Baby Goes Baaaaa! - Publication!!!!

Yes, today is the day (hurrah!) when all you good people can rush out to your local booksellers and demand multiple copies of my newest book, Baby Goes Baaaaa! 

The book is stuffed full of sounds that baby will recognise and can easily make. Making these early sounds with a baby is fundamental to early language development, but the funny illustrations of various cute and silly animal characters romping through the book will hopefully make it a fun experience to share and explore together, while the learning happens behind the scenes.

Although the pictures here are square edged, the actual book has gently rounded corners to make it baby-friendly, plus it's fully laminated (thanks Egmont), to allow for enthusiastic licking and sucking! 

My editor at Egmont tells me that we have already sold over 7000 copies (queue fireworks...)!! These are not sales made over the counter at bookshops of course, since it's only just available to buy this week, but because of pre-publication deals the publisher has done with Sainsburies, Mothercare, Bertrams and Gardners, plus 3000 copies for an Australian co-edition. It's all extremely good news though and bodes well, so I'm very excited, as you can imagine.

I've been working on Baby Goes Baaaaa! and it's sister book Baby Can Bounce! since May 2009 (yes, picture books take a very long time to come to fruition). If you want to look 'behind the scenes', so to speak, you can follow Baby Goes Baaaaa!'s progress here on my blog, from my first ideas and character sketches, pitching it to various publishers, negotiating my contract, through the roughs, publisher feedback, creating the artwork, right through to the digital finishing work, proofing and printing.

The 2nd book, Baby Can Bounce!, which explores learning through mimicry, follows on in the summer. Since all the orders and deals are made well in advance of publication, I should very shortly begin to hear news of how well this one is going to start it's life too.