I wrote a kid's book, now what?

I work at a bank. There are many children that I have become familiar with over the years that come into the bank regularly. Now when it was my turn to host a day for our customers, the theme was Back to School and Books Rule, so among other things, I decided to write a kids book that I could hand out to them. I thought about all the things I could base a children's book on, and that got overwhelming fast. So I narrowed the field to banking related things, which worked well, as it was a book they would receive from their bank. There are many subject within that field as well, but thinking of a fairly young audience, I wrote a little story about a boy who learns to save. He uses a piggy bank, so I wasn't blatantly hocking our banking products, but encouraging kids to think about the benefits of saving... like being able to buy the extra cool toy you found at the store without having to beg mom. One of the gentlemen I work with has a wonderful wife who is a teacher, and she agreed to edit the story for me, since I may be creative, but my grammar, well, sucks. I also did a dozen drawn illustrations for the book, some of which I painted as well. These, with the help of a co-worker, were scanned, re sized and formatted. All of this did not go smoothly. I was running out of time, and ended up hand cutting and taping printed copies of the art, to pre-printed pages, and copying. It looked pretty good actually! From there, I hand cut and stapled all of the copies, the night before we were to hand them out to children at the bank. And don't get me wrong, my co-workers would have happily helped, except that I was being particular about certain things, and there was only one big paper guillotine, and only one heavy duty stapler. So I was on my own, but it got done. In the morning, I gave everyone their own copy of the little book, I was excited to see what they thought, excited to see what the children who came in thought. I was just excited. Well, it rained, all day, a big heavy downpour, so next to no children came into the bank. But, it was busy enough, that no one had time to read the book themselves. They were enthusiastic that I had taken the time to do everything, but I got almost no feed back from them either. Poo! But I am thrilled with the results, I think the book is adorable, and I love the story. I would like to send it to a publisher, but I really have no idea where to start. Someone told me to go to a self publisher and then market it myself, but that ends up costing a few grand right off the get-go. But a good publishing company gets thousands of stories sent every year, so they usually only take very few new writers, sticking mostly with established authors. Where does that leave me??

Needlepoint

I walked into a needle point store with a few mom-friends. (roughly my age who have children) They had been talking about how relaxing it is to do needlepoint, and what wonderful gifts it makes. I am a crafty person, so I though this might be kinda cool. Though I was already thinking about taking up quilting, long enough to make one for my parents and in-laws, I really wasn't sure I needed to add another activity to my set of unfinished activities. The matronly old lady was very happy to have this relatively young group in the store. We wandering though the array of brightly colored threads, vast and varied patterns, and intricate pieces on the wall, with six to eight hundred dollar price tags. I was told that a two and a half by two piece had taken one of the moms six years to complete. SIX YEARS?! There were sickly sweet patterns for puppys and kittys, duck, dolphins and horses, each taking thousands of little, criss-crossed stitches, and over half of a DECADE to produce. The lady asked who had been there before. Of the four of us two had been, and the other one was very interested in starting. The lady was pleased, and she asked me if I waanted to start as well. "No!" was my swift reply. "Well, that was very definite," the lady chuckled, "Why not?" "Cause it takes six freaking years to finish one, and it only looks that good if you do it right! And you can only sell six years worth of work, and a million poked finger tips, for 700$" is what I did not say. "I'm busy already, I sure don't need another hobby." I smile politely at the woman who I now considered to be a lunatic. If not before she started needlepoint, certainly at some point since. And while I wanted to run out screaming, with my hands flailing above my head, I politely helped the other moms sift through pages of patterns, to select the source of their eventual insanity. When we left the store I directed my friends to an art store, where I selected four square canvases, a tube of black acrylic paint, and a tube of white acrylic paint. And when I went home, I sat down with my small variety of brushes, and in four short hours I created a beautiful scene of wild horses, running through the snow. Four hours. Four canvases. Done.