My children’s book, Leonardo Da Bunni, is up and running. I’ve never had so much fun writing anything, and I’m crazy proud of it.

Leonardo Da Bunni’s book cover.

It all started because I wanted to make a shower gift for a friend at work. I work in a regional theatre costume shop. We had just opened a play called Red, about artist Mark Rothko. Then we began work on Velveteen Rabbit. Which inspired this stuffed toy for my friend’s baby:

Isn’t he cute!

That led to me thinking about rabbits and art, and Leonardo, the baby rabbit with a penchant for painting, was born.

I have an extensive art background, but I am not an illustrator. When I had the idea to do parodies of famous works of art for the illustrations in Leonardo, everything fell into place. The pictures came before the story, which seems a little backward to me, but that’s how it went down. Once I had ten parody paintings, I started writing the story to incorporate them.

Leo’s self portrait.

The story pretty much wrote itself. I love Leonardo, and that made him easy to write about. The tale was written over a few days, then came the required polishing and tweaking. Then it was time to fight with upload to CreateSpace.

Now it’s promotion time. It’s my first time trying to promote a book that I’ve self-published. I know it’s going to be an ongoing process, but I’m looking forward to the journey as well as to learning new things. The first thing that I learned was how to make a book trailer.

Then it was time to give Little Leo a webpage of his own.

And a Facebook page.

I also got a whole slew of bookmarks printed to give to local libraries and such. I know it takes a great deal of work to promote a book, and I have time that’s limited by a day job as well as taking care of my parents. I’ll give it my best shot. I may not be as successful at it as people who have been through this rodeo before, but we all have to start somewhere. I love Leo. It’s the least I can do for him.

Spread the word if you can. If you are looking for a guest blogger, or starting a blog hop, let me know. I’ve never done either of those things, but it sounds like fun to me.

Leonardo Da Bunny is available on Createspace, Amazon, and Kindle.