SPECIAL FEATURE Building a Brand and Making Resources
You’ve got your books... but how do you build a brand and resources?
In this special feature Paul Morton shares his expert advice on how to develop resources and activities for your books including crafts, educational activities, school visits and more.
Well ok, maybe not, but I bet your young readers would absolutely love to and here’s how I came up with these and many more, resourceful ideas to support my Bug Belly books online.
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| A range of Bug Belly sweet making activities |
After attending the excellent SCBWI Bootcamp for newly published authors it was clear establishing an online footprint for your books and your brand was key.
As well as being an author illustrator I also trained as a graphic designer and have decades of experience working on advertising and marketing design. So when it came to promoting my two Early Reader books it was a natural move to design my own resources.
However you don’t have to be a designer.
One place for authors to turn to for inspiration is Twinkl. It’s the go-to place for schools and has a wealth of online ideas, (lots of them free). So I started there and checked out their most popular offerings.
My books feature the ever-hungry frog character Bug Belly and frogs are a fantastic theme to explore and run with – four years on from the first book I now have hundreds of free activities online.
As well as videos of me reading the books, there are Videos of how to draw – how to draw the baddies and the goodies, how to texture your pictures and how to copy and draw bigger pictures.
I’ve created various folding paper crafts and my all time favourite is the Forever Folding Booklet which was so much fun to make and design and you can easily adapt it to promote your book project.
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| Easy to make forever folding booklet - one of the free resources added each week |
I’ve made pop up cards, flying paper insects, hanging frog wobblers, hanging snake spirals, bookmarks and more. And of course every author needs the old favourites like spot the difference, colouring-in pictures and some word searches.
If so you can crop random mini sections and create an i-Spy sheet which is really entertaining but also means readers need a copy of your book to undertake this activity – a great bonus!
Having seen what other successful authors are providing, I have designed curriculum specific exercises concerned with English, creative writing and numbers.
Geography is covered with a 'frogs of the world' slide show and a map of where they can be found. This is then followed up with a 'make your own tree frog' collection.
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| Curriculum links with resources – frogs around the world |
For events, I usually contact a school, bookshop or library well in advance and suggest a range of activities and then tailor it to suit their requirements. The school in question then prints off the required sheets from my website, especially if it’s a virtual visit.
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| Resources for events and visits |
As well as creating many unique original crafts I’ve also adapted ideas from others online so please feel free to do the same. Simply check out www.bugbelly.com and look through my resources, download the templates and make them your own!
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| Some of the many resources and craft ideas available to adapt on BugBelly.com |
I eventually built up a bank of materials to post a brand new resource free, every week for six months. I promote these on FB, Insta, Twitter and TikTok. I frequently check how many times the website is accessed and there’s a healthy turnover of visitors which I hope are school children and kids at home making use of these resources.
If any SCBWI members want advice on creating their own sheets then please don’t hesitate to drop me a line. If you’d like me to create and design some for you and your books, then please get in touch. I’d be very happy to do that.
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You can reach out to Paul on email hot.frog@me.com, his website www.bugbelly.com and Insta & X @paulhotfrog
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Loretta Flockhart is features editor for Words & Pictures
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