Friday, December 9, 2016

Interview With Authors Nadine Briggs & Donna Shea





1. What inspired you to write your book?
As social coaches, we work with kids who have difficulty forming lasting friendships and navigating peer relationships. All the kids we see at our centers struggle with anxiety in some form. We see the impact that anxiety has on children and their behavior and provide them tools, tips and strategies to help manage that strong emotion. The book is our way of providing this valuable information to all children, not just the ones who we see in person.

2. What is it about?
I Feel Worried! Tips for Kids on Overcoming Anxiety was written to provide a tool for elementary-aged kids to help them understand that anxiety serves a purpose (for example, making you jump out of the way of car coming too fast), but that excess worry and anxiety that impacts your happiness can be defeated.

By explaining what worry is and how it manifests, we then provide a series of coping strategies and tools that kids can use to fight against worry and become an expert Worry Ninja. We provide an abundance of tips so that kids can pick and choose the ones that will work for them personally. Ultimately, we want to empower children with tools to be successful in winning over their worries. Our strength as authors and social coaches is to deliver these messages in a simple format with tips that are easy but also effective.

3. What do you hope will be the everlasting thoughts for readers who finish your book?
The everlasting thought we want our readers to take from the book is that everyone has the internal power to combat anxiety. We want to kids to understand that they can have control over any bad thoughts that are preventing them from enjoying good things.

4. What advice do you have for writers?
It is not necessary to find a publisher for your book, given that anyone can now become an author with self-publishing options.  It takes work to market your own book(s), but if the content is good, the book will be noticed. We also schedule specific times to write to help us to stay focused and complete projects.

5. Where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?
Self-publishing is on the rise. We have been approached by publishers who are interested in the How to Make and Keep Friends series, but we have decided that we will continue to self-publish. Our books are written based on the experiences we have working with kids in our individual social skills centers every day. We feel that we know the most about what our audience needs and want our books to reflect that without and outside an editor’s influence.

6. What challenges did you have in writing your book?
The biggest challenge is the time that it takes to illustrate the workbooks once they are written. Our workbooks include full color illustrations by an incredibly talented artist, Ryan Flynn. His beautiful illustrations are well worth the wait.

7. If people can only buy one book this month, why should it be yours?
Lives can be put on hold when worrying takes over and we feel this should never have to happen to a child, or anyone for that matter. Kids should feel like they can conquer the world and enjoy all it should offer them without being held back by anxiety.

Donna Shea, Founder of the Peter Pan Center for Social and Emotional Growth and Nadine Briggs, Director of Simply Social Kids are authors of the How to Make and Keep Friends book and workbook series. Briggs and Shea specialize in coaching and creating simple tips and language for kids with social and emotional learning challenges. Connect with Briggs and Shea on www.howtomakeandkeepfriends.com, Twitter, and Facebook.

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Brian Feinblum’s views, opinions, and ideas expressed in this blog are his alone and not that of his employer. You can follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog 2016 ©.
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