Phew! Well Greetings Carpeteers and Singing Frog Fans everywhere.

My favourite (favorite) phrase of the moment is 'You may not think this is important, but it is so I'm bothering telling you so....'  (Courtesy of Dr Seuss)

So the important news for me is that I finally finished my refresh of Bradley and the Magic Carpet, including a new cover, a bit of relayout work, new endpapers, and a bit more info about Singing Frog Publishing and the other books in the new version. We're up to three books now. Whoo! Three's the charm.. so it doesn't feel quite like a fluke getting a book published anymore (and it feels a lot more like hard work.. which is fine.. because it's a labour of love.. and here I am at nearly 11pm on a school night writing about it - which you would not do unless you were keen, right?!)

Any road up. That's the last road block basically before all my energy can go towards the next book. Except perhaps the production of a Kindle for this which I'm still keen to do. 

As I've mentioned before, Jumbo Giant Sausages and Bradley and the Dinosaur are both well liked it seems (early days for the Soss yet of course) so it was just a tweak needed for the Carpet, to bring it into line with the new look Second Edition Bradley and the Dinosaur, and also 'JGS' and also to update the cover and back cover to reflect these changes.

Now that I understand book layout a lot better - Bradley and the Magic Carpet was supposedly laid out perfectly for printing but ended up with about three blank pages at the end. Well, now I know what's causing that, they won't be there in the new edition.. and it will have a more industry standard endpaper layout and front matter too.

Not that many will notice I suppose, haha.. but these things are great when they're done right. In the original book, the front matter was just a single page.. and now it will be a full, double-spread.

We've had a competition, first in a while on Instagram... for those who helped give feedback on the new cover...and there'll be another one soon via mailing list. So if you haven't joined the mailing list yet.. either email us to join, or fill out the contact form on the website.

Dino Wishes,

​Julian

P.S. Maybe it's also worth mentioning, that if you're the collecting sort, Bradley and the Magic Carpet - first edition will soon be retired, once the second edtion is published sometime in the next couple of weeks. So you still have a chance to get hold of what will become a 'rarity'. If you're not the collecting sort, hang on.. a new edition will soon be available, and it will not probably change again after that.

Happy Sundays....

Well this is a short one this week. I just wanted to give a quick update. I've finally archived my files for Jumbo Giant Sausages to clear the decks. This means that the book, the cover, the internals are finally settled. I'm really happy with how it is now, and I don't think there'll be any more minor tweaks to this edition. Tweaks such as they were were fairly minor anyway, and some may not have noticed them in any case. I just wanted to make sure everything was right, so I can pat the sausages on the back as they leap out the pan and into the world for their brief moment of fame!

There's a lot to do when you self-publish - I may have mentioned this before!

So now the good news is I will turn my new attention and focus to the next book. Really sorry I can't tell you anything about that yet.. but as a consequence there may be a bit less posting here for a while, while I ramp up momentum on that. I'm just very excited that before too long, a fourth book will be taking shape, and I'm keen to see how long that one will take and if I'll be able to improve on the almost two years that Jumbo Giant Sausages took from start to finish. I will be doing the illustrations for the next one.. but I have another story that I can imagine will work well with a skilled illustrator, so I hope you may well see something sooner than two years. Gosh I hope so!! Some authors knock 'em out every three or four months!

Jumbo Giant Sausages is doing really well, we're already up to 10 reviews, and I think 9 of them were 5-star on Amazon. It's been up in the charts in a few nice categories. (Still a bit of tweaking to do there, as for example it's not really for 'up to 11 years' as Amazon says currently!!) So a few emails to write yet to sort some of the classification.

The big news is, I've stopped worrying about it. A lot of people really like it.. and that's good enough for me and a sign that I can move on to the next one.

​I was in the Star Cafe in Paignton recently (who have a copy if you're passing) and the little girl who was reading it there while I was having breakfast came over to me and said 'I like your book, it's good!'. So there you have it.. if someone who is approximately four likes the book.. then you can relax.