I’m over the moon and beaming! Marky Polo Travels series has just won the Gold Medal for Best Picture Book Series at the US-based Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards 2023! 🤩🥳🥰
(This series comprises: Marky Polo in Tokyo, Marky Polo in Beijing & Marky Polo in Singapore)
This was my experimental series created during Covid when our world went hybrid.
I thought: Why not go hybrid with my picture books? 😊
I hit a creative reset button and broke convention from all I had learnt on picture-book writing. Created a hybrid concept of combining comic book panels into a picture book framework. It was fun writing pacy, humorous conversations in speech bubbles to add a new layer to my picture book manuscript. And my tween son has been my muse for his witty quips.
This series could only have been brought to fruition by illustrator Nicholas Liem who has experience with both children’s picture books and comic books. Being architecturally trained, Nic brought incredibly accurate and beautiful drawings of these cities’ attractions in our books.
We also had further layers to our series, from augmented reality features to informational text boxes and write-ups on local animals from countries featured, which all cameo-ed as characters throughout the stories.
Appreciate our publisher World Scientific Education who was totally game for a whole new concept and introduced the augmented reality layer. 👩💻👨🏻🎨📚.
So grateful for this Gold shine and Moonbeam glow over our intrepid pangolin traveller Marky Polo and his famous family of explorers! 😊🙏🏼
Marky Polo Travels’ series is available in the bookstores and at World Scientific’s e-bookstore – There’s currently a 10:10 promotion going on. From 10.10 till 18.10.23, you get 35% off for a minimum purchase of 3 titles!
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