When Gail Condon was a children's nurse at Our Lady's Children's Hospital in Crumlin, she drew pictures for patients to explain what was happening to them. Condon realised how effective it was to communicate with children in a creative way about illnesses and changes in their lives. So she started a blog. "I did little drawings as PDFs and sent them to people. People started asking me to do books for them," she says.
She pitched her idea for a series of personalised e-books to Launchbox, the start-up accelerator at Trinity College Dublin and got in. It allowed her to work on the business full time.
“A lot has happened in the last 18 months,” says Condon. She left her nursing job to run Writing for Tiny, her children’s book publishing business. She is working on a degree in speech and language therapy at Trinity, and she had a baby.
She launched Writing for Tiny as an e-book publisher last April. While the feedback was strong, customers consistently asked for paper books. Condon decided to go back to the drawing board.
It was important for Condon that the books were of high quality and printed in Ireland. It took a while to find a printer willing to make custom books.
“Usually printers run a massive book: a hundred orders of the same print. For us, each book is completely individual. We had to convince them this would take off and would be worth their while.”
Next, she got a crash course in hand-sewing books from Tom Duffy of Duffy Bookbinders in Dublin. Now all of her books are hand-sewn. "I showed my dad how we make the books, and he said: 'Handmade, it is'."
“I’m very hands-on. I kind of do everything, but that’s what you have to do in a start-up. You have no choice.”
Customised books
The first book available on the Writing for Tiny website was a Christmas book with a message. “It’s all about morals, learning about different cultures and values. In the end, the child learns that Christmas is more about giving than receiving,” Condon says.
A book for big brothers and sisters about a new baby in the family will be available in January, and many more are in the pipeline. While the storyline in each book is standardised, the characters can be customised. People can choose things like the name and skin tone of each character.
“The really unique thing is how much we personalise it. No one in the world does that.
“Skin tone is very important because the children’s book industry doesn’t print many books with a main character of a different skin tone . . . More different types of children should be portrayed in children’s books. We can do that in our books.”
Children’s books also typically depict nuclear families, which is not always the reality.
“There might not be a dad or a mum. A child’s main carer might be granny.” Writing for Tiny customers can make books relevant to their families through writingfortiny.com.
