Published in Pacific Palisades: Palisades Couple Offers Children’s Book Authors An Empowering Option

As a published children’s book author of several titles, I have to stop and think how lucky I am my wife, Liz, is my agent. Not only because she obviously wants what’s best for me, but also because she comes from children’s book publishing and brings so much knowledge and experience to the equation. 

In 1995, we started our children’s entertainment company, SupperTime Entertainment, with our main focus on children’s book publishing and developing animated TV series.  We were very fortunate in having relatively unknown artist, Todd Parr, as our first artist/author property and even more fortunate that Todd has gone on to write and illustrate more than thirty books for publisher Little Brown and Company, won a slew of publishing awards and has been on the “New York Times Children’s Best-Seller” list several times.  

In 2005, our business took an odd twist when the Hilton Family of Hotels came to us with the goal of having us actually produce and publish a children’s book for the Hotel chain, written and illustrated by Todd Parr.   Thanks to our combined skills – mine being editorial and Liz’s being an understanding of the complete publishing process – we were able to do everything required to deliver a finished book.  That included all art direction, book design/production and printing.  We provided the book to Hilton within six months, and it was an immediate success – going into reprint within several weeks.  Two years later, Hilton asked us again to publish another Todd Parr book, this time for the Beijing Olympics.  We were honored this book was the only children’s title officially sanctioned by the U.S. Olympic Committee. 

Although we’ve continued to look at our self-publishing efforts as being more a side business, we recently got the opportunity to publish a book for a divorced woman who felt compelled to memorialize a personal message to her children.  She strongly believed that although families may sometimes go their separate ways and live apart, there will always be a special bond of love that holds them together.   She wrote the manuscript herself and was able to afford everything that goes into publishing the book including hiring the illustrator.   For our company, it was a much more time consuming project than working with a communications savvy company like Hilton but, in the end, proved to be a more rewarding experience.  To know that we were helping this woman achieve her dream of publishing a book and to realize how much this book meant to her: for perhaps closing some doors to her divorce while also leaving a message to her children, for posterity, deeply inspired us. 

Book publishing, even children’s book publishing, is changing almost weekly with the increasing power of digitalization. 

To us, there will always be something special about holding a printed book, reading it to your children at bedtime, then discovering the title on a dusty attic shelf years later, and reading it like it was the very first time.

• For more information about what we do at my publishing company, click here.
• For more information from my author website, click here.