A Toddler’s Self-Publishing Tale – Guest Post by “What Squirrels Do” picture book trilogy author Hazel Nutt

27 Mar


Image

My name is Hazel Nutt. I’m a two year old toddler and I have so many ideas for books, that tradional publishers wouldn’t be able to keep up with me (my parents find it hard enough.)

I first decided to go the self publishing route, as I am a control freak! I wanted to keep complete control over my picture books (and my parents). My parents are easier to keep in check than an agent of a traditional publisher.

I want to get up about 10 picture books this year and I don’t have the patience to wait a year for a publishing date for each and every one. I’m a toddler and I want things done now!

I have initially self published on Amazon, where I have three picture books published as paperbacks and Kindle versions and another additional couple of picture eBooks on Kindle.

I have another picture book ready to go that my parents’ plan to publish as an eBook on Smashwords, which will be available in lots of additional eBook formats than just Kindle, to see how much that makes a difference. They may decide to make that particular book permanently free, in order to get interest in the other books I have co-created with my parents.

I tend to take up a lot of my parents’ time during the day, so they have had to burn the midnight oil to get these picture books created and published for me, but they know how important the dream of being a published writer at just two is to me.

I think they initially wanted to get everything published last year, but instead they gave me the gift of publishing my three picture books about what squirrels do when people are looking the other way, for my second birthday in February. I was thrilled.

Image

Since then, I have been telling my parents how to market these picture books in a number of ingenious ways. I’ve got them to create and maintain a blog written from a toddler point of view, with me letting people into my life with a weekly diary summary –  my art, tips for other toddlers on how to train their parents and picture book reviews and author interviews. I’ve got my parents to create squirrel masks and a squirrel coloring book to accompany my picture books.

As part of a virtual book tour, for the month of March, I have been doing interviews left, right and centre, being published all over the Internet. I have been asking for reviews from as many people as I can and I have been writing guest posts like there is no tomorrow (well my parents have until 2 or 3 in the morning, which I know because I often wake up with a wail and they are still dressed.)

There is of course much more we could do, like videos, more on social media sites and networking, but the most important thing is that my parents are trying to do all sorts of imaginative things (based on my suggestions) to make me successful.

This is perhaps where traditional publishing has its advantages, as there are already marketing channels in place and you have the year build up until your book is published, so there is a hungry list of buyers waiting to snap up your book. Basically, you are not on your own.

The virtual book tour will be a good basis to build future promotions on. My parents will make me a successful author and they wouldn’t get that satisfaction if we had gone to a traditional publisher.  You never know, once I’m a well known picture book author, I might get noticed by a traditional publisher.

Hazel Nutt is a baby blogger who loves to share her take on the world, through words and art. She writes funny posts that should tickle the humor buds of most parents. She particularly likes blogging her toddler opinions and advice on how to train parents, to ensure that other toddlers can also wrap their parents around their little fingers! Find Hazel and her opinions here. Please sit back, relax and enjoy.

Image

Hazel Nutt also writes funny picture books. Her first trilogy is about what squirrels do when people are looking the other way. The What Squirrels Do is a trilogy of picture books that give people an insight into these curious creatures, not EVER revealed to the public before. It will shock you to know some of the devious tricks squirrels play. It will solve some of life’s mysteries, like why there are shopping trollies in the middle of the woods and why car alarms go off in the night, and they will make you laugh.

These books cannot fail to bring a smile to the faces of both toddler and whoever is reading the book to them. Why not take a look at http://www.whatsquirrelsdo.com for more information on these delightful little curiosities.

Advertisements

4 Responses to “A Toddler’s Self-Publishing Tale – Guest Post by “What Squirrels Do” picture book trilogy author Hazel Nutt”

  1. Carlo April 22, 2013 at 3:38 am #

    Hello there! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow you if that would be okay. I’m definitely enjoying your blog and look forward to
    new posts.

    • Lorna Dounaeva April 24, 2013 at 9:50 am #

      Hi Carlo – I’m @LornaDounaeva on Twitter 🙂

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://lornadounaeva.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/a-toddlers-self-publishing-tale-guest-post-by-hazel-nutt-what-squirrels-do-picture-book-trilogy-author-hazel-nutt/
lornadounaeva.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-43
74341
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:HR3J4DLGUQKORKGADTGZ3CN4CYAXNKRE
<urn:uuid:f9b62280-e551-4de2-8a8d-5a2da2653ab3>
2018-10-23T20:14:39Z
192.0.78.13
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:IIOIS67DUOYQ5ZQRX7T7WRPMSGY2BVUN
<urn:uuid:4018cd3a-2cdd-4a63-8803-08a893e673b8>
https://lornadounaeva.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/a-toddlers-self-publishing-tale-guest-post-by-hazel-nutt-what-squirrels-do-picture-book-trilogy-author-hazel-nutt/
response
<urn:uuid:a83d1758-a9e9-406f-b1cb-97434fc3dde9>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-102-130-252.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/