5000 Hardbacks In The Garage

Yeah, sure.

And yeah, you're right.

Sonia is a bit of a superwoman, that's for sure.

So I was a journalist for quite a long time and I worked in Ireland and that's where I kind of learned to become a journalist.

I met an editor of a small local newspaper in a pub and talked myself into a job, the way Kiwis often do.

But came back to New Zealand and ended up working at the New Zealand Herald for maybe 12 years or so.

And during that time, I had two young sons, two children, and began to write children's books specifically for them.

And, uh, so yeah, and I actually, at the time I was the, um, editor of the careers section back when there was a decent career section in the newspapers.

Uh, and we had, well, I had to fill, you know, 10 pages of stories to go with all the careers ads.

And one of those stories I did on a self-published author, uh, called Mark Somerset.

I was Mark and Rowan, a husband and wife team who was super successful, uh, I'd written three rhyming picture books, and I thought, hmm, maybe I'll go.

They were on Waiheke Island.

I took the ferry over, and I spent a couple of hours with them, and I wrote a story on them.

And at the end, I pulled out my manuscript and handed it to Mark and said, would you mind taking a look? And he said, yeah, it's got some promise.

But during the course of the time I'd spent with them, I had already kind of decided I'm going to self-publish my own.

If I do this, I'm going to do it myself, just like Mark's done.

And I haven't kind of looked back.

So I have those three picture books for sort of three to seven-year-olds.

I wrote another series called The Dragon Defenders of five junior novels for seven to 12-year-olds.

And then another trilogy called Children of the Rush, sort of set in Otago in the 1861 Cold Rush.

And I'm launching a new one this June, a couple of weeks.