"Tito's Soft World": Weyburn's Jennifer LaCharite publishes a children's book

'Tito's Soft World' is the first published book by Jennifer LaCharite. It's a fun little read for the whole family about a little doggy who has a pretty sweet life. 

LaCharite, who is from Weyburn, moved to Costa Rica in 2019, where she enjoys Tito's soft world in real life.

"This story came to me naturally, because he's just such a happy little dog. Tito's just such a little character," she shared. "Well, we all think that about our pets though, don't we? He's a miniature schnauzer, and everyone loves him. So he was the perfect subject to start out with." 

The book is available on Amazon and Kindle, and it was a self-published, which LaCharite says she'd highly recommend to other aspiring authors.

"We had just seen another Weyburnite, Tara Keating, publish her novel, and that's great. It opens up so many doors. You don't have to wait for a traditional publisher," she noted. "I didn't even attempt that route. I wanted something of my own. I wanted to have this piece of intellectual property that's all mine."

She said this is just the start, with a bigger project coming up next with full illustration, but she wanted to go through the learning process with this book.

"Something just a little less grandiose was what was more comfortable for me."

LaCharite said she didn't always have the aspiration to become a children's author. In fact, the inspiration struck fairly recently. 

"I started out writing another one about moving to a different country and the challenges that can pose because I saw a lot of families, young families with young children, moving to Costa Rica, a lot of them from Canada, and I started thinking about how that could be a challenge for them," she explained. "I did, however, write a children's book for an art project in high school that I remember really falling in love with, and that just goes back to what I wrote on my author's page in the book, is that an encouraging teacher or mentor can have such a great impact on you and these sorts of things that you decide to undertake."

She said the author's page was another last-minute addition, "because there's just so much to prepare in doing something like this and there are so many things you don't realize that you need."

"I've been reading about how to publish a book on Amazon Kindle for two years now. I've read so many articles. With almost every writing you read 10 or 20 times more than you ever write to find things out," noted LaCharite. "Even in creative writing, because, in this case, just trying to learn all the things that need to be done."

One of those things to be done was getting the ISBN, which was something she really didn't know anything about prior to this endeavour. It's a 13-digit international identifier on the back of every book.

She said one bit of luck was learning that Canadians have access to ISBN for free from Library and Archives Canada, and there is a separate ISBN for each version of a book.

You can find a link to the book HERE.