How I stumbled into writing Children’s books?

If you had asked me a few years ago about my hobbies, I would have told you a range of art-related hobbies such as ceramics, painting, knitting, etc. I would have never guessed writing “Illustrated Children’s books”? I did not even know that it was a hobby I could pursue.

So, how did it happen?

I started taking my daughter to ‘lap-sit-storytime’ at the local library when she was six months old. Around the same time, I started reading books to her. By the time, she turned one she started responding to books and our visits to the local library became more regular and her enthusiasm to visit was real.

We went through most of the books in the toddler section within the next few months, reading a few several times over. It was all good, but I felt that the books written for toddlers followed a few singular themes such as:

(i) Imparting good habits such as how to brush, which bed-time routine to follow or what to do when you wake up, etc.

(ii) Facts about animals (or other things) such as what sounds they make or names of their offsprings, etc. and

(iii) nursery rhymes with rhyme but conveys no useful message

(iv) The baby goes to the library, the market, vacation, etc.

, and so on …

Essentially they were imparting a lot of knowledge and teaching them about everything around them. This is not to say that no other books are available for toddlers, just that I didn’t find many such at my local library.

As my daughter grew, I felt the need for books that told stories and helped her understand that all her actions would have consequences. Also, I felt the need for books that helped her in reasoning and taking decisions. In short, books that developed emotional intelligence.

One night, she wanted a story during her bedtime and the nerd in me used planets as characters to tell her a story. For a few nights that was her favorite story and she wanted to hear it every day. Each night, the story got refined a little by little and I started feeling good about myself.

A few months later, when I found myself with some time between work, I started exploring possibilities of adding illustrations to the story I told my daughter. I found royalty-free images at pixabay.com and used google slides to compose the pages. I put my illustrated story on medium and within a day it had more than 100 views just within my close circle.

This encouraged me to continue writing. A few weeks after I wrote and published my first story, my six-year-old niece wrote a story too. This boosted my morale further and encouraged me to continue writing.

Every now and then when I have an idea of a Simple Story that uses science to convey a moral, I add illustrations to it, publish it, and have started pursuing it as my digital hobby.

As of writing this blog, I have self-published 10 stories on amazon.com. Please check out all my books here.

FAQs

Q1: If these stories are for toddlers, is the science real?

Yes, very much. Actually, for a lot of books, I read anywhere between 10 to 20 science blogs or book chapters to clear up my basics first.

Q2: What are these stories for?

At the end of each story, I have added a glossary of topics that can be used to discuss the story with your kids based on their age. I highly encourage you to use these to talk about the story for a few minutes.

Q3: Why are the books hosted in a kindle format?

In today’s web-connected world, the kindle format is widely portable across platforms. You can read them on a kindle, or in the kindle app of any tab or phone(android or iOS), or your laptop. If you would like to print it out for your child, please contact me and I can share the pdf with you.