Hi, I am Darcy Gyant and I am the author of the Coast Guard Adventures of Dolphin Gwen series.

The first book in that series is into the Storm.

Thanks, Darcy, for being a guest on the Adventures in the Heart of Children's Book Authors.

It's fantastic to interview another grandparent.

Had some influence from your granddaughter as I did with mine.

My granddaughter actually is a co author in our book.

I'd love to discuss the inspiration behind your book and the origin story.

How did this all come to life and what's the story behind the story for your first book?

Well, thanks for asking that.

And to tell you the story behind this story, I've got to go back a little bit, all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

And the reason for that is I'm a seventh generation descendant of.

Of a Revolutionary War veteran.

That veteran, my great, great, great, great grandfather was Luke Gyant and he immigrated from England to the colonies back then as a British soldier, served his time, got out of the British army and settled in the New World in the colonies.

And then, and then the revolution started and he joined the rebels to, to fight against England for independence.

A few years ago, I did some research trying to find out information about Luke Gyant, my great grandfather.

And we only had one document that, that documented his military history.

And he lived to be 83 years old.

I think they were probably passing away around 40 or 50 at the time.

Oh, oh yeah.

And he was pretty seriously wounded during the Revolutionary War, but he survived that.

And he was actually at the final major battle of the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Yorktown.

So there's a lot of information in this one document.

But other than that, we don't know anything about him.

We know where he was born, when he was born, and when he died or at least when this document was filled out.

But I always wondered, well, what, I mean, what prompted him to join the British Army?

Why did he stay in the US what did.

Or in the colonies, which eventually became the United States.

And then what did he do?

We, my grandparents did some genealogy and they were able to track down our relationship and his kids and all that.

But there wasn't really any information about what life was like with them or, you know, anything like that.

He hadn't, didn't leave any memoirs, didn't leave any letters or anything like that.

And I always wish he'd had flash forward about 200 years.

And my granddaughter was born about five years ago.

And I started thinking, boy, it'd be really nice to pass down to my Granddaughter and eventually her kids and her grandchildren, some information about her grandpa.

And at the time I wrote a memoir.

It was a children's book, but it was just a memoir with a bunch of stories from my time in the military and growing up as a kid and what I do now and all that.

And I put it into a memoir and for someday, you know, when she get.

Gets older, she might find it interesting.

But then somebody suggested, well, why wait until she's older for this for to share my stories with her.

And they suggested I write a children's book.

So I took one of my stories as a Coast Guard, Coast Guard helicopter pilot.

I he spent 25 years in the.

In the military, most of it in the Coast Guard.

And I did search and rescue.

I took one of my stories and developed it into a children's book.

That.

That was my first children's book, into the Storm.

It's a retelling of an actual search and rescue that I did as a pilot.

And.

But it's told in a way that the kids.

Kids would appreciate it.

I shortened it up a little bit for their attention span.

And.

And when I was starting to think about, okay, well, how do I write a children's book?

I did a lot of research.

I'd never written a children's book before, and before I wrote my memoir, I'd never written anything basically other than when I had to on my job.

But I did a lot of research and put together this first story.

And I knew to relate to the kids through my research and just looking at other children's books, I needed to have a character, characters that they could relate to.

So I took the helicopter that I used to fly and flew on the missions and gave it eyes and a mouth and gave it a personality.

So I made it a character of.

Of the book.

And the pilot is a female pilot.

And I decided to go with that because I wanted my granddaughter to be able to have a female that she could emulate or look up to have as a role model because she's going to know her grandpa used to be a helicopter pilot.

But I wanted her to know that, hey, girls, women can be pilots also.

So that was the reason behind that.

So my granddaughter was basically an inspiration to starting out writing books.

What's your granddaughter's name?

Her name is Gwyneth.

And the name of the character, the pilot in my children's book series is Gwen.

So it's named after my granddaughter.

Fantastic.

And I tell the story, actually the.

If you noticed, with caboose, it's Spelled with a K.

Right.

And my co author and my granddaughter, her name is Kira, we took the K and of course substituted the K in caboose from a C to a K.

And that's how we did that and came up with the, with the name caboose.

I just thought I'd share that with you as a proud grandfather.

And it's as nice as an independent author where you don't have a publisher or editors telling you what you can and can't write as independents.

We can, we can come up with our own names.

We can do it how we want to do it.

So.

Absolutely.

If you don't mind me asking, because that really leads me into my next question anyway, so I might as well use this as a perfect segue, your publishing approach.

And I share this for aspiring, not only aspiring authors, but also for readers to understand the challenges as a children's book author.

When I first started, and I'm sure you, you're going to tell us the same story, I found out there was traditional publishing, there was self publishing.

As I did more and more research, I found out about hybrid publishing, which is almost like a la carte.

So can you tell us your publishing approach and why you took that approach?

My first experience with writing was my memoir.

And I looked at all, all the methods available pro, you know, from traditional down to self and hybrids.

And I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time waiting for a traditional publisher to decide that I was worthy and to go through that whole process of agents and all that.

I was new to the, the game.

I've never written anything.

My education is in aeronautics, so it has nothing to do with writing.

I did some research and I settled on a hybrid for my memoir and they helped me a lot through that process.

When I decided to write my children's book, I decided to go it alone, did again some more research as the pros and cons, and decided, okay, I'm learning enough here to go self published independently.

And of course that's a steep learning curve, as you know, to, you bet learn all the ins and outs of self publishing and KDP and IngramSpark and you know, all these things that you and I are familiar with in the, in the industry.

In the process.

There was a steep learning curve in my first book, the into the storm of this children's book series.

But then it got easier.

I've gotten, I'm about ready to publish my fourth children's book here.

Congratulations.

That's phenomenal.

And each time it's gotten Quicker and easier because now I know how the process works.

Are you still using print on demand, basically, or have you done a quantity runs it all with a local printer?

No, it's strictly print on demand.

I just didn't want to get bogged down with boxes and boxes of books and.

And then to have that added pressure of, okay, now I've got these sitting in the.

In the garage, and I've got to make a move somehow.

So I.

I prefer the print on demand.

And the reason I asked that, of course, is to share that with our aspiring authors to understand that you don't.

You don't have to tie up thousands of dollars in inventory to bring your book to life.

The other interesting thing I just want to share this with you, Darcy, is yesterday I received a quote.

I thought, you know what?

We're going to be publishing our second book.

Why not just get a quote on doing quantity runs?

And when I got the quote, I was quite.

I don't want to use the word shock, but when I looked at it, I realized that using print on demand is really not that expensive compared to doing a large run.

So I think you'd have to get into the thousands and thousands of books run before there's any, really economy of scale.

And then you do, let's say 2,000 books, and they get shipped to you, and you've got these boxes and boxes sitting in your garage or storage.

Now what do you do with them?

How do you get them into the hands of the customers?

And it's a whole nother marketing issue.

Darcy, can you grab caboose the Rocky Mountain Bear book for one second?

Because I want to share something with the audience.

And if you open it up for yourself, and inside there should be the very front cover, there should be a heart.

Is there a heart there?

Okay.

That is called a book plate.

I added after the fact because somebody said, where does the author sign or the child's name?

A lot of times it's a gift from a parent or a grandparent.

So how do you.

Where do you put that?

So that's the reason I think you've done the same thing, if I'm not mistaken.

I didn't on this first book, but my next one, the one that's coming out here in a couple of weeks, I did.

I added that in there because somebody suggested, hey, you should have a place for kids to put their name on it.

Absolutely.

So the nice thing about, again, this is for the listening audience is that, you know, like Darcy and myself, we recognize that there should be somewhere that that's a nice little spot for a message to be written or for a child to write their name or whatever.

And so adding it in, because we're self published, I just had it added in after the fact.

Then I just updated the files on Ingham Sparks and on Amazon and boom, voila.

It's just another measure that you can use without having to tie up a lot of money in inventory.

Right.

And another thing, as a self publisher and having the ability to go in and make changes to your book and then upload them to Amazon or whoever's doing the Print on Demand is, you'll notice on the COVID of my book there into the Storm, it has won two awards within the last year.

I was able to myself using Canva, basically go in and update my cover with the.

The awards and then upload it to.

Upload it to Print on Demand, you know, through Amazon.

So I was able to do that myself where if you're going through a traditional publisher, I think to do that would be a lot harder.

And to your point, again, if you got a thousand copies sitting in the garage, you'd have to wait for the sell through before you'd ever be able to show people that you got a second award.

Exactly.

Thanks for sharing that.

The next thing, and I want to let you know, on my iPad, I actually have your website in front of me.

I love your website.

You've done a phenomenal job.

The one thing I wanted to ask you as a children's book author, when my granddaughter and I started on our adventure, the first thing we did is we wanted to get our book to market.

When we were just about ready to publish, someone said, well, where's your home?

And I said, what do you mean, where's our home?

And they said, well, do you have a website where you can direct somebody to, to buy your book?

And I thought, oh, I just thought I was going to send them to Amazon or whatever online retailer and that'd be the end of it.

And they said, no, no, no, no, you need a website.

We developed a website after the fact.

Can you tell us your journey with your website?

Did it come before or after your first book and how did you go about putting it all together?

My first whip.

I went through the process of getting my book all written and ready to publish.

And while I was waiting for the illustrators to finish up their part of it, I went on and developed my.

Went online and developed my own website and did it myself.

And I used a free website to do my own website I have no experience, but it was kind of a cut and paste, you know, you just make it yourself.

So I did that just to have a presence on the Internet.

So I threw that up.

And that was before your first book got published?

It was just before the first book got published, but then after it got published, I'm like, you know, this doesn't look professional.

It's not attractive.

So I did some more research and I, I designed and built another website myself.

I use, it's wix.

I use wix, which is a little more, A little more of an upscale.

They have more tools and some training to go along with it.

My website, I basically designed it, put it.

Some people can't do that because they don't have time.

It's.

It's time consuming.

I'm retired, so I got a lot of time now.

I don't have to go to work like a lot of people do.

This is my job.

You know, essentially it's a job, but it's not, it's fun, you know, it's what I do, as you know.

But so that's how my website, as it currently stands and I can update it easily.

And you'll.

If you're on my website right now, if you scroll down a little bit, you'll see my newest book that's coming out.

Cover pages up there and it says coming soon.

Some, Some angels have rotor blades.

Yeah, so that's the one coming out soon.

Because I did my own website, I didn't have to go through a web designer.

I can just go in and update it like that.

Fantastic.

Fantastic.

I'm always curious when it comes to website development and I always tell aspiring authors, sometimes children book authors.

I just had a guest on not that long ago and she didn't have a website at all.

We got to talking and I explained to her, you know, some people have their website in their author's name.

Some people, myself and my granddaughter, we actually named our website after our children's book series because with my other four grandchildren we've now written 38 books and.

But they're all in the series of Caboose, the Rocky Mountain Bear.

Explain why you chose to use your.

Name as your website's name for expediency.

At the time I, I didn't know where this children's book writing process was going to go.

I didn't know that there would be a series.

I thought it was going to be a one and done type of thing.

And I just said, hey, I'll just put my name on it.

As the author and just not very creative and coming up with anything better at the time.

And, and now that I have, I mean, it's.

It's a brand, I guess you could say kind of a brand name.

Darcy.

As soon as I started typing your name in and I just got to like Darcy Guy and it automatically came up in the search engine.

So, I mean, that's pretty remarkable, right?

There's not too many people out there named Darcy Guy Ant.

So it's going to kick them up.

In fact, there is nobody else with this name.

So it's not like.

It's not like it's Bob Jones or something where.

Okay, you're never going to find his website.

Right.

But yeah, one thing with our website, and again, I'm just sharing this with, with listeners is with our website.

We're.

We're locked into our series the Adventures of Caboose the Rocky Mountain Bear.

That's why we say the Adventures of.

Because Caboose has a family and a community and all of that.

So all those characters will get introduced, but they'll be in the, in the broader scope of, of the Adventures of Caboose.

And for you, the neat thing about it, when I look at your books, you certainly have Gwen and Dahl, I think in your first three books and then in your fourth book, you're introducing some new characters, right?

It's not part of the series.

It's a standalone book about a different type of helicopter.

It's still a Coast Guard rescue adventure story, but it's not part of the series.

I have a special reason for doing that.

A special story that I wanted to tell, again, inspired by my granddaughter.

It makes sense.

It gives you some flexibility.

Exactly.

That's what I was going to say.

You know, if, if I'd done a series or the series name, then it doesn't fit anymore.

If you could just tell us a little bit more about your website.

Like I, I know like you've said, you've added.

I can see it coming soon.

Is there other things every time you launched a book and.

Cause you're now coming up to your fourth book.

Tell us a little bit about the, like, the nuances behind each time you launched a book, did you.

Did you do something different to your website just in terms of changing it, giving it a different feel or what can you tell us about that journey.

Changed the style or the look and feel of my website?

I basically just update it with the COVID of the next book and people can place orders, they can shop and buy the book direct Books directly from me and I get the orders and I self fulfillment, I'll mail them out, put that in, update all that information.

But that is pretty easy to do very quick to, to go very quick to do.

The other thing I add to my, my website is special events.

If I'm going to be involved in an event, a book signing or updating it on my media page with podcasts that I'm involved in or have been on.

Just so if people want to see or hear a little bit more about, about what we're talking about, they can just click on the link from my website.

So I add that in there.

The reason I want to share that is so people understand again that the beautiful thing about a website is it's not static.

I would encourage you just as Darcy's done.

And we recently did about five or six changes ourselves, right in the new year.

I kind of looked at it and said I just did little changes.

And so it's important people to know that once you start and you have a home for your books, it's always evolving.

If you listen to Darcy, it's evolving in a very positive way because things are happening that are helping to build your business, such as events or new books or special offers, whatever it happens to be.

So thank you for sharing that.

So I know you talked about your granddaughter and you talked about your career in your motivation to get the children's book off the ground.

And you said earlier that, you said, I thought I'd be one and done.

Well, obviously there was a lot more motivation that happened.

So can you explain to us how you went from like an, an aspiring author thinking, oh, I'll write my one book from one and done to multiple.

Now you're going to be up to four children's books.

Can you explain that motivation?

I wrote the first one and I, I volunteer at a local elementary school, a public school.

Every morning I'm up there helping the teachers and I work with first grade students.

And when my first book was done, I went into the, the teachers invited me to their classroom because they, they knew me and I knew them.

And I read my book to the kids and the kids loved it because it's an adventure story and there's excitement and there's some suspense to it, and they were just captivated by it.

And I had so many kids come up to me and say, and they call me Mr.

Darcy.

Mr.

Darcy, I love your book.

I can't wait for the next one.

I'm like, next one?

Well, so that got the wheels turning and then I just talked to, you know, teachers and parents, and the feedback I was getting from people that read the book, and they're like, okay, I guess I better do another one now.

It's not hard.

I have all kinds of experiences from my time in the military of flying helicopters.

I've got almost an endless supply of potential stories that could be written or developed into books.

So settling on another story was fairly easy.

It just takes time to go through the whole process and illustrating and all that.

But.

But then I, you know, I just.

Through the encouragement of people that like the books and.

And.

And my granddaughter, my first book, of course, when it was done, she was about three and a half.

We read it together, and at first she was three and a half.

And because it is an adventure story and there's just some suspense with thunder and lightning and waves and people in trouble, she was a little scared.

So she's holding onto her mom's arm and she's got her little stuffy that she's holding onto.

And we got to the end of the story, and she's like, grandpa, what did I get?

So, just wanted to hear the story over and over again, over again.

And eventually she.

We read it to her so many times that she memorized it word for word.

She just loved the illustrate.

And I've gotten a lot of comments about.

The illustrations are very attractive to kids also.

And I hired an illustrator.

I didn't do that myself, but I've used the same illustrator through all, for.

For continuity, through all three of my first Adventures of Dolphin Gwen series.

And so that was kind of the.

The spark.

And I just keeps me going now with writing more books because kids love it.

That is fantastic.

One of the things, my most enjoyable, favorite thing to do is going to schools and visiting schools and classrooms, reading my story, telling them about helicopters, you know, mixed in a little bit of STEM technology and how helicopters work and telling them about the Coast Guard and my.

What they do.

The things I enjoyed when I looked at your website, and I thought, oh, Darcy, this is so neat, is you had a picture of one of the kids wearing your helmet.

And I thought, oh, my goodness.

Now, talk about excitement, because I noticed you had your big poster with Gwen and Dolph, and, like, it's huge.

So it feels for a child.

They must think, oh, my God, I could almost ride in this helicopter that's right in front of me.

And.

And Mr.

Darcy's brought his helmet.

Yeah.

And I tell him, this is the actual helmet.

You look in the story that Gwen on the COVID she's holding that helmet.

That was me, and that was my helmet that I used when I was flying that helicopter.

So it's just one of the props that.

That really keeps the kids interested.

So I do a lot of school business now, going around and just doing that.

I love that.

That's one of my favorite things.

I talk to you a little bit about Cap character development.

Now, I know you said just as we started the.

The show, you were talking about inspiration so that your granddaughter could see a reflection of herself through the female pilot, which.

Which I.

Which I love because actually Caboose, the Rocky Mountain Bear, is named after Kira.

It's, of course, a female.

Tell us a bit more about wanting to make sure that your granddaughter saw herself in the story and that she could be anything she wants to be.

I mentioned, you know, she's going to hear stories about, you know, my involvement of flying helicopters.

So she's going to know her grandpa used to fly.

But I didn't want her to be left with the impression that, well, it's only guys, only men that fly helicopters.

Because I have worked with and known many female pilots, excellent pilots, throughout my career.

So I wanted her to know that also.

Just not only for my granddaughter, but, like, when I go into schools, I make sure that the girls know that, hey, you know, they can.

This is a potentially something.

They could be a pilot.

Doesn't have to be a military pilot.

Aviation is open to men and women, and so I encourage that.

And just kind of as a side note, because I.

The main character is a woman.

My book was noticed by a woman, a lady that is now a friend of mine, but she is an advocate of females, women getting involved in the aviation industry.

And she is involved in an organization called Women's International Aviation or something like that.

I forget the name.

But anyway, so I've been invited to Women in Aviation conference in March.

Even though it's a conference for women, I've been invited to go because my book was advocating for women in aviation.

And they want me to come and.

And show off my book, so.

Fantastic.

So it's.

It's a way to just encourage people in the science and technology industry or potential careers.

I think you may already know this, but I want the audience to know that next week we have an episode coming up with Aaron Murphy.

Yeah.

And Erin Murphy for our listening audience.

Erin is a pilot for United, and she flies.

She flies 767.

I just want everybody to understand that we're proud grandfathers of granddaughters now that.

You mentioned Aaron Murphy.

I know Aaron.

We're friends.

We've never met in person, but we've collaborated and helped each other with promoting our books.

And I initially met Aaron through our mutual contact of Liz Booker, who was the person I just mentioned a minute ago, who first saw the COVID of my book and invited me to be involved in the Women in Aviation organization.

Liz Booker is a Coast Guard retired Coast Guard helicopter pilot.

She flew the age 65.

And the first time she saw the COVID of this book, she said, that could have been me.

That's me on the COVID And she got really excited.

I've been on Liz Booker's podcast, and so has Aaron Murphy.

And that's how Aaron and I got connected was through a third party, through Liz Booker.

But that's one thing I like about working with other children's book authors, too, especially in the aviation side of things, is we're not competitors, we're collaborators, and we hope to promote each other's books at book fairs and on Instagram and all these things.

So.

So it's a lot of fun, too.

The underlying theme in the three books with Gwen and Dolph, is there an underlying theme in those three books?

Yes, there is, actually.

So I'm telling the story of an actual rescue or events that I did, but an underlying theme is courage, teamwork, and trust.

In my first book, in the story there, the.

They had involved having to fly into a storm, and Dolph, the helicopter, he sees the thunder and the lightning storm and they gonna fly into it, and he's scared.

And he tells his pilot, Gwen, that, ooh, I don't know about this.

I'm pretty nervous.

And.

And so kids can relate to that.

You know, that, okay, a lot of kids are afraid of thunder and lightning or, you know, they experience fear and.

And so forth themselves.

So that's part of the story is how Gwen, the pilot, encouraged him and how they worked together to get, you know, to still do the mission.

Have courage.

Even though you still.

You may still be a little bit afraid or nervous, you can have courage.

So there's that.

And then teamwork, of course, was a big part of completing the mission successfully.

Those are the underlying themes in all three of my.

Well, in all of my books that.

I've written so far, you talked a lot about school visits, and I'm curious on generally, what's the central lesson or teaching from your book.

When you go into the school and you read it, the kids get a sense of what you're trying to convey as a Lesson.

Yeah, because I, I, I read the story and then we talk about courage.

And I ask them, you know, what does courage mean?

And I get a lot of input, feedback from the kids as to what are they afraid of, and I get some of their inputs.

And then we talk about how Gwen encouraged and helped Dolph to get through his trepidations.

And then I asked them, well, who could you talk to if you're not feeling, if you're feeling nervous or afraid of something?

And then we, they start throwing out all the different people in their lives that they could talk to about it.

Don't keep it to yourself.

Talk to people.

So, so that's the central message for the younger kids anyway.

For the first and second grade age, even third grade, I sometimes talk to fourth and fifth graders.

Don't focus so much on that aspect of things.

And I, I get into a little bit more about the writing process and publishing process just to let them know a little bit more about how books are born, where do they come from, how do they end up on a.

And that kind of thing.

So it depends on the age of the kids, but the younger kids, it's mostly based on, focused on courage and teamwork and trust.

Thank you.

I want to delve into your writing process with multiple children's books.

Can you share some insights into your development and writing process for your children's books?

So kind of explain what's a day in writing look like for Mr.

Darcy.

Okay.

Because my stories are based on actual events, I don't have to write a fiction story and come up with characters and all that.

I just basically got to tell my story.

But I add in a couple of, I changed the characters.

I've got Dolph, of course, now I've got Gwen, but I also have the crew on the helicopter that were with me.

So it's a true story.

When I first decide, okay, I'm going to write this next book, I'll spend an afternoon just writing the story.

I just write, write, write, write down the story.

What happened next?

Where was, where were we?

When did it happen, all this kind of stuff, how did it conclude?

So I can, within a matter of a couple hours, I can write out an initial draft of the story pretty quickly.

But then you go back, and now you got to smooth it out.

My first book, into the Storm, I did a draft and I shared it with one of my teacher friends, a first grade teacher, and she read it and she gave it back to me and she said, way too long, too many words, you gotta shorten it up.

I said, okay, I didn't know that.

So I ended up cutting out half of the words.

And she.

One thing she told me that was very important for children's books is you're going to have illustrations.

You don't have to describe or use a lot of words to describe the scenery or set the scene, because you're going to have illustrations that the kids are going to look at that story.

So that helped a lot once I kept that in mind, you know, when.

I did my research, I found when I first started to write a children's book, and like, now we've written multiple.

The one recommendation I had heard about, especially if it's a illustrative book, is between five and a thousand words, maximum.

Exactly.

That's been my target.

Yep, target.

But I usually always go way over that.

And then I have to edit and trim it down and edit again and.

And to go through a lot of editing and having some friends and other people read it.

But even after all that, I still involve a professional editor.

Do you visualize the illustration to help you cut down on your words?

Uh, yes.

I don't draw them out, but I know as I'm writing what it should look like.

And then when I get with an illustrator, I give them a lot of details about what this scene looks like.

It's interesting you should say that, because I mentioned we're working on our second book, and it's now the.

One of the pages has gone to the illustrator.

This one's probably the most important page in the whole book because we're actually introducing four new characters all at once.

So, you know, trying to do that and still convey a story can be a little difficult.

But I.

I'm.

I've got a good illustrator, so I hope he's up for the challenge, that's for sure.

What was interesting about my illustrator, he actually lives in Ukraine, the country of Ukraine.

And I don't know if he's ever even seen the ocean.

So here are.

He's helping me to illustrate a story about a coast guard adventure on.

On the ocean in a storm.

So there was a lot of back and forth between him and I describing.

And I.

And then I would send him pictures of the actual helicopter and, you know, I'd send him photographs.

This is what the ocean looks like in a storm, you know, and he would go, oh, okay.

And then he'd.

He'd make it into a children.

My illustrator actually is in England, and our whole book takes place in.

In an actual real town.

But we've we've changed the name of it from Cammore to Big Head.

And what's interesting is that I know he's never been to the Rocky Mountains yet.

That's a big part of our whole adventure series.

So it's interesting you should say that.

Whether it's an ocean or a mountain, as long as you get a good illustrator and you can give them guidance, it's incredible what they do.

Oh yeah.

I could never do it myself.

I definitely have to get help with that.

That makes two of us.

So I'm also curious because you talked about your personal experience, said, you know what, Rick?

I've got no problem in writing the story because I just draw upon my personal experience.

Did you do any additional research when you, when you started trimming the story back?

Tell, tell us about that?

Not a lot.

There wasn't really a lot of necessity for that since, you know, I knew about.

There was nothing for me to research as far as the mission because I, I knew from personal experience what, where it was.

And that was true for all three of my, well, now all four of my books.

So I didn't have to, I didn't do that.

Now, okay, people to understand that, you know what I mean?

There's different ways of doing it.

After 25 years, you definitely have had a, you know, an extensive background, so you've got lots to draw upon.

And so I just want people to understand sometimes you've got to go out, even with a children's book and do a little bit of research.

But don't be afraid.

Either way, whatever works for you produces the same results.

I want to get around to success.

When I talk to people about success measurement.

Can you tell us about your original goal?

I know you originally said one and done.

Tell us about your original goal or goals regarding your first book launch.

First book launch was to hopefully eventually earn back my investment.

You know, as a, as a self publisher, you pay for it all out of your pocket.

And with a children's book, for me, the biggest expense was the illustrator.

They get paid good money because they have a skill and it's well worth it if you have a good illustrator.

So you make this investment upfront for getting the book published and then you gotta get your print pay for printing your first batch.

So my goal was to try to make my investment back over time.

And I didn't get into this as a career.

It's not fame and fortune.

It's not fame and fortune.

No.

I always say that if you get into children's book writing for fame and fortune, you've gone into the wrong career.

And you know what's funny is for some reason kids and even adults think that if you're a published author, that you now have a lot of money, that you're a millionaire, you're rich.

And they're surprised to know that, no, I haven't made any money yet and it may be years before I earned back my investment.

But they think of people like the very famous children's books, the Dr.

Seuss's, the J.K.

rowlings, Harry Potter type of people.

And those are very, very rare.

I'm trying to give aspiring authors some realism.

That's why I talk about success.

I don't know about your calculations, but I calculated we're going to have to sell between 1100 and 1500 books just to break even.

That doesn't include my time, that just includes all the expenses to bring it to market.

I just want people to understand that you get into it and it's certainly not about fame and fortune.

Talking about success, measures of success, it's not about the money.

I don't really look at book sales or money as a measure of success.

I feel I've been successful when I get the feedback from the kids, which I get frequently, how they just love these books, they can't wait for the next one.

They read them over and over again.

I hear that feedback from, from the kids that read them and the parents and, and then when I go to, I do a lot of in person events, vendor events and book signings and just talking to the people when they come up to my table and I sign the book and they want to talk about the Coast Guard or they want to talk about their first helicopter ride, or they have questions, want us to share stories.

And I just have all this great feedback and interaction with people at these events.

That's, that's just one of my measures of success is I get to talk to people and they're interested.

Darcy last week I talked to, I call her a newly minted book author and I talked to her about success and she said, you know, when I got my first book review, that was a big part of my success.

And you know what?

I know exactly how she feels.

When you, when you can go onto Amazon and read those reviews from people you don't even know, pretty, pretty satisfying.

I want to pick up on what you talked about because when I looked at your website, when I listened to you about your school visits and you mentioned that you've got over a thousand hours of volunteer Work in the public school system.

I thought, wow, that's incredible.

So talk to us about that feeling and also talk to us about how is the.

How is the school visits and the interaction with the kids helping you with your books?

I actually started volunteering in the school system before I started writing.

So that wasn't something that.

Because I had books, now I'm going to go volunteer to use that as a marketing scheme or ploy.

The two kind of go hand in hand.

Because I was a volunteer, it kind of opened the door for me to be able to go and talk to schools.

And then word of mouth has helped a lot from getting into schools.

But I love sharing the story with kids and teaching them.

I mix in some science, you know, about helicopter aerodynamics, and I do some demonstrations to the kids, the difference between airplanes and helicopters.

So they're learning about that.

And then we talk about courage and all these kinds of things.

But what I've started doing recently, because I'm doing a lot more school visits, is asking the school to somehow either send home a flyer or a book order form so that the parents can buy the book.

It helps to increase my sales for families or parents that want to have copies of their own.

So it helps with a little marketing a little bit.

Um, I don't get a lot of book sales because of school visits, but.

But it all adds up.

That's not.

My motivation is to go into schools to try to sell books, is to go in and tell.

And it's not like kids are walking around with 20 bucks and they say, okay, here, I'll take.

I'll take two copies, please.

I want to talk about the role of writing because, you know, you had a full career, and I'm just wondering now, how is being a children's book author, how has that helped you in the grand scheme of things in.

In your current life?

I pay a lot more attention to children's books now that I have one, and there are several.

I.

When I'm at the library, I'm looking at children's books to see how other children's book authors are approaching things, see what their covers look like, seeing their styles and the topics, you know, what are the books about?

And so that's kind of opened my eyes to what kids are.

Are being exposed to in the school system, in their libraries, and all the different things there.

And then I do a lot.

It has helped with every book.

It's a little bit easier and a little bit better that I write because now I'm able to use not only my experience, but I kind of know, have an eye for what else is out there and seeing how I can incorporate those techniques and ideas into my, my next book or my next story.

So that, that has helped me to progress as a professional author and, and get better at my craft, I guess you could say, which to me still sounds very weird to say because I never ever thought I'd be an author of anything.

But now to say, well, yeah, I'm a professional author and I'm, yeah, I'm an award winning author.

I've won some awards and it's like, how did that happen?

You know, that's fantastic.

Never was in the cards.

When you get up in the morning.

I'm just thinking kind of out loud here a bit, but when you get up in the morning, how does, how does this whole writing thing fit into your, into your life, into your daily routine?

My routine.

I kind of wake up and spend a lot of my time thinking now about marketing.

At some point you go from writing your books and spending a lot of time, you know, just producing the book and getting it published.

But then unless you do some marketing, it's going to sit there and nobody's going to know about it.

You wrote the book for a reason.

And this is for prospective authors that not very many people decide they want to be an author because they love marketing.

They love writing and producing the stories and telling the stories.

But now I spend as much time, if not more time on the marketing aspect of things.

So figuring out how to get the books recognized, get em into the hands of people and get them into schools and libraries and so forth.

So that's where a lot of my focus is nowadays.

That's important for people to know.

I'm glad you shared that because that's such a important part.

And you know what, Darcy?

Every day I get up, I'm, I'm thinking the same thing as you is that, you know, I recently put together a couple of lists of what I think would be potential bookstores to reach out to them.

So you know, all of those things are so important besides your friends and family, like how do you build your circle bigger so that's there's more people that know about your book.

And I am a hands on kind of person.

I like to get out, I like to talk to people.

So part of the marketing focus for me is this won't work for everybody, but for me is getting out, doing school visits, which takes time and effort to go and do, and then doing other in person, you know, vendor Type events.

Talk a little bit more about vendor events.

Like how far would would you go?

Like how many vendor events would you do in a year and how far would you go to get to a vendor event?

Like in, in terms of travel, I've.

Traveled as, as far as two and a half hour drive to get to an event.

But when I go to that location I try to do multiple things.

I try to do like a vendor type event pop up market or a book signing at a bookstore combined with a school visit to kind of make get the most bang for my buck as far as traveling and maybe having to stay overnight and that type of stuff.

But generally most of my events that I do are within an hour drive of, of where I live.

I live near Seattle, so there's, there's just about every weekend there is something somewhere if I wanted to be involved in it.

And I'm kind of putting together my plan for the next six months and scheduling things and getting my, my applications in for different events coming up.

Do you find people are, are pretty warm to that?

When you say I'm going to be doing a vendor event, I'm just going to use a name.

So I'm going to Portland, I'm going to be doing a vendor event.

And when you, when you get a hold of a school or, or a store that's in Portland, do they say oh, okay, well that sounds great.

You generally find good acceptance.

You have to work at it.

Okay, so I like if I know in Portland is a good example.

I am actually going down to Vancouver, Washington, which is right across the river from Portland here this summer and I will be talking to bookstores and I do have to make some phone calls.

Some of them say well no, we don't, we don't do that or your genre is not right for us or whatever.

I contact schools and tell them I'm in the area.

Here's an opportunity and some, occasionally one or two will take it, but you know, it's not guaranteed or it's not everybody you contact so you have to do some shopping and getting the word out.

But I try to, you know, combine different events to make it more economical, cost effective.

The reason I asked that is because my next question is actually leading to what advice?

And I know and you've already given some great advice and I've tried to just draw out a little more supplementary support for people to understand this.

But advice for aspiring authors.

What kind of advice would you give someone who's just trying to get their first book to market or just published their first book.

What would you say?

I would say don't get discouraged because I knew I struggled with that.

Keep your writer idea, edit it, share it with some other people, get some feedback and keep working at it, revising it, and then send it to a professional editor so they can give you some third party feedback on it.

And then once you've done that, of course some, somewhere in that process you gotta decide how are you gonna do this?

So you can go traditional or you're gonna self publish, but then do the research and keep looking online.

There's all kinds of information and resources to help prospective author, aspiring author.

You just gotta spend some time researching it and reading and, and just keep, keep plugging at it.

Don't, don't get discouraged.

And I just want to pick up on what Darcy said about editing.

As Darcy and I both know, if you have an excellent illustrator, that's, that's where the primary cost is if you're not an illustrator, to get your book edited so you have some, some type of idea of how people are going to be able to read it and get a sense from it.

Editing is not that expensive because most of the time they're, they're setting their price on the number of words and if you've written between 500 and a thousand, it's not a lot of words.

Don't worry about the cost of editing.

That should be right.

But, but it's very important.

I just want to emphasize that because Darcy's absolutely right.

Yeah.

And if you have a lot of mistakes in your book when it goes to print, you know, punctuation and grammar and all that kind of stuff, it just kind of ruins the book.

And it's, it's a shame that with just a little bit of, a little bit more investment, it could have been fixed.

I, I agree a hundred percent.

And my first book was the, was the, was the memoir.

No illustrations, uh, but a lot of words.

And the biggest expense for my memoir was what I paid by the editor because there was no illustration.

So that was an investment well worth it because it was a lot of words and it took a lot of time.

But children's books, that's kind of a minor expense but very critical.

I want to talk about the encouragement for readers and with you doing school visits, I'd like to you to answer two questions is the first one is why should children's book readers purchase your book?

This again, it's written for kids.

They're going to want to hold it and read it again.

Like my Granddaughter.

Read it again, read it again, read it again.

If it's a good book with good illustrations, they will want to read it again.

And that just helps them in developing.

Well, they start to recognize words and they recognize the flow of a story.

And it's just a process in helping them to learn to read and eventually learn to write and appreciate literature and to have.

There's nothing more better than having a physical copy in your hand.

I do have my books on electronically.

People can buy them through Kindle, but I don't know that I've even sold five Kindle copies of my children's books because kids want to see paper, paper, you know, and hold the book.

So that's what I encourage.

I couldn't agree to more.

I know when people visit your website and by the way, everyone, what we're going to do is we'll put all, all the links to all of Darcy's his website and all the social media and, and any, any other links to other things that we've talked about that'll be in the show notes.

So I just want everybody to know that I know your books are on your website in terms of where they're available for purchase.

Can you just quickly tell us where they're available for purchase?

Amazon, of course, is the big one, but anywhere online, that book you can buy online books, Barnes and Noble and Target and all these different places that you can buy books online, they're available because I've marketed it not only through Amazon but also through IngramSpark, which allows those books to be uploaded to all these other online book sellers or bookstores.

So those are the two biggest.

And just so everybody knows, that's exactly the same model we've used Darcy's model.

So we use Amazon and we use ingramsparks for every other online book retailer.

And I also publish my books in hardcover, Paperback and hardcover.

And the hardcover, I have published them through IngramSpark because Amazon doesn't do children's books and hardcover.

So IngramSpark actually has a website that buyers can go to and purchase the book directly from IngramSpark.

Instead of going through Amazon, you can buy it directly from ingramspark.

There's a little bit of a cost savings there and it's quicker, quicker to buy it through IngramSpark's website if you want hardcover.

Can you share some final thoughts?

The experience for me, I'd never anticipated going down this road, but now that I have, it has been such a wonderful experience that I can't imagine not doing it or not having done it and not stopping.

I think I'm going to continue to do it.

Eventually I may start lacking off on the number of books that I write and just focus more on getting out there and talking to people and sharing the books.

But it's, it's just a lot of fun and it's a way to kind of, for some people, even if you're just going to do a one and done, it's so fulfilling to do one book and have it out there in the world with your name on it and then go to the library and you see it on the shelf.

It's just, wow.

Nothing feels better than to see your book with your name on the COVID you know, So I would encourage just go for it, do it.

And it's so easy, it's so easy to do.

Nowadays through self publishing, there's some expense, but there's ways to mitigate that too.

Some of the expenses.

To your point, go have some fun with it.

Like it doesn't have to be all work.

If you tie in some play, it definitely can be some fun.

Especially I love what you're doing with your grandkids and getting them involved.

And it's like, wow, what a great idea.

And look, now you have planted the idea in my head of when my grandkids get a little older, we're going to go out and do some of.

Our own adventures as a self published book author.

We both know that, you know, it takes some financial resources to do all this.

And so what we did is with my grandchildren, we've written 38 stories.

Now, of course they're not children's books yet, but what we've done, and we've actually added them to our website is we actually turned at least half of them into audiobooks.

And four out of my five grandchildren are the narrator capturing their young voices.

Now before they get.

Because I got a couple of grandsons, I got three granddaughters and two grandsons.

At some point their, their voices are going to get huskier.

Right, Right.

Yeah.

I, I listened to the podcast where you interviewed your, your granddaughter, Kira.

Yes.

And she, she sounds grown up now.

Is she?

She is.

We did capture her younger voice.

It's in one of the episodes where I, I, I interviewed her when she was five or six.

So.

Okay.

Yeah, so.

And you know, it's just the way it, it, it turned out.

But you know, they grow so quickly.

That's what's happened.

And that's why I'm trying to capture all these moments as quickly as I can.

Because every day they just get it.

They get.

I get younger.

They get older.

Yep.

That's right.

I understand.

I understand.

My.

My granddaughter's now 5, and I have a second granddaughter that will be entering the world in the middle of May.

So she's not born yet, but then I'll have two grandkids to go out and do some adventures with.

One of the things that we did, Darcy, created a bookmark, and it has a QR code, and so when someone purchases our book, we give them a free bookmark and they get the audio.

A free audio book with it.

It's actually my middle granddaughter.

She's the narrator of our first story.

Oh, wow.

Good.

Definitely a lot of fun.

Well, you know what?

I want to thank you so much for being a guest on the Adventures in the Heart of Children's Book Authors.

Your generosity of time, your insights and are definitely going to significantly benefit aspiring authors, which I love, and I.

I know that readers will enjoy your books.

I really enjoyed your book.

I can't wait to share it with my grandchildren.

I promise everyone we'll get links to everything to help you reach out to Darcy and enjoy his.

His four what.

What soon will be four.

Four books.

I really, really appreciate that.

If you've enjoyed this episode, please hit the subscribe button to listen to this episode, and our future episodes would really be appreciated.

And feel free to share this episode with anyone who's inspired or enjoys hearing about Darcy, Dolph, and Gwen's Coast Guard adventures.