image credit: make something brooch, via flickr

As many of you know, Íñigo and I have poured our hearts into developing a new line of bilingual books and games, which will finally be out on the market in mid October. We’ve worked with a fabulous group of authors and illustrators to create what we hope will be a line of hip, modern, high quality and very useful products for bilingual families from all over the world to enjoy together. As our books make their long journey by sea from China to Spain, we are busy getting the word out about Bilingual Readers in order to reach as many families as possible. It’s hard work, but we are also having a fabulous time seeing what began as a small idea finally become a real live publishing company with real books!

Of course, nothing comes out of nowhere, and Bilingual Readers is no exception. So we thought we’d take some time out this week to explain to our faithful readers and any new friends exactly why we decided to embark on this crazy journey. We’ll also be talking about how we came up with the idea for each one of our launch products and why we think they’ll be useful for bilingual families, libraries and classrooms alike. We’ll even give you insight into the complex world of children’s book publishing and explain how an intangible idea can be turned into a really cool physical book. We’d like to welcome all of our friends to…The Making of Bilingual Readers Week!

So how exactly did Bilingual Readers come about? There’s no simple answer to this question, although I think it’s fair to say that Íñigo and I did not just wake up one morning and say, “Why don’t we throw caution to the wind and start a bilingual publishing company for kids?” The truth is that we both began reading about bilingualism and language development when we started mulling over how we’d like to raise our own future bilingual family, and we were fascinated by the role reading plays in monolingual language development. The more we read on this subject, the more we realized reading could be even more important in reinforcing language skills in bilingual children. If reading and language go hand in hand, it just makes sense that reading should be an important part of any bilingual family’s language strategy.

Íñigo and I have both worked in publishing for years, so the next step was a fairly logical one. We began to envision specific ideas for books and games based on all our research, and we presented those ideas to some of our favorite authors and illustrators, who were just as enthusiastic about the project as we were. We interviewed bilingual families and asked what did and didn’t work for them, and we tried to incorporate their extremely helpful suggestions into our books. We started a website in English and Spanish to introduce ourselves to a fabulous community of bilingual parents worldwide, and we’ve gotten so amazing suggestions from many of you as well. We’ve laughed, cried and stayed up all night revising files and fighting with our ftp. We’ve given our all to give you some of the coolest bilingual books around, if we do say so ourselves. But we’ll tell you a bit more about the books tomorrow…