A Dream Is Coming True: Launching ”The Story of Babushka”
Welcome to the wonderful world of Babushka. I’m Catherine Flores and I’m happy you have found the new website for my book as well as its blog. Here I will keep you up to date on my journey with The Story of Babushka.
It has been quite a journey to get this far and one which started many years ago when The Story of Babushka was just an idea. When I first planned to write a story for children, a book launch was the last thing I would have thought of since it seemed an unreachable goal, my everest; but this thought planted a seed, and to have my first children’s book printed became my dream.
By the time I finished writing the story, I had already met my partner Aaron, who joined the project and took the lead and began translating it into English. Yes, I’m originally from Switzerland (I’m also half Guyanese) and my mother tongue is German. I was about 7 months pregnant at that point. After I gave birth to my son Kiasmos I felt the drive to get the book finished, so I could read the story to Kiasmos.
With Aaron’s support, we got the story polished and found an illustrator (the wonderful Ana Beatriz Marques) who began to create Babushka’s world. It took 6 months, but once we received the illustrations we were happy with the results and got to detailing them, so they were print-ready. The dream of holding my own book in my hands seemed much closer. But now I wanted to go all-in, meaning giving more than just 100% and taking the project to a whole new level. I wanted to create more than just a book but a whole world for The Story of Babushka.
As on every journey, there are many hurdles to overcome, especially when you are self-publishing without the funds and support of a large publishing house (although, we decided to self-publish early on) we took what we had and got to work. One of the biggest hurdles we had to overcome was the website.
Our idea of a unique website, where the homepage becomes a playground for children with moving objects, took a lot of effort and time; from illustrating the initial page, to getting our wonderfully patient SVG-animation-artist Humberto Ventura to convert it to SVG and bring it to life. It was a trying few months, especially building everything from scratch and ended up greatly delaying the release of the book. But being so close, we focused on our goal and eventually got there in April 2020, when we printed the first 750 copies of the book!
So, here we are. A dream is coming true and my book will launch 29th of July 2020. If you made it to the end of this blog post, thank you for your time reading it. Enjoy the website and don’t forget to check out the shop!
Warmest of Greetings,
PS. If you purchase the book, ebook, or audiobook, posting a review on Amazon, Goodreads, your own blog, or on Instagram would really mean a lot to me!
That is quite the journey you have been on. By writing about the journey itself, you are helping others who dream of publishing a book. They, too, are beginning from scratch and need the help. I see your story as much more than it currently is. A middle grade book can be so many different things and Babushka’s story has so much potential for an ambitious author like yourself. Good luck with this and every venture you take on.