactly as sculpted by myself or my helpers at home out of the clay. Others are drawn or refined digitally so the final art is clean and ready for publishing. That mix lets me keep the handmade texture while shaping th...

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams Somewhere between the spreadsheets, stanzas, and storyboards... I lost count. When you're self-publishing a picture book, every page matters. Literally. I had carefully mapped out all 32 pages of Bye-Bye, Boobies , laid out each stanza, sketched each scene… and then realized I'd gone over. Not by a little. By a full two-page spread! Of course, it had to be  one of my favourite moments in the book. Soft, quiet, and full of feeling. And I had to cut it. Why? Because I forgot to count my copyright page in my original 32 pages. I hadn't even thought about it until I started the last bit of colouring that I needed to do before ordering proofs.  I even tried a workaround before I removed those pages, I added the copyright block onto my title page but that looked terrible and cramped and I had to reduce the font to such a tiny amount to get all the info in there.   Why t...

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen If you’re a Canadian author preparing to self-publish, you’ll quickly realise that some parts of the process look very different from what you’ll see in the US or UK. One of the biggest perks? ISBNs are free. In Canada, ISBNs are issued by Library and Archives Canada . You apply through their website, and once approved, you can request ISBNs as needed no bundles, no barcode upsells, and no cost. That’s very different from the US (where ISBNs must be purchased through Bowker) or the UK (through Nielsen). When researching how to publish, most of what comes up for me, especially in Google searches or YouTube videos, turned out to be very US-focused. You’ll see a lot of talk about “free” ISBNs from platforms like Amazon or Draft2Digital. But those ISBNs are platform-assigned which means: You don’t own them You can’t reuse them across platforms And often, the platform’s name is listed as the publishe...

  Thank you for being a friend. — Andrew Gold, 1978 (made famous by The Golden Girls ) What I had to start I’m so glad she did. This little sleeping pup appears on multiple pages in my book and I almost uploaded the final files with the original version. I thought he looked fine. Cute, even. But then Natasha, a talented artist and my friend, gently pointed out that the dog looked a bit plastic . Her gorgeous pen & ink image is on my parent page of my book and you can read about that and see for yourself on my other thank you post to her,  here . At first, I winced. Then I looked closer. She was right. I had drawn and coloured her with care but without much experience in digital tools like Krita, I had missed the subtleties that make illustrations feel soft, textured, and alive. I’ve never studied art formally, and Krita has a steep learning curve when you’re diving in with a full children’s book to finish. So I’m learning on the job constantly. Thanks to her feedba...

  "What is essential is invisible to the eye." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince   If you look closely at our updated logo, you’ll see something familiar and something just a little different. The bunny still sits in the center, gently reaching for a falling maple leaf. The softness is still there. So is the quiet, thoughtful feeling that shaped our very first stories. But the words around the circle have changed slightly. What was once Little Goodbyes is now Little Goodbyes Press  one small shift that marks a bigger step forward. We’ve also changed the text to EB Garamond , a classic book typeface that feels right at home in children’s publishing. It’s simple, timeless, and widely accessible and is the perfect match for the kind of imprint we’re becoming. Adding “Press” may seem like a technical change (and it is, in part. It looks just right on a letterhead or the spine of a book). But it’s also a signal that this imprint isn’t just an idea anymore. It’...

"The world is but a canvas to our imagination." — Henry David Thoreau I can't believe it,  I’ve spent more than a week colouring and feel like I'm barely progressing.  To be fair, it hasn’t been just one page. I started with the child, layering section by section, and began colouring parts of the mother. Then I coloured the whole title page. Not because it was next, but because I needed something to feel finished. That helped me see the palette more clearly and gave me a sense of progress, even while the rest is still in motion. A big part of the process is switching the linework on and off. I draw everything in layers inside of Krita, and I regularly toggle the outlines to see how the colours hold up on their own. With the lines visible, the drawing feels sharper and more defined. With them off, it becomes softer and more painterly. I use both views to figure out if a colour feels too harsh or if something needs to be adjusted. Here are two views of the same page, on...

  “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”  – Arthur Ashe A screenshot of a digital illustration in progress using Krita.  Somewhere between the early sketches and the endless file exports, I realised I’m actually making a real picture book! It’s not finished yet, but I’m far enough in to pause, look around, and take a breath. Here’s what I’ve learned so far: It takes longer than you think Even with a clear vision of what I wanted to see on each spread and (mostly) finished text, the illustration process is slow. Slower still when you’re doing it yourself, by hand, and balancing everything else at home and work. I thought I’d be colouring pages weeks ago. Instead, I spent those weeks getting feedback, refining poses, redrawing bunnies, and adjusting blankets so they looked right across a page fold. Each step adds time and and that’s okay, just a bit surprising. You don’t have to follow the crowd When I made the decision to go from a board book to a pictu...

    “Sometimes the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.” — A. A. Milne When I first imagined Bye-Bye, Boobies , I thought it would be a board book. One of those short, simple, and sturdy books. You know, the kind of story toddlers could turn over in their hands, maybe even chew on a little. But as I began sketching, writing, and reworking the pacing, the book quietly started asking for more space. Board books are beautiful in their simplicity. Some of my own favourites, like Goodnight Moon , which lives on our shelf beside The Runaway Bunny , say so much with so few words and pages. Still, the story I was working on didn’t quite fit that format. I wanted Bye-Bye, Boobies to capture something gradual: the soft letting go that happens when a child begins to wean from breastfeeding. Not a single “last feed” moment, but a series of quiet transitions in bedrooms, at the park, and on airplanes. At the end of writing, much to my surprise, there was too much story to c...