S1 Ep. 4 Kickstarter for a Picture Book

Shari Lyon talks about her children’s picture books featuring exotic animals and music, and her upcoming book about a shy hippo who stands up against poachers. Lisa and Shari also discuss Kickstarter and the importance of knowing your audience as a writer.

Check out Shari’s Kickstarter campaign

Key Points

• Shari’s next book, Hadori Stands Up, is about a shy hippo who stands up for her friends against poachers. She discusses the importance of teaching kids to speak up when they see something wrong, especially in the age of social media bullying.
• Shari discusses her desire to control the representation of her book and the importance of the subject matter. She explains how Kickstarter funding will allow her to pay her team and potentially create deluxe copies for backers.
• Shari encourages writers to take their work seriously and not give up, sharing her experience helping writers get published and the importance of holding onto one’s beliefs. She references Stephen King’s book On Writing and emphasizes the importance of knowing your audience.

Lisa: I’m here today with an author, Shari Lyon, who has some beautiful and educational children’s picture books out. I love these books. Why don’t you talk a bit about how you got into wildlife and writing for children?

Shari: I have always loved animals, and my children are my people. I love hanging around with them because what you see is what you get with kids. And it encourages you to be your authentic self. I’ve always loved stories and animals and children, and I put it all together with a little addition of music because all of my books have a song that helps to tell the story. In fact, the song appears at least once, sometimes twice, sometimes three times within the actual storytelling. I add that music piece to the children and the stories and the animals, the exotic animals, because they’re so in trouble. And I figure if we inspire our children to love them, not just lions and tigers and bears, oh, my. But also cassowaries and hippos and all these other kinds of animals that people don’t know that much about. Then maybe they will become adults aware of the fact that we are caretakers of these beautiful creatures on our planet.

Lisa: How do you incorporate music? Do you have a musical background?

Shari: Yes, I do. I have my masters in English, in music, and I I’ve been involved with music since I was five. And so at one point, I was going to be a professional musician, copyist. And nobody knows what that is. And it’s okay if you don’t know. Probably there aren’t any copyist left on the planet anyway, since we have other means to do that now.

But all that is to say, I always was a dancer and a string bass player and a piano player and a clarinet player. And I love music and I write songs all the time. They come into my brain and they’re little ditties more than songs kind of like. But the ones in the books are actual official songs that sometimes the song comes first and sometimes the story comes first and sometimes the main character comes first. In any case, it’s always there. I make up songs to teach people things.

Lisa: Tell me about some of your books.

Shari: The first one I wrote is called But Not Gino about a short giraffe who feels like he’s not a very successful giraffe because he can’t do the things the tall giraffes can do. But in the telling of the book, we find that he has something special that he can even teach the tall giraffes to do.

The second book that came out is called Toby Came Late, about a little tiny monarch caterpillar that is spotted by a little boy named Max in the garden the day after Christmas. And of course, he’s all alone in the garden. Max befriends him and sees him grow from Caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. And Toby has a little adventure when he actually ends up going to a butterfly exhibit with Max. And that book is all about let yourself shine in the sun, even though you’re only one and it goes on encouraging late bloomers to just hang in there. They will find their niche soon enough.

The third one I wrote for the San Diego Zoo called Paws, Hoofs, and Wings: Animal Heroes of the San Diego Zoo. It’s their centennial book honoring their first hundred years. And in it, a little orangutan escapes from her enclosure and gets lost in the middle of the night. And a tortoise named Speed, who actually lived at the San Diego Zoo, takes her back to her enclosure and tells her stories about the first animals that came to the zoo and how they got there, including the zoo’s creator, Dr. Harry Wegeforth. We find out more about him, too.

And the next one in the series is live on Kickstarter. And that book is called Hadori Stands Up, and it’s about a shy little hippo who finds herself standing up for her friends around the river, who don’t know that they’re supposed to stand up for creatures that can’t stand up for themselves against poachers that come after them. So that one has a little more serious of the topic than the others, but it’s a fun book, too. I love the book. I can’t wait to get it in the hands of kiddos.

Lisa: Yeah, these are all very educational in nature because they talk about animals, they talk about nature and humans and the whole relationship. So I guess they’re probably very popular among schoolchildren.

Shari: Yes, they are. One of the things I love to do is go into schools and read the stories and tell them a little bit more about whatever they want to know. Actually because we have a Q&A about the animal or about what it is to write and or the song, whatever. But you make an excellent point that my animals don’t wear purple shirts and pink pants and they don’t do things that they normally wouldn’t do in the wild. Each one of the books emphasizes the fact that this is an animal doing what the animal does. And, the animal solves a problem that young people and people of all ages really can also face. And they have to find their own way of dealing with that issue or that problem. But once a young person sees an animal finding their own way to solve the issue, it kind of gives them a leg up. If that hippo can do it, that giraffe can do it, that butterfly can do it. Maybe I can do it too.

Lisa: Speaking of you can do it. You were an English major. Is that how you got into writing or what really got you into writing?

Shari: My father and my grandmother were amazing storytellers and I listened to the same story over and over and over again. And my mother, who was not as enlightened in that way, said, ‘Why do you listen to the same thing all the time?’ Because I was too little to write them down.

Then I started telling the stories to my children. And I started writing down the stories for my own children and my own grandchildren. But truthfully, a sweet little girl at a signing once asked me What was the first story I wrote? And I told her I had this vision of myself at my little desk and as a two and a half year old, maybe three and I was, you know, doodling, but I kept saying it was my writing. I was doing my writing. And when my dad came home from work, he said, ‘What did you do today, Bright Eyes?’ And I said, I wrote you a story and I held it up and showed it to him. And he said, ‘What’s the story about?’ And I made up some story. I don’t know what it was about, but I made up some story. And he said, ‘Oh, I love that. I hope you write me another one sometime.’

My cat had kittens when I was nine and I wrote a story about it. It’s just my way of entering the world and processing what happens to me.

Lisa: So you’re a born writer. That’s wonderful. You know, some people are born writers. Some people are made writers. But we all hope to get published. So how did you get these books published?

Shari: That’s a very interesting story. And I will credit the Santa Barbara writers conference for giving me the courage to step out. I taught school for 40 years, and when I left public education, I left to write the stories that I had in my head. And I had dozens. So I took them to the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, and I read them or had them read in a group led by the wonderful Mary Penny Hershey. She loved my stories. Mary said, ‘Shari, you can share your story now.’ And, of course, I had to sing the songs because nobody knows what the songs are like except me.

I shared a story called Along Hippity Gets Fancy New Legs and sang the song and the woman in the doorway was a publisher. And Mary, the publisher, and I went to lunch. She said, ‘We can’t pick you up right now. But here are three things I want you to do in the next few months. And they’re hard things, so it’ll take you all this time.’

It took me a good six months to do all three things.

The first thing she said to do was to visualize your product. And more than visualize it, hold it in your hand, smell it, feel it. Open the book up, turn the pages. Have a clear and concise vision about what you want your project to be like and hold on to it. Once you have it, hold onto it.

The second thing is, after you do that, you’ll know more about what your product and what makes it stand aside from other products. And that’s when I came up with, well, I have songs, all my books have songs. And it was a happy accident. Coincidence, I don’t know. But all of them had songs that helped that were part of the story were the messages encapsulated in the song. So the kids forget the story, that’s okay, but they might remember the song.

Then the third thing she said was come up with a short phrase and a logo that says what your stuff is just by looking at it. And that’s when I came up with Read to me saying all of my books are read to me, sing to me, books with the song that helps to tell the story. Well, my books are all about wild animals and I live near the San Diego Zoo. So I thought I’ll just find out if I can find somebody who has the power to say yes or no without walking up a ladder chain to the top. Can you let me know whether these stories are good enough? Would you like my stories? And we could illustrate them with photographs from the San Diego Zoo animals. So I got the name of this person and I went in to this meeting and I walked out of the meeting having sold them, But Not Gino, which was not finished.

I did not have any illustrations except a portrait of the main character. And I made up my own publishing company called Cozy Lyon Press, which I don’t do anymore. But they said, okay, we’ll buy 150 copies. Wow. All right, so I printed 200 copies all at my own expense. Those sold out in a month. They said, okay, we need 250 more. So I printed 500 and by the time the summer was over, the zoo said, You need a publisher. This is ridiculous. You need to make some money. So how about if we connect you with a couple of ideas and you pick one?

I picked one and they published Toby Came Late and Paws, Hoofs, and Wings. So that’s how that happened. I mean, the hard part is what happened at Santa Barbara Writers Conference, which was stepping, learning how to step out and whether your product is, as some people say, has legs, whether it has the power to touch someone in a way that hasn’t been before.

Lisa: You certainly do that very well. You have great messages in your books. This new one in particular, because it talks about something that I don’t think is very often covered in a children’s book or a book for young children. And that’s the idea of preventing poaching.

Shari: Yes, you’re absolutely right. And I hadn’t thought about the fact that it’s not dealt with much, but I agree. And I took on the subject because it was important and because I knew children needed to find out what is happening to these animals. And, you know, they came out a long time ago with this phrase, if you see something, say something. And that’s what this book encourages kids to do. If you see something that doesn’t look exactly right, say something to someone who can help. And I think it’s an important message for kids to get, especially in this age of social media, bullying and all this icky stuff that’s out there that young people feel like it’s bombarding them from all sides.

That’s why this is a hard subject. But thanks to Christina Wald‘s really remarkable art and Vicky Vaughn Shea‘s wonderful design, this book is appealing. My main character, Hadori, is this kind hippo who has an ox pecker bird as her little buddy who flies around. We never mention her till you get to the fun facts of the end of the book. But she’s a very appealing character. And thanks to these two women who, by the way, Vicki was my designer for Toby Came Late and also the designer for Paws, Hoofs, and Wings. So this is a team that’s been together for a while.

Lisa: Now in order to get this book out there and published and to be able to pay these wonderful people and to be able to get some for yourself and to get the word out there you decided to do a Kickstarter campaign. And that in itself can be quite a challenge.

Shari: Oh, my goodness. You said it. Anyone that tells you that what people did on Kickstarter is just like filling in the blanks. No, it’s not. I mean, there are blanks to fill in, but it is it’s challenging to do it. Well, I think probably anybody could do it. But whether you do it well enough.

The reason I decided to go with Kickstarter is because they are a good company. Their protection, their security, protect you as an author. And the only thing is it’s very risky because if you don’t make your fundraising goal, you don’t get anything. And it’s a lot of work for nothing.

So you really need a good team of people helping you. I have a wonderful illustrator who’s been down the road two or three times and my designer also. So I had this really good team and what I found out from doing some research, watching, you know, going to webinars and watching things and some of the things that you sent me, by the way, which helped. I found out that even traditional publishers are funding new authors through Kickstarter because they figure, well, this is going to cost us $20,000 to print these copies. And so if we can raise 20,000 on Kickstarter, we start at the head of the game and we’re paying the author from book sales. And I thought, Well, if traditional publishers can do it, then why can’t I?

I thought and also Christina, my illustrator, said this is an important book. You don’t want anybody to mess with it and change it for you. You want to control this book. And when she said that, I said, you’re right. This is a very important subject to me, poaching and standing up for what’s right. I want it represented. I want to control how it’s represented. And so that’s why I decided to fund it through Kickstarter. And this way, if I make my finance goal, then I pay my illustrator, pay my designer. If I go over the goal, then I can pay for a deluxe printing for my Kickstarter backers and give them some prettier copies of the book.

Lisa: What were some of the challenges you faced when setting up your Kickstarter campaign?

Shari: Well, as with anything technologically, you’re better at technology than I am. Thank goodness I have you. But things change over time within the program that they’re using. So you have to roll with those punches, making the site look appealing, not using forbidden terms, not necessarily forbidden, but words that Kickstarter doesn’t like you to use in reference to your project, which you know you have to learn.

I think there was probably two or three months of watching videos, going to webinars, joining a group called Kickstarter for Authors, which is a group on Facebook, and reading through those posts and finding out where people had hiccups and tripped and fell into holes and things and learning how they got out of their messes, seeing projects that failed and projects that succeeded.

It’s like going to college to do it right. And then I was blessed with a designer and an illustrator who had both funded their own books through Kickstarter. So they’d been down the path and they knew where some hiccups might be.

Lisa: Yes, they did the illustrations and the layout they helped with, it’s beautiful, a beautiful page. And you had to come up with a bunch of rewards for your backers.

Shari: Yeah, they recommend 8 to 10 reward tiers. And coming up with that and keeping yourself consistent, that was hard. What would people want and what would they not want? You know, what is valuable? What’s not valuable. And so, yeah, that was kind of fun in a way, because I started out with these crazy reward ideas and I kind of pared them down.

Lisa: Some people think, oh, well, doing Kickstarter, that’s easy. And, you’re saying, well, it might sound easy, but it’s not. There’s a lot of challenges. And then the other thing people think is you probably get a lot of people who say, I’ve heard this from other people who write children’s stories, Oh, I want to write a children’s story. Oh, well, that’s so much easier than writing a story for an adult. It’s so much easier than writing a novel. What do you tell people when they say that?

Shari: I say to them that good writers come in all different shapes and sizes, and there are some writers who are destined to write novels. There are some writers that have poetry in their soul and they write poems beautifully. There are some people who write plays really well, and there are some people that think like five-year-olds.

I don’t think I ever left that thought process, but actually what I tell them is you may very well have a wonderful, good idea for a story. And if your niece or your grandson or your neighbor child loves your story, that’s a great beginning. Join writers groups, have people critique your piece. But if you are serious about this, you have to get serious and you have to follow it through.

I help writers get their own books out there and I’ve had ten people that I have helped get books published, three of them couldn’t stand the long journey and just bowed out. They said, No, this is too much work, it’s too hard. Even though they weren’t putting it online, I was doing all the putting it online and all the editing and all that stuff. They were just making fixes and keeping the storyline line and whatnot. Three of them gave up. Don’t give up if it’s something you really believe in, hold on to it.

And I think that’s why that publisher’s advice was so good. So take some time with your product and hold onto your image of it, which Lisa, to be honest with you, even with my publisher, that was hard because there were times when I had to dig in. I said, no, that’s not who I am. I don’t do books like that. I don’t do books about purple elephants. I just don’t. My elephants look like elephants. I want people, if they saw them in the wild, to say, yes, that’s an elephant. Or if they saw a hippo in the wild, they say, oh, there’s Hadori.

And believe me, I can’t tell you the number of kids who come up to me and say I was Toby for Halloween. And the mother said, yes, he was. But the only butterfly wings we could find were female butterfly wings. Because in your story, you tell how they tell the difference. And they made me put a black dot on those wings where it should go, so they could be Toby and, you know, so it it’s meaningful.

It’s important that you stick with that. You stick with what’s important, and you just hold on to it and don’t give up. Because if you give up, guess what? You fail, period. It’s done. The story doesn’t come out.

Lisa: Wow. What wonderful advice and inspiration for writers and anybody wanting to go into to publishing a book, whether it’s for children or adults or anybody. Any other advice you can think of for writers or people wanting to get their books published or put their books on Kickstarter or anything else you want to tell people?

Shari: I guess the one thing is that when you’re ready to put it out to people that you know and you’d be amazed where the help comes from because you’re going to need help, you can do a lot of the writing is the fun part. The writing is your alone part.

Stephen King‘s book On Writing is a very valuable resource. It’s not a How to Do It book. He writes it as a sort of an autobiography. A memoir, but through the memoir, he talks about his process, his writing process and a couple other things that he said was, one is the writing is what you do by yourself. You don’t share it with anybody. It’s kind of getting ready to be shared, don’t share it with anybody. But keep in mind who you are writing for. Have an idea of who you’re writing for. And that’s what saved me and all my books. I knew exactly who I was writing this story for.

Lisa: Well, that is excellent advice. And I thank you so much for coming on and talking with me.