Local author seeks crowd support for launch of second children’s book
By John Watson Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
A local author is launching his second children’s picture book on the popular crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, in an effort to broaden his audience.
Andrew “Rew” Jones, who operates Checkered Owl Media, recently migrated to Strathmore from Grande Prairie, following the growing opportunities for work in the film industry appearing in Southern Alberta.
“With everything that’s happening, all the shows coming to Calgary area and all the surrounding regions, it made sense for us to come down here and connect to some of the larger film industry,” said Jones. “Strathmore is a great place for our kids and our family really enjoys walking, so we’ve absolutely been thrilled to discover all the walking trails that snake all through the neighbourhoods.”
The book, “Afraid But Brave – A Simeon Sasquatch Tale” he explains, stars a timid sasquatch and his adventures with a small human girl.
“The idea of the book is that’s why we don’t see sasquatches because they’re terrified of absolutely everything,” said Jones. “So that’s what’s going along, but then he meets a brave little human girl named Meg and they have some adventures.”
Afraid But Brave is the first book from Jones to feature these characters, but he hopes more tales will eventually follow.
Jones added he and his wife, Sarah, are often thinking about content their six children might enjoy and often take on projects together.
“My wife has worked away at writing stuff for kids for a long time and we’ve written together for film projects; we used to write a theatre show together,” said Jones. “This is (our) second kids picture book, we released Evalina’s Egg a little over a year ago and now Afraid But Brave is coming out.”
Their goal for Afraid But Brave was to write something that would be enjoyable for a very broad age range.
“We just love telling stories and so whatever medium best fits that story is something that we’re interested in. We have ideas for different stories, we take a look at what feels like it would be a good fit and go from there,” he explained. “My wife is probably the lead writer, but we work together on stuff and that’s part of it too.
“We really love projects that we can work on together, but then also involve our whole family when we can.”
Both of their titles have been self published and according to Jones, his first book was overall well received.
Launching their second book through Kickstarter, Jones added, would give the team a platform to expand their audience and get the book out to more people and markets.