LB Library: From One Illustration to Four Children’s Books
LB Library: It all started with a friendship and an idea. Now we’ve got four completed books, with more on the way, and each has followed a slightly different path.
Twelve years ago, Brandon reached out. He’d already created the illustrations for our first book, Your Forever, and had tried writing the words himself, but writing wasn’t really his area. So he brought me on, and I wrote to support his images.
As a writer, it was a fun new challenge. Instead of staring at a blank page and building a story from scratch, the illustrations gave me a jumping-off point.
Our next book, Let Me Help!, was the first one we created together from the beginning. We came up with a toddler who desperately wants to help but somehow makes everything harder. Anyone who has spent much time around toddlers will probably recognise the general concept.
At the time, we were really inspired by Aaron Blabey’s books, particularly Pig the Pug and Thelma the Unicorn. We loved their cheeky, irreverent approach and wanted to make something a little more mischievous and fun.
That openness has stayed with us. We haven’t decided there is one particular way an LB Library book has to sound or look. The stories are different, so it makes sense that the way we tell them might be different too.
The next two books, Out of the Nest and A Tail of Love, came after I’d had children — and becoming a parent changed the way I thought about writing for young readers.
One of the unexpected pleasures of having kids has been revisiting children’s books through their eyes. My boys have favourites. Some books appear in the bedtime rotation again and again and again.
And somewhere in amongst all that reading, I realised I was getting a fairly thorough education in what makes a children’s book work.
Forced market research, essentially.
I started noticing which books I enjoyed reading aloud, which ones my kids immediately engaged with, which stories they wanted again, and which somehow lost them halfway through.
It made me think differently about rhythm, repetition, humour, how much information children actually need, and how much an illustration can carry without the words explaining it all over again.
That fed directly into our two newest books.
Out of the Nest follows Wren, a little girl determined to reunite a baby bird with Mama Bird. Underneath the rescue mission is a quieter idea about family: it doesn’t have to look one particular way to be complete. What matters is having someone who loves you and shows up for you.
A Tail of Love came from somewhere sillier. Oscar sees Baby Mason crying and tries all the things that make him happy: a ball, a bone, even his lead. Slight problem: Mason can’t throw, has no teeth, and can’t walk.
Eventually Oscar realises that maybe Mason just needs what he needs when he’s sad — a cuddle.
Sometimes love is all we need.
Looking across the four books now, I can see our evolution in them: from finding words for Brandon’s existing illustrations, to building a character and story together, to bringing years of reading to my own children into the writing.
I don’t think that means we’ve discovered “the LB Library formula”. I hope we haven’t.
Some books rhyme. Some don’t. Some are heartfelt. Some are silly. Some let the illustrations do more of the talking.
Each story tells us what it needs. And with four books now complete, it’s lovely to see that they belong to the same little family without all being the same child.
Now comes the bit we can’t control: what happens when they get into the hands of actual kids!
Which characters they love. Which stories get requested at bedtime. And, perhaps the ultimate accolade for a children’s book, which one a parent eventually knows completely by heart whether they wanted to or not.