Discoverability

The Big Green finally arrived in UK shops in January 2026. It launches in US shops in March. The story about this book has just begun.

We have been careful and attentive to how the book is portrayed, and hopefully, this will make it more discoverable. There are so many new titles released each year that the biggest challenge to their success is whether or not readers know they exist.

This post is about ‘discoverability’. If you’re a creator, what can you do to help your book be discovered? It turns out you can do a lot. Most publishers will have a standard marketing plan they will share with an author and illustrator. Sometimes the marketing budget is large (we’d all love a big budget), so the plan is fuller, but mostly the budgets are modest and contain a list of basic activities to draw attention to the new book. Discoverability is not marketing. It’s the stuff that leads to marketing. All the thinking about what the book is, why it exists, and who the chosen audience is can help inform a marketing and sales plan, and the creators are the best people to feed into this conversation. For The Big Green, I thought long and hard about what the book should do, what it can’t possibly do, and why I made it in the first place and realized that there was a part of the audience I could reach more effectively than the publisher.

I also practiced my words about how the book was made until they sounded short, sharp, and conversational, whether on social media or in conversation. Some of it is outside my comfort zone, but that’s an opportunity to do something new, like a podcast interview with Bex on the Fun Kids Radio. Being prepared meant that I said pretty much all I wanted to, and it felt great.

How to Train Your Dragon: Can You Survive the Ghost Ship? 🐉⛵ – Fun Kids Book Quest

In this episode of BookQuest, we’re exploring what it means to find your crew—whether that’s a mismatched pack of dragons on the high seas or a massive, unexpected family right here on Earth. On the Shelf This Week: Cressida Cowell joins the show to discuss How to Train Your Dragon School: Fight of the Flamestrike. When a routine Viking training lesson goes completely off course, Hiccup, Toothless, and the gang find themselves trapped on a mysterious, abandoned vessel at sea. Get ready for a hilarious, action-packed adventure full of dragon chaos and hidden dangers! Kristina Rahim also features with her heartfelt and moving contemporary story, The Doughnut Club. Twelve-year-old Quinn has always felt like the odd one out in her adventurous family. But when she makes the life-changing discovery that she has sixteen donor siblings, she sets off on a journey of identity, belonging, and true self-discovery. Join Fun Kids Podcasts+: https://funkidslive.com/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1. How to Train Your Dragon: Can You Survive the Ghost Ship? 🐉⛵ 18:47
2. Time-Travel Disasters & High School Drama ⏳ 🏫 18:38
3. The Carnegie Awards Special: Friendship, Identity and Finding Your Place in the World 🎧📚 20:33
4. Ghouls, Dragons, and Haunted Forests 🪄🐉 22:18
5. Blitz Bombs & Mythical Monsters🪖⛵ 22:21

You can listen to Bex on Fun Kids (weekdays from 4pm) on DAB Digital Radio across the UK, on the free Fun Kids app, and online at funkidslive.com

Assume that discoverability will take time and start your flag waving early, like up to six months before publication. Be available and discoverable yourself so that the book can have a better chance of succeeding. Talk to your publishing marketers, or try to understand book marketing more if you’re self publishing, because you are the stage when your lovely idea has become a product that now needs to perform. Your knowledge about it is valuable.

If you’re in the UK The Big Green is available from online stores.