Happy 2023!
2022 was a wild ride. I released my first kid's book, "Horsing Around In The Town Of Gold Hill" at the end of the year, thanks to all of you who contributed to my crowd-funding campaign. And this month, I got to relax for approximately three minutes... In Mexico... It was glorious. Now that 2023 is in a full gallop, I am trying to fig out how to promote the book while simultaneously building my jewelry inventory for the upcoming summer season at the tiny shop. Yes, I am still here hammering/sawing my fingers and crawling around the studio floor searching for dropped diamonds... Some things don't change. So far, the book is not on the best-seller list, nor have I been featured on Oprah, but a girl can dream!
Let me be brutally honest with you: I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing when it comes to book promotion.
I can design jewelry with my eyes closed. I can wrestle wire into submission, patina silver to perfection, and run a sustainable tiny business on wheels in the middle of a historic mining town. I can write a children's book in rhyme, navigate international collaborations with a Brazilian illustrator despite a language barrier, and persist through years of setbacks to bring a project to life.
But book promotion? Marketing a children's book in 2023? Utterly lost.
Do I need a TikTok? Should I be doing school visits? What even is a book tour for a self-published author with a tiny shop in Gold Hill, Colorado? Am I supposed to have an email list? A media kit? Should I be pitching to bookstores or just hoping someone stumbles across it online and falls in love?
I don't know. I genuinely don't know.
What I do know is that I wrote this book because it mattered—because kids need stories about overcoming self-doubt, protecting the natural world, and choosing kindness over cruelty. I know that Chief Niwot's prophecy haunts me, that wildfires are real, that bullying is escalating, and that this story was motivated by all of it.
But getting it into the hands of the people who need it? That's where I'm flailing like a fish out of water, hoping someone throws me back in before I suffocate on my own ignorance.
So here I am, fumbling through hashtags, writing blog posts, probably doing half of this wrong, and trusting that somebody out there will see it, share it, or care enough to pass it along. Because I didn't come this far—through fires, loss, pandemics, and self-doubt—to let the book die quietly on a shelf.
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