Local student publishes first children’s book Jaiven Pedersen’s book is about a cool and spunky character named Danny Donut, a new student in a new school Nick AlleN Pass Herald Reporter A local high school student recently published a children's book in early June titled The Colourful World of Danny Donut. Tina Pedersen helped her son Jaiven Pedersen with publishing the book, which is available locally at Copy Magic or online through Amazon. The books description is as follows: “Meet the cool and spunky character of Danny Donut, a new student of Callaway Elementary School. This feel-good story teaches Alice Apple, Benny Banana, Karen Kiwi, Oliver Orange and Polly Peach an important life lesson of self-esteem and how to embrace their unique self.” Jaiven Pedersen said his favourite part of doing the book was making the characters, who were inspired by his love of food. “I just really like food and I love donuts especially,” he said. Tina Pedersen said the book was an idea her son had very suddenly. After he sat down and wrote out the story, she said the next steps were more difficult. “We had to do tons of research, like how do you actually self-publish a book? What does that actually look like?” said Pedersen, “There are some other local authors who I've reached out to... and I ended up using the same publishers they did.” After the story had been completed, the next step was finding someone to illustrate the story. She said
Nick Allen photo
The cover of the book The Colourful World of Danny Donut by Tina Pedersen and her son Jaiven Pedersen. The book was illustrated by Brittany Frank.
there was one illustrator that did a mock-up for the book, but it was “nothing really exciting” to look at. “Then it happened to be that the day I received the photo via e-mail, my sister-in-law was visiting, and she saw the picture and she's like, my daughter can do that,” explained Pedersen. Pedersen knew that her niece had been awesome at doing pictures but didn't know that she could draw digitally. All images were done digitally, a requirement for publishing, otherwise her son would have illustrated the book himself. “They dedicated [the book] to their grandpa...” said Pedersen, “We did not tell Grandma that we're dedicating it to him so when we got the actual copies in the mail, we brought her one of the first [copies]”.
She added it has been a challenge to distribute the book so far, only selling a dozen or so copies at the community market. “The second market we sold only one book, so we sat for four hours, and we sold only one. It was a little bit devastating, and Jaiven was so bored it was unfortunate,” she said. She said they have been speaking with schools and Horace Allen is going to buy a copy for their learning commons. "Then there is actually the school in Saskatchewan where my niece works... just yesterday they said they're going to buy 10 copies,” exclaimed Pedersen. To purchase, please visit Copy Magic or email: pedersens4@hotmail.com.