We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Becci Murray. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Becci below.

Becci, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright – so having the idea is one thing, but going from idea to execution is where countless people drop the ball. Can you talk to us about your journey from idea to execution?

My journey towards having a career as children’s author has been a long and exciting road. I’ve always had a passion for children’s literature, as I love stories that transport you to other worlds where the characters are as large as life and literally anything can happen. In my twenties, I started writing plays and songs for a local children’s theatre company, after which an opportunity came up for me to submit my work to a UK-based television channel called Children’s BBC. Some of my sketches were purchased and I joined the ad hoc writing team for a programme called ‘Class Dismissed,’ which was such a fantastic experience and a real confidence-booster.
Fast-forward a few years and as that confidence grew, I decided to publish my first middle-grade book, ‘Billy’s Brain Booster Juice.’ Billy had been quietly lurking on my laptop for a very long time, so I thought it was time he saw the light of day. I can’t tell you how exciting it was when my proof copy finally arrived and I saw my name on the cover! It was the best feeling ever, and that was it – I’d caught the self-publishing bug!
Since then, I’ve published twenty-one other books and my craft is constantly evolving. I didn’t have much money to put into it, so I’ve had to learn everything myself, from formatting through to producing my own website. During this process, I became very familiar with design software and discovered a newly-found love of drawing.
So, in 2021, I thought it might be fun to have a go at illustrating my first picture book – ‘Granny Got a Sprout Stuck Up Her Sneezer.’ I didn’t expect much to come from it, but I showed it to my fantastic group of author friends, who encouraged me to go ahead and publish the book that Christmas. I was shocked when it quickly became an Amazon bestseller and I then went on to create a series of ‘Granny’ books, the latest of which, ‘Granny’s Easter Eggs Are Not the Sort You Eat,’ got to number 19 in the UK Amazon book charts this April.
It’s been a lot of work to get to this point and self-publishing continues to take up a huge amount of my time, but I absolutely love every second of it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I write and illustrate fiction for children of all ages, but every one of my books has a lot of humour in it. That’s a big part of my writing style and I hope it sets my stories apart from others. My bestselling ‘Granny’ picture book series is roughly aimed at young readers from 3 to 8 years, but I receive a lot of messages from grandparents telling me they’ve enjoyed laughing along with their grandchildren whilst reading them. I think it’s important when writing for children to keep in mind that adults are likely be reading the books too, especially with this younger age-group. As a mother myself, I remember reading huge amounts of picture books with my daughter when she was little and it was lovely to share books that we could both enjoy together.
For readers between the ages of 5 and 7 years, who are just starting out on that exciting transition from picture books to chapter books, I have an early reader series called ‘Unicorn Island.’ The stories are split into eight short chapters and fully illustrated, and the residents of the island are not your usual type of unicorn! These stories are great for children who have just started to read independently, because they’re full of adventure and humour, and even have some puzzle pages at the end of each book.
I also have a series of choose-the-page ‘StoryQuest’ books for a slightly older age-group of 7 to 11 years. I loved these types of stories when I was a child, but something awful always seemed to happen if I chose the wrong page and inadvertently sent the story in the wrong direction. In fact, I vividly remember accidentally killing a unicorn on one occasion – eek! I wanted to create a more light-hearted take on the traditional choose-the-page format, so my ‘StoryQuest’ books are jam-packed full of humour. For example, in ‘Santa Claus Has Lost His Drawers,’ young readers can choose the story’s direction as they trek across the North Pole in search of Father Christmas’s missing underpants with nothing but a yeti companion to help them.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience is essential in the self-publishing business. Our books are competing with the big traditional publishing houses, who have a team of people working on the release of one publication. I’m a single-parent working from my living-room with a very small budget, so it feels like there’s an endless ‘to do’ list at every stage of the process. Before embarking on this journey, I mistakenly thought I’d just put my book on Amazon and people would buy it, because there are millions of customers on Amazon, right? Well, yes, there are, but there are also millions of books. Writing, formatting and producing a book is only the start of the process, and marketing is crucial. Plus, not everyone will like what you’re putting out there. People have different tastes in books and they’re especially careful about what they choose when it comes to children’s fiction. But even a tiny amount of negative feedback amongst the positive can be hard to handle when you’ve put so much time and energy into producing a piece of work. A lady once commented that my book ‘Granny Got a Sprout Stuck Up Her Sneezer’ was just mean and she’d be taking it to the charity shop at the first opportunity! I was devastated when I read this at first (as amusing as it sounds now!), but you just have to pick yourself up and use the experience to spur you on and keep going.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

When I became a children’s author, I’d never had a profile on Instagram, but I decided to dive headfirst into the unknown and sent out a post to a handful of followers, most of which I had gone to school with. Then I started looking for other independent authors on the platform and began commenting on their posts. I found them to be the most supportive bunch of human beings you could ever wish to meet and as we shared each other’s posts, our followers and our friendships grew. I’ve also found some amazing children’s book reviewers on Instagram, so being involved in the writing community and posting regularly has been an essential part of expanding my social media presence.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.llamahousebooks.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/becci_murray_author
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/beccimurray.childrensauthor