Get out your party hats and pencils… My new series of drawing books, Mini Doodles, comes out this month! To celebrate, I’m giving away a set of each to the first 5 people who comment below (US only). You can pre-order anywhere books are sold and the books will be out on June 20th.
Later this week I will be Mini-Doodle-decorating the Water Street Bookstore window to celebrate my book launch and drawing event on June 25th at 1pm in Exeter, NH.
Other upcoming events:
July 27th 3pm Plaistow Library. Plaistow, NH. Drawing workshop + book signing.
August 1st 2:30pm Weymouth Tufts Library. Weymouth, MA. Drawing workshop + book signing.
August 19th Book Fair By the Sea. 10am-1pm Camden, Maine.
I’d love to see you at any of these events this summer! I’d also love to see drawings that your kids make using Mini Doodles.
But first, let’s take it way back to 2017. After years of illustrating educational books, I was finally about to celebrate a string of new trade picture books. The first one was IT’S GREAT BEING A DAD (by Dan Bar-el, Tundra), and to kick it off I was tabling and teaching a magical creatures drawing class at Kids Con New England (it’s an awesome event!). I created several drawing sheets for an activity kit for the book. I popped on a unicorn headband and got ready to lead about 30 kids in a long drawing class. I hadn’t done anything like that before. I was worried because a few minutes into drawing loch ness it was so…quiet. This was a packed room. And there were kids from 3yo up to 10-11yos. Can you guess why they were so quiet? BECAUSE THEY WERE DRAWING AND IT WAS AMAZING. I just love the magic that happens when you give kids a handful of simple tools: paper, pencils/markers/crayons, a tiny bit of instruction, and encouragement.
So after several years of events, more drawing workshops, and lots of how-to-draw sheets I kept thinking there was an idea for a book series within my reach. In between writing picture books, I took some time to create Mini Doodles. I created a pitch that explained why my idea was different, and what the books would look like. This is part of that proposal:
My agent helped me refine and improve the pitch and off it went to a short list of publishers. There aren’t a lot of publishers making drawing books for kids, and they all seem to follow a format (totally opposite of what I was pitching). There was interest, and some nibbles, but ultimately it went back on the shelf. It kept nagging at me (ideas tend to do that) and sometime last summer I came across Bushel & Peck Books. They had a few drawing books and as a small, growing, independent publisher I wondered if Mini Doodles would be a match…and it was! In well under I year, here I am holding copies of my drawing books - If you know anything about publishing, that is FAST.
Big thanks to my super agent Sean McCarthy and David Miles at Bushel & Peck for supporting me and Mini Doodles …and all the weird, fun ideas inside. You’ll see!
Don’t think I forgot about the printables. This month’s suggestion came from super-talented author/illustrator Breanna Carzoo. I hadn’t ever heard of a numbat, but they certainly are cute and interesting.
Don’t forget to leave a comment if you’d like a chance at 5 sets of Mini Doodle books!
These look so good! My kids will gobble them up. Fun to hear the behind-the-scenes of your process getting it published, too. Under a year IS SUPER FAST!
Congrats! Definitely ordering for my classroom!