Why Daddy Works
I wrote Why Daddy Works in the fall of 2015 during my maternity leave late one night when my son had finally gone back to sleep, and I couldn’t fall back to sleep yet. My husband had started working nights in the spring and our two-year-old daughter didn’t understand why she wasn’t seeing him as often as she used to. With a new baby in tow, she had a lot of questions about why her daddy had to work. I had always loved writing poetry and stories, so I had the idea to write a story for her and insert pictures of our family to help explain why her daddy works. Whenever she missed him, we would read the story as a reminder for why he is making the sacrifice that he is making.
My grandmother thought it was a good story and that other parents may be having the same conversation with their children so I should consider publishing it to help other families. I started the journey to finding a publisher. At the time, I had no idea about self-publishing. I started pitching the story and after many rejections I finally received the dream email that all authors look forward to receiving…. Someone wanted to publish my story! I was so excited! She loved the story because it resonated with her son. She advised me to begin looking for the style of illustrations that I like and begin sending them to her to help guide the process.
A month goes by, and I received a lovely email that the CEO no longer wants to publish children’s books and that they were not going to move forward with my project. I went back to the drawing board and continued querying. I also started looking at the back of the children’s books my kids were bringing home to learn about more publishers that are out here. I came across one at the time that was local. In my mind, I thought this would be a great publisher to go through because of course they would want to publish a local author. Well, the joke was on me.
Being that the publisher was local in my head we were neighbors so instead of querying I called the office like I was going to ask them to borrow some sugar. Now, I wasn’t acting thirsty when I called. I approached our conversation more like an informational interview. I told them that I was an aspiring author, and I was looking for more information on the industry to prepare me for this journey. They answered many of my questions and finished the conversation with “Becoming a published author is like winning the lottery”. I was not expecting that response at all. I thought they were going to ask to see some of the stories I had written or invite me to tour the offices. As I write this, I definitely understand what they meant by that comment however, there are ways to get your story out there which I found out later.
