Now, as an adult, do you look for those kinds of stories to help the kids in your lives? Then you’ll want to meet Maggie Van Galen!

Maggie’s debut children’s book, The Adventures of Keeno and Ernest: The Banana Tree, is a perfect example of a story designed to entertain and educate young children. Starring a mischievous monkey and the clever elephant, this brightly colored children’s book touches on the importance of both friendship and listening to family rules.

Here to share more about her motivations behind creating her book and her experiences after publishing it, is Maggie Van Galen. Please welcome Maggie to the Spotlight!

MCA: Hello Maggie! Can you share with us your reasons for creating The Adventures of Keeno and Ernest?
Maggie: My inspiration comes from two places: my father and my boys. As a child, my father always told me stories. He was a fantastic storyteller, and I would get lost in his characters and the different locations he sent me. I guess I sort of got the bug!

My second inspiration is my two beautiful boys. When they were born, I began making up my own stories. I would tell them about Keeno and Ernest at bedtime. The boys loved them, and I soon found myself going into classrooms and sharing the stories with all of their friends.

MCA: It’s nice to see a love for stories shared by families through generations! Now, it’s easy to have an idea and goal for a book, but bringing it to life is a journey. What was your biggest challenge, and how did you overcome it?
Maggie: Fear of rejection was my biggest challenge! Overcoming  that came with encouragement from family, friends, teachers, and the children that I would tell the story to.

MCA: What kind of response have you had from those who are reading your book? It is what you had hoped for?
Maggie: I have had overwhelmingly positive feedback from most everyone! The best response is from the kids when I read the story to them! That is what it’s all about for me! I have read to as many as 200 kids at once, ranging in ages from infant to fifth graders and my claim to fame is that I haven’t lost a child’s attention yet!

MCA: That is good to hear! What do you consider your most important contribution in bringing your book to families and educators?
Maggie: I think the story offers a lot of what children are looking for in a book: action, adventure, interesting and engaging characters, and friendship! Plus, there is a “non-preachy” (as one reviewer put it) way of giving a life lesson that both parents and educators like.

MCA: Has developing The Adventures of Keeno and Ernest changed your life in any way? We’d love it if you could share that  with our readers.
Maggie: My children are visibly proud of me and that is such a heartwarming feeling! It hasn’t changed me, but it has made me appreciate my boys even more … if that’s possible!

MCA: That’s wonderful! Looking ahead six months to a year, what’s next for you?
Maggie: My signature that I use everywhere is “Always Follow Your Dreams!”

I plan to continue to follow mine by promoting this book to its fullest. I just released the next book in the series, The Adventures of Keeno and Ernest: The Diamond Mine. A third adventure for Keeno and Ernest is swirling around in my head…so we’ll see where that goes!

MCA: We look forward to seeing what you will come up with for your third book! Thanks for sharing your story with us, Maggie.

Mom’s Choice Awards® Honors

The Adventures of Keeno and Ernest: The Banana Tree
by Maggie Van Galen
Children’s Picture Books
Silver – Values and Life Lessons

Contact, Connect, and Network with Maggie

The Alumni Spotlight is a periodic feature on the official Mom’s Choice Awards® blog. It is part of our ongoing effort to “shine the spotlight” on you and your award-winning, family-friendly products, services, and media.Recent Posts:

• Meet our Newest Honorees
• Forget Facebook; keep your fans to yourself! : Confluent Forms
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We’re glad you’re here to meet our newest members of the Mom’s Choice Awards® family!

Every month we publish a Press Release announcing the newest group of Mom’s Choice Awards® Honorees who have EARNED our Honoring Excellence endorsement as being among the best in family-friendly products.

Unlike any other Awards program, we accept entries and announce winners with an open schedule.

For families and buyers, it means that you don’t have to wait until “kid’s month” to see the best in family-friendly toys and educational products. You know that the products listed here have been thoroughly evaluated and are award-winners when YOU are ready to make a purchase. Not because someone else decided.

For creators, publishers, and manufacturers, it means that you can enter your product on a schedule that works for you … especially when you are trying to build buzz for a new product!

• Go here to see our Press Releases
• Browse the Mom’s Choice Awards® Shop to find products or services that interest you.
• Visit our Website to learn more about who we are, meet our volunteer judges, and find out how to enter your product or service.

to find the best in family-friendly products, services, and resources for your children or yourself.

Our monthly press release introduces you to award winning products and services that have EARNED our Honoring Excellence seal.Recent Posts:

• Maggie Van Galen’s fun and thoughtful story for families
• Forget Facebook; keep your fans to yourself! : Confluent Forms
• The Small Business Guide to Google Analytics

The post Meet our Newest Honorees appeared first on Celebrating Mom's Choice.

See on www.webmarketingdude.comRecent Posts:

• UPDATED Book Publishers: What I Learned at IBPA Pub U (Part 2)
• Forget Facebook; keep your fans to yourself! : Confluent Forms
• The Small Business Guide to Google Analytics

The post How To Get More Pinterest Users To Pin Your Blog Posts ~ Web Marketing Dude appeared first on Celebrating Mom's Choice.

Today I’ll start with this question: have you ever thought of yourself as a global company?

Most likely you already are, particularly if you are creating and selling in the digital space. From the thumbnail of your book cover in the iTunes bookstore to the fact that 5.1 billion of the 7.1 billion people on our planet have cellphones … many of us using them for reading.

Futurist David Houle really brought this home for me in his keynote at IBPA Publishing University on Saturday. As he explained, we are in a transformation point of the “Shift Age.” 2010-2020 represents a transformation where “legacy thinking falls away.” These are the three key forces

• Flow to global – Not just economic, but the human construct, too. Neither time, distance, nor place limit our communications. 
• Flow to individual – An explosion of choice means power moves from the producer to the consumer.
• Accelerating Electronic Connectedness – Internet and cellphones.

So what does this mean for creatives and their publishers? According to David:

Content is not king. ConTEXT is king. Context isn’t about content exclusively, and it isn’t about product absolutely. ~ David Heule, futurist and author

Sound familiar? In his presentation, David offered that intellectual property creates wealth in the Shift Age. Validation of this point was available all weekend long.

• Guy Kawasaki’s presentation about his new book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish a Book.
  
• Christopher Kenneally’s panel, Beyond the Click: There’s More to Publishing than Uploading a file
  • Allen Lau, co-founder and CEO of Wattpad, the world’s largest community of readers and writers.
    
  • Matthew Cavnar, VP of Business Development at Vook, a cloud-based ePublishing platform.
• Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, an ebook distributor serving more than 35,000 indie authors and small presses around the world.
• Brian Felsen, president of BookBaby, CD Baby, and HostBaby.
• Dominique Raccah‘s keynote that focused on the evolution of Sourcebooks.

Shift happens. My sense of the weekend is that attendees look at the idea of “legacy thinking falling away” in the same way the world looked at Lenin’s statue coming down in Red Square. Transformation.

Progressive thinking and flexibility have always been the hallmarks of the independent publishers and writers. The shift to the individual is neither new nor unique to IBPA and its members.

Now is the perfect time for the self-described small, nontraditional, or artisanal publisher and independent creator (author, illustrator, blogger) to drop the labels, step into the spotlight, share their expertise, and shine.

IBPA Publishing University makes that possible … and I can’t wait until next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

 Recent Posts:

• UPDATED Book Publishers: What I Learned at IBPA Pub U (Part 2)
• What I Learned at IBPA University 2013 – Part 1
• IBPA Publishing University: Will I see you in Chicago?

The post Shift Has Happened: Today’s Book Publishing Paradigm (Part 3) appeared first on Celebrating Mom's Choice.

This is the second in a three-part series about attending the Independent Book Publishers’ Association (IBPA) Publishing University last weekend in Chicago.

In Part I, I shared my experiences from a “macro” view. That post focused on the opportunities and my general observations. Today’s focus is on books from the book publishers perspective.

Your book is part of the discoverability process. It is not the end game.

Everyone agrees that your book is an investment – your creative capital, your time, and of course money to pay for it all. What was new to me, however, is the idea that a book is a tangible piece of a broader marketing plan. More than a “prop,” but clearly just one piece of a broader strategy.

Book publishers sell books, they aren’t marketers. In our session, Deltina Hay Mary Agnes Antonopoulos explained that book sales won’t make money. The book is a vehicle, but it is the product services that draw your audience first.

Discoverability at its core. Guy Kawasaki explained in his presentation that writing a book to get speaking engagements won’t work. As he – and many others – explained, though, discovery can’t happen unless you have established your expertise.

How? It takes a well-defined strategy that you can realistically implement. Here are three takeaways:

1. Don’t try to be everywhere. You don’t have time and it dilutes your message. [Panel: Strategies for a Winning  Social Media Campaign]
2. Do only the type of promotion you enjoy [Earlybird General Session: Dan Poynter: Book Promotion 2013]
3. Marketing is about connecting to people / readers, not [insert company name]. [Dominique Raccah, Luncheon Keynote]

I’ll close with this quote about book publishers from Dominique Raccah …

Book publishers are solving problems for readers in ways that are useful for authors.

What are your experiences in trying to get your book discovered? Is it strictly book events (like signings) or does it take more?Recent Posts:

• How To Get More Pinterest Users To Pin Your Blog Posts ~ Web Marketing Dude
• Shift Has Happened: Today’s Book Publishing Paradigm (Part 3)
• What I Learned at IBPA University 2013 – Part 1

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