Germany Is Leading the Sales. I Did Not See That Coming.

Kid’s Books
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I have been talking to a lot of authors lately and one of the questions that keeps coming up is which countries the books are selling in.

Honestly? I do not check that often. The reports are not always updated as frequently as one might wish, I have someone helping me with that side of things, and — let us be real — anxiety and sales dashboards are not always a healthy combination.

But the question got me curious. So I checked.

Germany is leading the sales for My First American Coloring Book.

Germany. A book about everyday American life, written by a Brazilian living in Switzerland, leading in Germany. I genuinely love that. I do not know who you are, German readers, but I see you and I am thrilled and slightly obsessed with finding out more about you.

To celebrate, Janyne Azevedo — the illustrator behind every single one of the 101 illustrations in the book — sent me some backstage images from the process. The ones you never see. The early sketches. The decisions made before the final version existed.

I have been staring at them for an hour.

There is something about seeing the work before it is finished that makes the finished thing feel more real. You see the hand that made it. You see the moment before it became what it became. Janyne built something that a reader in Germany just bought without knowing any of this existed six months ago. That is the whole thing, honestly.

If you are in Germany and you bought this book I genuinely want to know who you are. Reply to this and tell me.

Janyne — thank you for letting me share these. And for making illustrations that apparently speak German.

More countries to come. I am watching the dashboard now.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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