Author Journeys: Writing picture books with Maria Oliver
Welcome to Author Journeys, an interview series focused on overcoming rejection and other struggles in order to get published, self-publish, or secure literary representation. If you’ve ever felt held back, lost, or stressed out by the path to publication, this series is here to inspire and motivate you, no matter the route you want to take. I’ll be interviewing a range of authors, from self-publishing authors to traditionally published.
Interview with picture book author Maria Oliver
In this interview, I’m welcoming Maria Oliver, a yoga teacher and self-published author of children’s picture books. She started teaching yoga classes in 2015 and her picture books include guided meditations, relaxation techniques, and yoga adventures to spark children’s imagination.
You can find her online at Boxmoor Yoga and purchase her books on Amazon. Maria is also on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Welcome, Maria!
Thank you so much for having me!
You started teaching yoga classes in and around Hemel Hempstead in 2015. Tell us a little bit about how your yoga teaching eventually led to you writing and publishing your own picture books.
When I first started teaching yoga, I relied heavily on books. There is a lot of yoga philosophy to learn when you’re training to be a teacher, and we studied books such as the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. It’s common to read a poem or guided meditation at the end of a yoga class, because every class should end with a short period of relaxation. I love how guided meditations can take you away from your worries and help you to focus on your breathing.
I’ve loved creative writing since I was a child, and desperately wanted to be a published writer, but felt I’d let go of that dream. Before having children and training to be a yoga teacher, I’d been a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and had attended a number of their amazing events, but small children and yoga studies got in the way of my writing.
As a yoga teacher, I never considered self-publishing my own books until I had to start teaching classes online during lockdown. I was so concerned that my class members would lose interest that I wanted to offer something additional. So as well as offering live classes online, I recorded YouTube videos so people could continue to practise during their spare time – and they had a lot of spare time! I discovered that I would not be allowed to read from any books on a YouTube video unless I had permission from the publisher. So I started to make up my own relaxation scripts.
I researched self-publishing because I didn’t want to lose momentum by approaching publishing houses. I thought I might have enough of an audience to sell enough books to cover my own costs. I dived straight in.
You mentioned that you started writing relaxation scripts and yoga books during lockdown. How much did lockdown impact your writing?
I found that the world slowed down during lockdown. My children were aged nine and eleven, and very active, so we made sure we went out every day. We explored our local green spaces and I found myself noticing the changes in the seasons more than before. The natural world was an inspiration for many of my relaxation scripts.
I wanted to use my imagination to escape the feeling of being hemmed in. One of the first relaxation scripts I wrote down was about floating out of your window on a magic carpet, and looking down at the familiar streets and parks around your home. I got to know my local area well through our daily walks, and it was eerie walking past empty playgrounds. We used to spot rainbows in people’s windows, which children had drawn to show support for the NHS, so a rainbow appears in my magic carpet relaxation too.
Lockdown was both frustrating and motivating. I need to feel I’m making a contribution to the world, and creating something that people could order online made me feel I had something useful to offer. There was a lot of concern about children’s mental health, and I felt I could create some tools to help.
What are some of the challenges of self-publishing picture books? Did you find it was easier to reach your target audience because of your existing teaching role?
Although I teach yoga to up to a hundred children a week (sometimes more), it doesn’t automatically follow that they will buy my books!
Marketing is definitely a challenge of being self-published because you rely on other people to help you. I naively thought that if a few people read my book and liked it, or if I got an article in the local paper or a yoga magazine, then interest would grow and sales would take off organically. But it’s a constant job. Potential readers are bombarded with advertisements, and even traditionally published authors have to promote themselves. I try to consistently show up on social media and involve myself in yoga and book-related events.
Some of the administration is confusing too! It’s easy to get your book uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing so that customers can buy through Amazon. It’s more complicated to get your books available in bookshops. It took me a while to work out how organisations like Nielsen, Gardners, IngramSpark and Bookvault relate to each other, but my books are now available so that anyone can order them from any bookshop!
Although I don’t necessarily sell to my yoga class members, they are brilliant for improvising ideas or trying my books out on. I have some wonderful children in my classes!
I love using my books to support schools, for example if the school promotes my books and allows me to sell directly to their families, I donate a percentage of the sales to the school or their PTA fund. And I’ll happily donate a book as a raffle prize.
I love the way you use illustrations and choices to make yoga more fun and interesting for kids. How did you decide on the choose-your-own-adventure format?
I adored Choose Your Own Adventure and Asterix Adventure Game books as a child, although I’d often make the wrong decision and meet a sticky end! I also enjoy making up yoga stories in my children’s classes. We sit in a circle and take it in turns to add to the story, but you have to include a yoga pose. One story started off on a snowy mountain, and we sledged down it, and at the bottom was a frozen lake with a mermaid trapped under the ice! Anything can happen, and if there isn’t a yoga pose for it, you can make one up or adapt one. I guide the story a little to make sure it doesn’t go off on too much of a tangent or go on forever!
I thought it would be fun to combine the format of making choices with a yoga storybook. I started writing my book when children were just starting to go back to school. Teachers were commenting that children were struggling with a structured day after months of being at home. I thought it would be fun to provide a loose structure, but allow the children some freedom to make choices as well. It took a while to work the format out, and to make sure that the page numbers worked, but I’m really happy with how it all fits together.
You crowdfunded to distribute 200 copies of Once Upon a Time, You… in both English and Ukrainian when Ukrainian children were coming to England to flee the war. How did that idea come about, and what was the experience of crowdfunding like?
When it was announced that Ukrainian children would be coming to the UK and joining schools, a lot of teachers on social media were asking where they could get bilingual resources. The wonderful thing about being self-published is that you can respond to a need and turn a project around quickly.
At the same time, I’d heard that all schoolchildren would be receiving a free book about Queen Elizabeth II as part of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations. This gave me the idea of providing a free book for as many Ukrainian children as possible, to make them feel welcome and maybe help with their wellbeing.
I got in touch with Herts Welcomes Refugees to see if I could offer paid translation work to anyone. Denys had recently joined a local secondary school and very quickly translated my book during the May half-term in 2022. I then met Mariia, whose son had joined my daughter’s class. She checked over Denys’s translation. I had no prior knowledge of the Ukrainian language or the Cyrillic alphabet, so I could contribute nothing to the proofreading process!
Crowdfunding was easy! I had so much support from family, yoga class members and the wider community. So many people were angry about the war and wanted to do something positive to help. We quickly met my original target, so I moved on to the stretch target. This meant that I could print 200 copies in Ukrainian, 200 copies in English, and cover the postage costs to schools.
A local printer agreed a discounted price to print the books, and through school networks and social media I put together a mailing list of teachers who were expecting Ukrainian children to join their classes. By a miracle, I got all the books delivered to schools across the UK and in children’s book bags by the end of the summer term. The whole process was done in about six weeks!
The illustrations and images in your book are colourful and charming – I imagine it’s also important to make sure all the yoga poses are correct! Do you do these illustrations yourself?
Yes, I illustrate my yoga books myself! I also enlisted the help of Lizzie Martell Illustration, who dealt with the scanning and digital editing of my illustrations. Without her, my illustrations would still be stuck on paper, or would look awful when printed. I’ve always loved drawing cartoons, and I am fussy about how the yoga poses appear, so I’ve enjoyed illustrating my books.
Yoga books for adults give very detailed cues about how you should be positioned. With children’s yoga, although alignment isn’t as important, they will instinctively copy a picture – sometimes when I’m using one of my books in a class, the children are already ahead and trying the poses out themselves! So I try to make the drawings as accurate as possible, as well as showing more than one version of a pose. Some children are naturally more mobile than others, and it’s really important not to push yourself if it hurts.
Another thing that’s important to me is allowing all children to see themselves in books. I include a mix of children of different ethnic backgrounds and genders. All the children are dressed in a gender-neutral way. You might find someone in there who looks like you!
Because I strongly believe that yoga is for every body, I created a Chair Yoga version of both my yoga adventure books. Chair Yoga is fantastic for people with physical disabilities, because you are still stretching and strengthening muscles, but in a way that is best for you. It is a fantastic alternative for schools that don’t have sports halls, as it can be practised in the classroom. Although the stories of my Chair Yoga books are exactly the same as the original yoga adventures, I’ve had to create more illustrations of children demonstrating seated versions of yoga poses and change some of the wording slightly. I don’t sell nearly as many copies of my Chair Yoga books but it feels wrong not to do a more accessible version! As far as I can see, these books are unique. There are books about Chair Yoga for children, and there are yoga storybooks for children, but there are no other Chair Yoga storybooks out there!
My three relaxation books are illustrated by Ben and Steph Grandis. These books don’t include any yoga poses, but it’s just as important to me that children see themselves represented in these books.
What’s your favourite thing about writing picture books for children?
I love reconnecting with little Maria. I write and draw in the way I used to when I was at primary school, when I created my own books and stapled the pages together. I loved stories about flying so I write about magical winged horses and dragons and quests! I also love it when I read my books to children or use my yoga books in classes. It’s one thing to get excited about getting ideas on paper, but another thing to see how children react to them.
Do you have any advice for writers who want to break into self-publishing children’s books?
There is so much to learn, and I’m still learning! Firstly, being self-published is not the second-best option for people who have ‘failed’ to get their books traditionally published. Being self-published is wonderful if you want to get a book out quickly and want control over the process, but you have to project-manage working with illustrators, proofreading, formatting and marketing. There are steps you can take to run a successful launch for a book, but everyday life gets in the way, and things don’t always follow the timeline you’d hoped for. There are algorithms on social media and on Amazon that can be worked around to give you more exposure, but I don’t always have the time and energy to keep up with all the latest tips and tricks.
Social media has really helped me to make connections with other writers, teachers, parents and carers who might be interested in my books. There are Facebook groups for self-published writers and children’s writers, which have given me a wealth of information. I’ve been able to pick up tips from reading other people’s posts, or if I have a query, I can ask a question and get a range of responses.
I’m always happy to help other people, but my knowledge is limited, so I always advise people to join groups and benefit from the hive mind so they can find the approach that works for them!
Selling books is like being self-employed. You’re aiming to get a profit from your investment. I was a self-employed yoga teacher to start with, so I already had that mindset.
What’s next in the works on your publishing journey?
I have a phonics book coming out! I was approached by Rocket Phonics to write a Chair Yoga phonics book, which is coming out in the summer. I love the idea that children will be able to stretch themselves out while reading! This work came through a connection made on Twitter, who had read Once Upon a Time, You… a Chair Yoga adventure where you choose what happens!
Other than that, I have my new book Not So Long Ago, You… to promote, and events to attend this summer where I can share my yoga and books with children and their families! I always have ideas bubbling in the background.
Thanks again to author Maria Oliver for joining me on the blog! You can buy all of her books on her website, on Amazon, and at plenty of other booksellers!
