We recently connected with Katherine Pryor and have shared our conversation below.

Katherine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s talk about innovation. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done in your career?

After grad school, I got hired in a job I loved helping hospitals bring more local and sustainable foods to their cafeterias and patient meals. It allowed me to collaborate with lots of interesting people working in health care, public health, nutrition, and sustainability. I made a point to seek out opportunities for overlap with other professionals doing similar work in education and corporate settings, and one of those moments changed the course of my career.

I was in our state capital advocating for farm-to-school funding, because I knew hospitals would be able to purchase from farms who could meet K-12 food safety criteria. In a meeting, a dad told a story about how his daughter wouldn’t eat spinach until she grew it in her school garden–and then she didn’t want to stop eating it. All the other food advocates in the room had very standard responses, like writing white papers or press releases. For whatever reason, I thought, “I want to write a children’s book about that.”

I tried a few drafts and shared them with a librarian friend who said, “It’s cute, but I can tell you have no idea how to write a children’s book.” I took her words to heart and signed up for a night class at my local community college, where I refined the draft of my first book, “Sylvia’s Spinach.”

For the next few years, I worked on writing in the morning before work and did book events on weekends while still holding my regular job. People looking at it from the outside must have been a little baffled–what did talking to kids about eating vegetables have to do with sustainable food and farming? But I could see a direct line between getting kids excited about healthy eating and getting adults to break out of the system of dis-ease we’ve created by allowing corporations to spread industrially-raised, chemical-laden foods in far too many settings. Simply put, we can’t allow that to continue to future generations for the health of ourselves or our planet.

I’m now the author of seven books for kids, with more in the works. I’ve written about the pleasures of eating with the seasons, how to reduce food waste, and even found ways to discuss the harms of pesticides on pollinators in books about bees and butterflies. Several of my books have won national awards, and have become staples of school garden and nutrition programs.

I’m so glad I listened to that odd little voice in my head encouraging me to try something new, because it took my career to places I didn’t dare dream.

Katherine, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m the author of several books for kids about food, gardens, and the natural world. I’m passionate about sustainability and leaving the planet better than we found it. I believe there are many ways to get people engaged in caring for our world, and use storytelling to reach potentially hesitant audiences.

In addition to writing, I’ve worked to improve food choices in institutions, corporations, and food banks. I maintain a small consulting company working with non-profits on communication and creating unconventional solutions.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

I wasn’t able to pursue writing full-time until my husband and I paid off our student loans. We took a pretty aggressive approach to paying them down, paying more than we needed every month. We knew we wouldn’t have financial freedom to take risks until we didn’t have those hefty payments and brutal interest.

After I paid off my student loans, I pretended I hadn’t. I kept living on the same budget, and putting the money that would have been going to my loans into savings. I saved enough money to pay my share of our basic monthly expenses for one year, and gave notice at my day job.

Yet it didn’t necessarily work the way I thought. Even though I had more time, I was having a hard time getting new manuscripts and essays published. I was putting so much financial pressure on my creative work that it stopped being fun. I ended up starting up a small consulting company and working part-time with various non-profits to take the financial pressure off of my art, and art started being fun again. Being self-employed is always a bit of a financial adventure, and having multiple sources of revenue allowed me to continue working with interesting people while also allowing my writing to remain my “fun” job.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

When schools and libraries closed in 2020, children’s books publishers and creatives took a major hit. Those two markets were where I sold most of my books, and doing school visits is a major revenue stream for book authors and illustrators. Things were bleak on many fronts.

The publisher of my first two books took a dramatic step, and pivoted away from school and library markets toward educational non-profits and child nutrition programs. Rather than selling a few books to several schools and libraries each season, they started pushing large bulk purchases at steep discounts to organizations that could buy hundreds or thousands of books at once.

I pivoted with them, trading school visits for virtual events like “Read Across Iowa” with the Iowa Agriculture Literacy Foundation, or or reading to several schools at once as part of a SNAP-Ed initiative to get more kids shopping at farmers markets. Several state WIC programs bought cases of books to give away to their clients, and a program in Maryland bought 50,000 copies to give away to kids in need across the state. There is no better feeling than seeing my books in the hands of children, and these book giveaways created a sudden explosion of kids and teachers reading my work across the country. It was amazing.

Now that schools are libraries are open and thriving again, that market is still there, but I also have this wonderful new market I wouldn’t have engaged with if the world hadn’t changed so dramatically. I’ve met some incredible people as passionate about books and healthy eating as I am, and am grateful for my quick-thinking publisher who kept us afloat through a hard season.

Contact Info:

• Website: KatherinePryor.com
• Instagram: @readyourgreens
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/katherinepryor
• Twitter: @readyourgreens
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/@readyourgreens
• Other: Bluesky: @katherinepryor.bsky.social