Hi Reader,

I don’t fully know why I decided to publish a children’s book in the middle of all the chaos — my business, my household, and my other creative projects all going at once. I just had to. There was a story sitting inside me, and I decided I’d do whatever it took to get it out into the world.

So I went into hyperfocus mode and made it happen. My first children’s book, The Lonely Cucumber, is now out — starring a cucumber who’s sad because he keeps getting left behind in a child’s lunchbox. He’s opinionated, he’s passionate, and he’s the heart of my multicultural story about healthy eating.

And through this whole wonderful (and humbling) journey, I learned a handful of lessons I want to share with you. So buckle up — here we go.

There’s a myth that children’s books are where writers go to relax. Fewer words. Bigger pictures. Lower stakes. Scribble a few rhymes about a duck, collect your check, go home.

I believed that too — right up until I tried it myself.

Children ’s-book authors do impossible math.

They squeeze a whole story — beginning, middle, heartbreak, and resolution — into 400 words. They picture the page before they write the sentence, because in a picture book, the page turn is a plot device and the white space is part of the script. They trust a child to get the joke without a single line of explanation. They make a grown-up’s voice crack at bedtime — on the fourth read of the night, when that grown-up swore they weren’t even listening anymore. And the very best of them land a shelf classic in one sitting: a book a family reads until the cover falls off.

Short isn’t easy. Short is the hardest writing there is.

I’ve spent 25 years writing — journalism, a literary thriller, memoirs for other people, thousands of words a week. None of it prepared me for the discipline of a picture book. So here’s what publishing one actually taught me — lessons that apply whether you’re working on a board book or a 90,000-word manuscript.

1. Constraint is a gift, not a punishment. When you only get 400 words, every word has to earn its place. There’s nowhere to hide a lazy sentence, a throat-clearing intro, or a paragraph you kept only because you liked it. The word limit doesn’t shrink your story — it forces you to find its spine. Most first drafts aren’t too short. They’re too padded.
2. Respect the reader. All of them. Kids can smell condescension from across the room. The instant you over-explain the joke, you’ve lost them. Adults are exactly the same — we’ve just learned to be polite about clicking away. Write up, never down.
3. If it doesn’t sound right out loud, it isn’t done. Picture books live in the mouth. They’re read aloud, again and again, by someone who is tired. Rhythm, repetition, the satisfying thunk of the right word at the end of a line — that’s not decoration, that’s the architecture. Read your work aloud. Your ear catches what your eye forgives.
4. Leave room. In a picture book, the illustration does half the storytelling, so the writer has to not say things on purpose. That’s a muscle most of us never build. Trust the gap. Trust the page turn. Trust your reader to lean in and meet you halfway.

The single biggest thing I got right: I hired a real artist.

If you take one thing from this email, take this. In a children’s book, the art is the product. The words matter — but the bread and butter, the thing that makes someone pick it up, fall in love, and buy it, is how the book looks. Gorgeous art forgives a lot. Mediocre art sinks even a beautiful story.

I was incredibly fortunate to work with the renowned artist and designer Ahmed Al Khalidi, who hand-drew every image in The Lonely Cucumber. They are, honestly, stunning — warm, full of character, alive in a way that makes the whole book feel like a gift. I can’t take credit for it; I just got to write the words underneath.

So here’s my strongest piece of advice in this entire email: invest in a professional illustrator and designer for both your cover and your interior pages. And please — do not use AI-generated images for a children’s book. I say that as someone who uses AI across my business every single day, but a picture book is exactly where I draw the line. Kids and parents can feel the difference between art made by a human and images assembled by a machine, even if they can’t name it. If a children’s book doesn’t look creative, handmade, and genuinely alive, it most likely won’t sell. The art is the one corner you cannot cut.

Typesetting will eat you alive.

Writing the story was the fun part. Then came typesetting — the unglamorous work of preparing the interior layout and cover files for publishing — and it nearly broke me.

. A children’s book is a different animal. You’re not pouring text into a template; you’re juggling full-bleed illustrations, exact margins, trim sizes, and the math of where every image sits on every spread. One wrong measurement and your art gets clipped at the printer.

I published through Amazon KDP, and the page-count rules alone sent me down a rabbit hole. In my experience, KDP’s hardcover option requires a higher minimum page count — around 40 pages — which is long for a picture book. That’s a big reason most self-published children’s books you’ll find are paperback, not hardcover: the format simply doesn’t bend to how short these stories are meant to be.

So here’s my advice: hire a professional typesetter. I know the instinct — you’ve already paid for the writing and the illustrations, and this feels like one more cost you could DIY. Don’t. Figuring out children’s-book typesetting from scratch will swallow days of your life and still leave you with something that looks slightly off. It is not worth your time or your energy. Pay the person who does this every day, and spend your hours on the part only you can do: the story.

And then something happened that I never expected: children’s book is the easiest book I’ve ever had to sell.

Of all my books, The Lonely Cucumber moves the fastest — and at first that baffled me. Then it clicked.

Almost everyone has a small person in their life: a kid, a niece or nephew, a younger cousin, a friend who’s about to have a baby. A picture book isn’t really a purchase for them — it’s a gift for someone they love. And people will spend on the people they love a lot faster than they’ll spend on themselves.

There’s a quieter reason, too. A picture book is short. You can finish it. Buyers know they’ll actually read it — well, read it aloud, roughly forty times — which is more than they can say for the 400-page hardcover gathering dust on the nightstand with a bookmark frozen on page 30. On some level, people run the numbers and decide a children’s book is the safer, more economical buy. They know they’ll get their money’s worth.

If you’re a writer trying to sell anything, sit with that. The easiest thing to sell is short, giftable, and finishable — and that’s true of a lot more than picture books.

Promoting a grown-up book can feel like begging. Promoting a children’s book is the opposite — people want you. Schools, elementary classrooms, local bookshops, libraries, daycares, community story hours: there’s an entire ecosystem of places genuinely delighted to host a children’s-book author for a reading or a signing.

I was surprised by how easy — and how fun — it is. It’s a tiny show. You get to perform, the kids get an event, the venue gets a program, and parents walk out with a signed book. Almost everyone says yes.

If you write for kids, lean all the way into this. Email the schools near you. Walk into the local bookstore. Ask the library. These events are easier to book, more joyful to run, and far better at selling books than anything you’ll do online.

And the lesson that meant the most: kids are the most honest audience on earth.

Nothing prepared me for reading The Lonely Cucumber aloud to actual children. Reading to kids is a completely different sport. You’re not just delivering words — you’re holding attention that can wander at any second, competing with the wiggle in their legs and the toy across the room.

And I learned what success actually looks like. IIt’s the moment a room of kids goes quiet — leaning in, hanging on every word — and then laughs at the joke, gasps at the turn, reacts out loud. That feedback is instant and completely honest. Kids can’t fake interest, and they will not pretend to like something they don’t.

That experience rewired how I think about every word. In a children’s book, every single word has to earn its place and be reachable for a small person: clear, easy, and impossible to look away from. If a word makes a four-year-old check out, it’s the wrong word. There’s no faking your way past a kid — and that, it turns out, is the best writing lesson of them all.

So — about that cucumber.

You’ve already met him up top, but here’s the official line: The Lonely Cucumber is a multicultural story about healthy eating, told through the eyes of one very lonely cucumber — a small character with a big feeling that every kid (and most grown-ups) will recognize. It’s the kind of book you can read at bedtime, talk about at the dinner table, and hand to a teacher looking for a gentle way into a big conversation.

If you’ve ever wanted to support my work in a way that costs about the price of a coffee and lands on a child’s shelf for years, this is it.

👉 Order The Lonely Cucumber on Amazon​

Three ways you can help today, in order of how much it matters to me:

Buy a copy — for your kid, your niece, a friend’s baby shower, or your classroom. Leave a review once you’ve read it. Reviews are oxygen for a new book; even one line moves the needle. Forward this email to one parent, teacher, or grandparent who’d love it.

Thank you.

Readers like you are the reason any of this exists.

I’ll see you in the next one.

Warmly, Natasha

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