Children’s Books

Where the Sidewalk Ends

imageBy @AprilDParker

Brianna has recently borrowed this book from the school library and she loves it.  She says, “It’s awesome!”  She’s already read it once and is rereading it.
She excitedly told me about various poems she read and how the cover was supposed to be white but it came off so it was replaced.
It makes this mother’s heart sing to hear her baby so excited about reading.

Willow's Friends Surprise Her

Willow’s Friends Surprise Her : A Book of Shadow Puppets

Willow's Friends Surprise Her

These are the links to the paperback version of Willow Travels the World.

Available on Amazon.

Available on CreateSpace.

Available on Barnes & Noble.

The story focuses on the character Willow as she travels the world, making new friends along the way. It has a simple story with intermediate level vocabulary and multiple short sentences per story page perfect for the budding reader ready for the next challenge. This book contains photographs of shadow puppet animals and a photograph of how my daughter made each of them with her hands so the reader can try to make them on their own.

It only took me months.

Willow’s Friends Surprise Her is up on Create Space!  It will slowly filter into other stores from there.  I will share links in the next few days.

Willow's Friends Surprise Her

 

Willow Book Three is almost live!Willow's Friends Surprise Her

The next book in the Bree’s shadow puppet series is one step closer to going live.  I am waiting to here back from Create Space.  I haven’t decided if I’m going to offer it as an ebook or not yet.  So far we have only been selling paperback versions.  It was a lot of extra work turning it into an ebook.  I will share the links as soon as it goes live.

 

Scooby and the Witch Doctor

Scooby-Doo and the Witch DoctorScooby-Doo and the Witch Doctor by James Gelsey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved Scooby Doo as a child and now my daughter has picked up the torch. She read this in one sitting.  Immediately read it again.

View all my reviews

Purple Cover

Cover Reveal

After I gave up I neglected this website a bit.  It was kind of up to date and that was fine.  What I hadn’t shared was the tentative new cover for the next Willow book.  So I will do that today!

Willow 3 Cover

 

I gave up –

Bump in Progress had me beat.

I tried and tried to fix the toc .epub error.  I even added a table of contents.  At one point I added the phrase attempt ’50ish’ to the end of my .doc file.  Frustration finally won out and I abandoned it.  It was still on Smashwords, still on Amazon (with new cover), still on CreateSpace but it just wasn’t in the Premium Catalogue anymore.  I could live with that.

At the beginning of the month they sent me a courtesy email reminding me that the abandoned book did not have Premium status.  Again I decided I could live with it and disregarded the email.  To finish my story I have to go sideways a bit.  I have written a book under another name and it is with my dear beloved beta reader.  While my book is waiting her hectic life to slow down so she can read it I decided to work on my styles and toc.

A chapter in the Smashwords guide I fool-heartly didn’t read.  Even against their repeated expressed advice not to skip any parts.  I didn’t have a table of contents!  Why did I need to read it?  Well after reading it and making a toc for my adult book I dove into fixing my bump in progress.  Using information obtained in the seemingly unneeded chapter of the guide.

I am pleased to share that the book sailed through it’s .file checks.  And while it churned at the place in cyber space where they process books at Smashwords I tweaked soft returns, regular returns, pt spaces and the such to eliminate weird blank pages.  Finally arriving at a version I was pleased with.  (It even sailed through .mobi file checks which it never did before.  This always hung me up and I would just uncheck the box for .mobi conversion.)  This is the current version of the Willow Series with the now white cover!  Onto purple!

Bump in progress

Per suggestion as I mentioned a few days ago I changed the cover of the second Willow book, Willow Travels the World.  I thought this would be no big deal, change the cover, submit and go about my merry way.  Well for some reason this simple change has now got the book flagged for having an ePub error, ‘calibre_toc_2’, there is more to it but that’s not the important part.  Oddly enough it always had that ePub error, actually both books do when I ran them through the ePub check.  So I am confused as to why suddenly it halts our re-inclusion with the new cover into the Premium Program with Smashwords.  I don’t know anything about ePub or it’s errors but ‘toc’ I have noticed usually means table of contents, I don’t even have one.  So, I have no idea how to fix an error on something I don’t even have.  What I gather it’s a malfunctioning link and since I have no ‘toc’ links I went ahead and checked all my hyper links to my social media and they all are working correctly.  I resubmitted it as an ePub file so wish me luck.  My next move will be just to resubmit the previous version that got expectance and hope it sneaks through like it did before.  At least the book is still available in the other cover on Smashwords distribution sites like iBooks, Kobo and Nook.  The new cover is available on Kindle but not in paperback yet, it’s in the works with CreateSpace for distribution on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc..  Already submitted, approved and checked.

Made it!

Willow Travels the World finally made it to Kobo.  I checked and checked so I gave it a rest for a few days and just saw it on there tonight.  Bree is already talking about the next adventure for Willow and I have an idea or two too.

Smiling!!!

Here is the link to Willow Visits Her Friends now available as an eBook on Nook!!

Willow Visits Her Friends: A Book of Shadow Puppets by April Parker | 2940151969987 | NOOK Book (eBook) | Barnes & Noble.