Easy to download to iPad

Animations, sound effects and narration (optional!)

Includes recipe for pink party cake

Only $1.99/£1.49

Currently selected in the 'featured' book list on ITB

Loads of other great interactive books also available at ITB, including My Crazy Purple Pen and The Day My Teacher Came to Tea.

I would love to hear from any readers, so please do get in touch.

If you own an iPad or iPhone, and have young children to entertain, then the Interactive Touch Book (ITB) store is a great resource. It features a wide range of interactive books, most of which are priced at $1.99 (£1.49) or less.

Birthday Cake Disaster is now available from ITB. This new version of my book features narration, simple animations, touch screen interaction and sound effects.  The recipe for pink party cake is still included too!

My Crazy Purple Pen and The Day My Teacher Came to Tea are also available from ITB in this format.

As always, I would love to receive feedback on any of my interactive touch books.

I have noticed that Amazon are currently offering the Kindle Fire HD Tablet at £99, a saving of £60 on their previous price. I have added the link at the end of this post in case you are interested in checking it out.  Anyway, this got me thinking about whether  a Kindle is a good idea as a Christmas gift for young children as well as teens and adults?

Children’s picture books in ebook format have certainly been much slower to take off than other book genres but I think this is set to change. There are loads of fantastic ebooks available these days and the electronic format does offer a number of advantages over the traditional print books.

For example;

• Kindle books can normally be purchased much more cheaply than print books so you can build up your collection at a lower cost.

• A kindle is a much more convenient way to take a large selection books away on holiday, or with you when travelling in the car or just waiting in a queue somewhere (at the doctor’s etc).

• Interactive touch books (ITB) are becoming more prevalent now. I have created ITB versions of two of my books for iPad use (available here) and they really do offer so much more to the reader – animations, sound effects and narration all in one package. A traditional print book is far less flexible. I have included my YouTube promotional video below which illustrates the ITB app.

Personally, I do still love print books. It feels more special, somehow, to sit down with a child and open up a real book. So perhaps the way forward to is to combine the two; Build up an ebook collection but purchase the child’s favourite books in print format too for the special bedtime reading routine. Amazon certainly seem to see this as being the way to go. They have a Matchbook program where they allow publishers to offer the Kindle version of a book at a low (or free) cost to those who have purchased a print version.

You may be interested to note that the ebook for Kindle version of my first book, My Crazy Purple Pen, will be selling at the special price of £0.99 (or $0.99 for American customers) during the period 2-9 December! 

I have also enrolled all of my books in the Amazon Matchbook program, so they should be available for free to anyone who has bought the print version!

I would be really interested to hear people's views on this subject!

Interactive Touch Books for iOS devices
My interactive touch book (ITB) version of ‘The Day My Teacher Came to Tea’ is now finished and available for purchase. Hooray!  Mark (my techno-whizz-kid of a husband) and I had a lot of fun creating this book. We gave the spider a laid-back hippy style personality and I rather think that he steals the show.

We also took the opportunity to update the ITB version of ‘My Crazy Purple Pen’. I wanted to record a faster, more lively narration and also make it easier for the reader to navigate and activate the touch screen features.

YouTube promotional video for Interactive Touch Books
Then, as if we hadn’t spent long enough glued to our computer screen, we set about making a youtube video to promote the ITB books. A huge thank you to Mark for bringing all his techno-knowhow to bear on this project and for working on it so tirelessly on my behalf.

Updated website
And one last thing! Some of you may have noticed that the website has been updated, improved and is more functional than before. You can ‘like’ my website now or send me comments or questions.

Other news...
My third book, Birthday Cake Disaster, has been approved by Amazon (Createspace). I should receive my proof copy next week, after which it will become available for sale. I am very excited about this book, my longest to date and with a recipe for pink party cake included at the back (tried and tested I might add!).

Husband’s quote “I’ve liked all your books but this is my favourite so far!”

In the meantime I have been working on a series of pirate stories. I’ve been having great fun with this theme. These are now ready to be illustrated so watch this space....

I recently received sales figures for my interactive touch book (ITB), My Crazy Purple Pen. They were a pleasant surprise! Much stronger sales than expected, outperforming my traditional book format despite significantly less marketing. This is definitely a market to develop further.

This was just the nudge I needed to get going on the next one! So, here I am recording the narration for the ITB version of The Day My Teacher Came to Tea.