Prefer the transcription? Here you go!
January 1, 2026
Happy New Year! I’m Hilary Dow, the owner, author, illustrator, and publisher of Binding Tales. And I’m kicking off 2026 with a series of weekly videos. And my plan is to capture everything from the habits of my daily grind.
And grind is probably the right word, although I love my grind, so maybe that’s not the right word. But to others, it would probably be a grind. All the things that go into a typical day for me as a mom, a entrepreneur of a small business that is still very much in the launch phase for projects like this beauty right here.
I’m in the midst of changing the format of the eyes for my main character. This is Jet, who is an octopus, and my fifth illustrated children’s book is written. And what I’d like to do is create video content weekly that helps people really follow along the process and journey of a small business owner who wears all the hats.
Author, illustrator, self-publisher. I do my own marketing. I work with the printer directly. I really do all the steps. So I find that when I am at events and I convey that to people as they’re looking at my books and my artwork, they’re quite taken aback by how much I can manage to handle.
And I wanted to start off the year with a message about habits. So for this first video, my goal, and I’m going to do it, 52 videos. I’m going to post them online. It’ll be on YouTube every week as well as my social media platforms.
And then I’ll also post them on my website. But in addition to that, I’m really thinking that I want to start a Patreon community. So I’ll put my content up, but then I’ll have additional content that kind of digs into the deeper details and I’ll put that on Patreon.
So something I’m kind of kicking around and I follow some creators that are just such a wealth of information and they share so much and I have learned such a great deal. And then there’s the community, so the inner sanctum, if you will, of people that just want to learn a little more.
So recently when I started this idea, probably about a week ago now, I said, I want to do a video a week. And Adam, who’s my wonderful, very supportive, amazing husband, he said, who’s your audience?
And what sort of content would you want it to be? What would the audience want to hear from you or learn about? And my audience really runs the gamut of people who are interested in children’s books or they’re an author-illustrator.
Maybe they’re self-publishing. Maybe they’re my retail customers and they’re buying books for loved ones or for their own children. I sell to a lot of grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents buying books for small children.
My subject matter, quite obviously, is for the very young. So these are going to have black pupils on the eye. So the minute I took this downstairs and showed Eva, my oldest, she is going to be 13 in just a couple of weeks.
She looked at the eyes and she said, oh, those eyes are scary, mama. So I’m changing up the format of the eyes. This is the first illustration, so I’m early enough that that’s easy to do. So anyway, I am going to stick with this format.
This is the kickoff. I did my first kind of like get the feel for how I want to set up my cameras. Now I’ve got two cameras going. So I’ll be sharing things about marketing and content capture for people that that is not what you really want to focus your time on.
Like I’m not a multimedia content focused creator. I want to have my felting needle in my hand and be working on things like this. So if you’re like that, but you also want to build something that’s your own, that you are sharing with the world in whatever way that is.
For me, I publish books, but for you, it might be selling original artwork. And really what you want to be focused on for your time is the making of the things, not the marketing of the things. So while this is a commitment for me to say I’m going to do a video a week, it also means that I’m going to batch.
So you’re going to see a couple of videos that I put up back to back where I’m going to be wearing the same outfit because when I’m done with this first video, I’m going to record another video. I mentioned habits.
I think I’ll do my second video this morning about habits and have this video just be an overview of what’s to come. So when I post this on my blog, so I manage my own website, I will talk about the fact that this is what’s in store.
So if you join my Patreon community, I got to find out if that’s pronounced Patreon or Patreon, either way, where I’ll post additional content, then I hope that it adds value and inspiration. And you learn through some of the lessons that I’ve worked my way through, good and bad.
Sometimes I’ve had success and sometimes I’ve had misses. So my eyes are, oh, those are still kind of like they’re really, really bright. Let me put a pupil on there and see how I like that. Because I could also put a little more of the orange.
I’m going to do that. I’m going to give them little eyelids. So this orangey red here, this is my palette. This is a blend that I made with some red and orange, which is the outermost layer of jet. So he’s got multiple shades of red on his tentacles and his head.
And I’m really in this first piece trying to figure out exactly what I am comfortable with for the look and feel of his expressions and his features. So I’m going to take this little pinch. I’m going to put this on here.
Some of my videos, I will place my camera above my workspace so that you’re seeing what I’m creating as I’m creating it. So some of my content is tutorial format where you’re learning through my creations on how my techniques take shape.
So yeah, a little bit less big bulgy eye and a little more eyelid there. So I like that. And then I’ll throw on my little pupil and we’ll see how that looks. So that’s what I’ve got in store for 2026 for these video updates.
And it’ll be a combination too of update focused and a narrative for me on how things are going. In my last video, my first one really, of the last couple days of 2025, I talked a little bit about what’s coming up in the first quarter of 2026.
I am very business-minded, so I think in quarters, three months, whether you’re business-minded and you call it a quarter or you’re just a every three months that works for me for setting a goal and sticking to it and working in increments of threes.
I love that. So I tend to look out to what’s coming up in the next three months. And so I’ll keep you updated on the things that I have underway and in the works right now this morning for this week’s update.
I was downloading templates from Adobe Stock to map out my order form for the wholesale show that I’m registered for in March down in South Portland. It’s the New England Made Show and it’s the first time I’ve ever had a concerted effort to try and develop a wholesale channel.
So now that I have four books with a fifth one that will be published this year, I feel like I have enough of a product base to start a wholesale sale channel. So that’s on the docket. And the start of prepping my sales and marketing material in earnest really started this morning.
So more to come on those. I will share probably in some of my other content that I don’t include in these update videos. I’ll include some additional how-to guides, some of the resources like my style guide.
If you own a business and you don’t have a brand style guide, highly recommend. It helps you define what your colors are, your font, your logo, logo usage, all those sorts of things, and all the different file types that you need.
But as I build out a simple catalog and brochure so that people have material to take with them from the show. It’s really so much simpler if I have a set palette of colors that I’m always working with.
And so things like that. I mean, it really runs the gamut from working on wonderful, fun characters like this and Felting and working on my website and brochures and coordination with my printer and everything in between.
So the next video I’m going to record here in just a minute is less about me and all the things in my business and the format of what’s to come over the course of the year. I figured it’s January 1st and I’ve got a goal for 52 of these in a year.
So there’s the lowdown on what I’m going to be working on in terms of this video content and posting. And then the next video coming up, oh, this is fun. I like those eyes much better. Eva was right.
We’ll talk about some of the foundation habits every day that help me stay focused on what’s most important, my priorities, and just keep making incremental progress continuously towards reaching the goals for binding tails.
And I have very big, audacious goals. At the very, very top of the triangle is that at some point in my lifetime, I have a goal to win a Caldecott Medal. So I submitted Flock of Rock, which is my most recent published book, to the Caldecott Medal Selection Committee for 2025.
Has to be a book that’s published in 2025. So I will talk more about that in a future video. But thank you for listening and following along on this wonderful author, illustrator, publisher, entrepreneur journey and fiber artist.
First and foremost, I have to be creating things so that all this like crazy, this is like welcome to my imagination. This right here is all up in my head with stories and ideas and getting it out of here and onto a surface that I can then share with the world.
That’s my happy place. So thank you for joining me and I will see you again. I hope you are also kicking off a fabulous 2026. Thanks.