Hi ! My name’s Katrina.
Here I begin with my ongoing tale of discovery. That is, how to write a children’s book and self publish. I say ongoing tale because I’m still rewriting it after 8 months of work, my illustrator is still painting scenes of the Australian bush, I am undecided on the printer I would like to use; it is very much still a work in progress.
I know that becoming a parent opens up doors of creativity in most of us. We start drawing for our kids, making play dough animals, building whole block cities, dancing in a crazy way pretending we are dinosaurs and amongst other fun things, we start telling stories.
I don’t even know how I think of some of the things I tell my children, the words just come out and the thing is I say silly things because I want to make them laugh. Some of these stories have become favourites, and at the beginning of the year my eldest daughter said “Can you tell me the story about the wombat?” and I decided then and there to write it into a book for her and her sisters.
I actually thought that all I needed to do was write the story, have it illustrated, send it to a publisher and that they would publish it. Well it is kind of like that but, believe me – its a minefield out there! I just threw myself into it and the next thing you know I am self publishing with the generous help from my grandmother and my fabulous clever friend who is providing the design and layout for me. I really didn’t intend to self publish, the book just took on a life of its own and that’s the direction I ended up going in. I should have researched a little more but I just go so excited and carried away that before I knew it, I was committed.
Let’s hope it’s worth it!
