Welcome to “Juno Knows (the Making of),” the blog where I will be documenting the exciting journey of self-publishing a children’s picture book featuring full color photography of my very best friend: Juno the Jack Russell. This journey has been a while in the making—I recently stumbled upon my fifth grade yearbook and discovered that even at twelve years old it was my dream to be a published author.

The dream certainly waivered and almost disappeared as various interests came and went and I changed majors about a dozen times before somewhat accidentally ending up with a degree in Economics. Even then, I was still on a roundabout path and decided to begin my career at a small publishing house in San Diego rather than follow any of the likely routes a budding economist might take. That’s when my dream started getting back on path and the more I learned about publishing, the more I realized I wanted to delve into a project where I could be in control of nearly every aspect of a publication—the writing, the design, the layout, the marketing, the sales (though not necessarily warehousing and shipping—thank goodness for print on demand!).

Originally, my plan was to travel the country interviewing people with especially interesting jobs who had gotten undergraduate degrees in Economics. I figured it would be a great guide for people like me who need inspiration for what to do with their degree after graduation. If the book was a hit, I could start a publishing company to make follow up books for people with degrees in English, Physics, Engineering, etc. Unfortunately, I wasn’t passionate enough about the project to ever get started and I almost gave up on the idea of starting my own small press completely. Instead I found myself applying for jobs in larger publishing companies, where I would still only focus on one aspect of publishing at a time.

One day, preceding an important interview, I spent some time looking over the many excellent benefits the company had to offer and thought about the healthy salary I was to expect. The only drawback, I thought, was that the little company I worked for at the time allowed me to bring my dog to the office with me each day and I was sure a big corporate company would not allow such a thing. I looked up doggy day care and realized that it was not only going to take a large cut of my salary, but that even the places that offered lots of space for dogs to run and play were not a very good fit for my Junebug who prefers human company and can get a bit snappy with other animals. Not only that, I wondered why was I looking into a job where I was going to have to work my butt off to pay someone else to take care of my pet when there is nothing I would rather be doing than spending time with her.

It was at that moment I knew that I wanted to find a way to combine my passion for writing and publishing with a way to spend time with my dog and be outdoors as much of the day as possible. That’s when the idea for the Juno Knows book series was born.