It was January, 2018. I was standing in my office at the time in Sandy, Utah. It all of a sudden dawned on me that I should write a children’s book about blockchain technology. I had been studying blockchain, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies for many years before and had decided this was a contribution I wanted to make for this space. My Nieces were the original inspiration as I have been spending time with them talking about business, finance and what the future may hold.
The very first person I thought to call is my dear friend Linda Rawson, as she was already a published author and we had previously been talking about another book I’ll be writing. I figured she would make a great partner and she sure has. After a couple of months of us sharing some ideas about the project, I met another individual while I was out and about named Tim Rowberry. We set up a time to talk about doing a video for my business Woodland Advisors and as we spoke we immediately hit it off. He had also had quite a bit of background in the crypto world so I told him about our project. He was very excited about what we were doing and wanted to be a part of it. I spoke with Linda about him, we set up a meeting for us all to meet and it worked about very well for us all to become partners in the project.
Tim had also mentioned that his brother Ben Rowberry was an accomplished illustrator and had also done some illustrated contributions to the Dogecoin project. We asked to see some of his work and it was exactly what we were looking for! We contracted Ben to do our illustrations and we went straight to work.
For the next 4 and a half months we hashed out ideas, met, wrote and worked on our project. It was a wonderful growing experience as I had never written a children’s book before. After we had written the entire book, Tim had the idea to re-write to whole thing into a rhyme. Initially, I thought that would take a ton of extra time in which we didn’t have, but really liked the idea of the book rhyming. The three of us started sharing our ideas and before we knew it, four hours later the entire book was re-written into a rhyme format. We were all very excited, not only did we complete it in such a short time frame, but we were also still in line for our deadline coming up.
We chose Saturday, November 10th as our launch date and we had asked Marissa’s Books and Gifts located in Murray, Utah if they were interested in carrying it and they were more than excited to. Leading up to our launch date, we all brainstormed about how we were going to market our new book. A good friend James Leyba, offered to sponsor me at the World Crypto Con in Las Vegas. The same week it started, I made a decision to go on Halloween night. I called a friend of mine, Tony Reese and he was also down to rearrange his schedule and we took off that Wednesday evening.
The World Crypto Con was an amazing experience overall. I was able to meet a lot of wonderful people and also reconnect with some old friends. It was a great opportunity to share with people our new book “Toshi to the Moon”.
Our launch was an amazing success, we saw over 100 people come through that day to buy a book. We also had some limited edition certificates that accompanied each book that was bought that day. We are looking forward to creating more adventures with our character Toshi, so keep an eye out!
