Hard to believe that this time last year I was overwhelmed with the thought of getting all these nursery rhymes for children out of my head and into print. I worried for endless nights about who would read my books, how would I handle the nuts and bolts of getting them into e-book format, and even coming up with the illustrations based on the numerous ideas floating around inside my head. Well, here were are at book #15 already, and Becca the bat has finally flown from inside my head to her very own classic children's book called "The Bat Who Lost Her Hat". This cute little bat has a real story to tell that most parents will be able to relate to quite easily. Becca was one of the first children's books that I had wanted to release, but for some reason I kept pushing her off because other stories needing to get out of my head seemed like they needed the center stage.
Finally, Becca has her time and she is flying from my computer to Amazon, and to hundreds of thousands of readers around the globe. I released this preschool rhyming book for free for the first five days, and on the second day there were over 1,000 downloads. I really didn't do that much marketing for Becca, she just seems to have found her groove on her own, and today she is soaring into the homes of little kids everywhere. By the last day of my free book promotion, Becca has doubled my previous books best record, and she appears to be showing no signs of slowing down. This little nursery rhyme was especially popular in Japan, I have not really connected with that audience before, but they quickly gobbled up hundreds of the e-book in a few days, and now I have even seen sales for my other books like "The Pony That Hates Macaroni" and "The Pig Who Loved to Dig" because of all the added excitement of Becca. This cute little bat obviously was waiting in the wings for a reason, and today she has found me a whole new audience from halfway around the world. I really do owe a lot to this little bat.
So that brings me to the story of Becca the bat and her cute little pink hat. I have developed this unique process for writing children's books now. I look for a lesson I learned as a child, and look for a silly and fun way to tell it to my own daughter using cute baby animals to tell the story. See, the lessons these little animals learn are ones I hope my little girls and children around the world can learn while they are still young enough to not let ego and the pressure from friends cloud their judgement. I remember a saying one of my elementary school teachers told me, she said you already made the mistake and paid the tuition, you might as well get the lesson. So with Becca the bat, she was absolutely in love with her hat to the point she made sure everyone in her world knew about it. She told friends, family, classmates, and neighbors, and they all responded how they loved it too. One day when the hat goes missing, Becca blames those same people because she assumes since they loved it too, they had to have taken it. The blame game is a very dangerous one, especially for young children. I think after they see what happens to Becca in this fun kid's book, they will think twice about jumping to conclusions in their own little worlds.