The last two years have
been a time warp. Most of the time went by so slowly as I tried to wait
patiently for my series to be ready to go to market, and then the last four
months have rattled past faster than a Japanese bullet train. I’m still very excited
about the books’ arrival into stores,
but, just quietly, I’m also packing it.
I’ve never done this
before. And I’m very attached to my
five little babies. I want them to succeed. I want them to be loved by all and
bought by the truckloads. But of course until they’re out there you don’t know how they’re going to be received.
I have also organised a
series of launches, which scare me silly. I’m the sort of person who
could order enough champagne for a hundred people and forget to organise the
glasses! So what if it all goes terribly wrong? Well, I suppose we’ll just laugh about it.
It will give people something to talk about, and talking is good, so long as
the books get a mention right?!
Then there’s the age group I’ve written for. It’s a beautiful age group -
one to five - but lets be honest, those one year olds are not all ready to sit
and listen to me at story-time. In fact I went around to a friend’s house to video my
daughter reading You’re One! to her divine,
perfectly behaved, and downright adorable one-year-old and we soon had to
abandon our high hopes and settle for a cute video of the first three pages!
But all that said I
couldn’t be more excited. I
believe in these little books. There is so much love in them. Children love
telling you how old they are and these books celebrate that. They also help
children to think about all the numbers around them - in You’re One! with ‘one tummy to tickle, one
head to shake, one little mouth for eating cake’
through to the wider
concepts for five-year-olds in You’re Five!, ‘five vowels to learn A,
E, I, O, U, five questions to ask, what, where,
when, how, and who.’
So as they head off in
trucks to the corners of Oz it is with a smidge of pride, a glimmer of
expectation and a barrel-load of hope that their readers fall in love and
cherish them nearly as much as I do.
Shelly Unwin is an Australian based children's author with a background in primary teaching. The You're Series is her debut picture book collection with another two more picture books to follow in 2017. You can learn more about Shelly at her website, here.
Don't forget to pop back in on Tuesday 20 June for an insightful interview with Shelly as she tackles our 12 Curly Questions.
