Irene Smalls is an award winning children’s book author with publishers like Scholastic, Simon and Schuster, and Little Brown. Not only that, she has presented programs at the White House Easter Egg Hunt, toured internationally and most impressively taken her career into her own hand. Study her website [ Read the full article… ]

Why I chose Kickstarter to fund my Children’s Picture Book by JQ Sirls There are many reasons why I decided to go in the route of Kickstarter, all of which stem from a common idea about people in my generation (millennials). People of my parent’s generation often claim that we are lazy, entitled, ungrateful, selfish, the [ Read the full article… ]

  Any time a new book enters the world is a great day. But it’s even more thrilling when the book comes from one of our own. The Brown Bookshelf co-founder Varian Johnson celebrated the birthday of his new stand-out middle-grade novel, The Great Greene Heist (Arthur Levine Books), on Tuesday. It’s already winning raves. Today, Varian is featured [ Read the full article… ]

Carole Boston Weatherford starting writing poems in childhood and never looked back. Her first picture book, Juneteenth Jamboree, about a summer celebration in memory of the Texas Emancipation, was published in 1995 by Lee & Low Books She’s written numerous picture books, board books, poetry collections, chapter books, and more, including the award-winning The Sound [ Read the full article… ]

This week, we’ve shared books by three stand-out children’s book creators who have chosen to publish their own work, Zetta Elliott, Jerry Craft and Kathleen M. Wainwright. We know there are more great authors and illustrators our readers should check out. Please post your self-published titles, link and a one or two line summary in the comments. We can’t [ Read the full article… ]

When I read Summer in the City written by teacher and blogger Kathleen M. Wainwright, I was taken back in time. I remembered playing hide-and-seek and freeze tag with my neighbors and cousins, sailing on the swing at the playground, chasing fireflies under a quilt of stars. With illustrations by Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor winner Nancy Devard, [ Read the full article… ]

Syndicated cartoonist, illustrator, author, nice guy.  That’s the tagline for Jerry Craft’s website. Love that last part. Jerry is one of those special people who makes a difference wherever he goes. With more than a dozen books to his credit, he has made the dreams of many self-published authors come true. From alphabet book A is for [ Read the full article… ]

An important part of the conversation of Making Our Own Market is opening the door to quality, independently-created books. Self-publishing has long empowered African-American children’s book authors to tell our stories and blaze a new path. Wade and Cheryl Hudson self-published their AFRO-BETS ABC Book when they found few children’s books that reflected African-American culture and history. Their [ Read the full article… ]