Happy April, friends! And happy (almost) book birthday to Whale and Otter! I’ve been waiting and waiting for this book’s release because it’s likely the most unusual picture book I’ve written. You see, you can read this one from front to back OR from back to front. And yes…you can imagine the consternation when I told my agent about this book. “How…exactly will that work?”
Never fear! We figured it out and THE WHALE’S TALE AND THE OTTER’S SIDE OF THE STORY comes out on Tuesday, April 21st! It’s already earned some stellar reviews, including a star from Kirkus. Our beloved indie booksellers voted to give Whale and Otter a coveted spot on the May/June Kids’ Indie Next list. And Amazon named it one of April’s Best Books for Children and Teens. And we hope that very soon, it’ll also earn a spot on YOUR personal Favorite Read-alouds list. You can order your copy here!
So remember that team effort I told you about? This book absolutely wouldn’t have worked without the talent, can-do attitude, and good humor of illustrator Brian Biggs. He suggested that we sit down for a two-way interview to pull back the curtain on how this quirky book came together. Here’s the conversations we had over Google docs, over about two weeks as we were both frantically chasing down pre-book-tour deadlines…
Kate: Hey, Brian! We’re just weeks away from our launch for The Whale’s Tale and the Otter’s Side of the Story: A Book to Read from Front to Back and Back to Front, and there’s one question I’ve been dying to ask you about this project.
As you know, this is a weird book. Read from the first page to the last, it’s about a whale who’s trash-talking an otter, explaining why whales are better. But read from the last page to the first? A different story – about an otter who’s insisting that otters are actually the superior marine mammal.
I’ll be honest – when I wrote this one, I wasn’t sure we’d find a publisher who understood what I was trying to do. Then, after our incredible editor Anne Hoppe acquired the book for Clarion, my agent and I were both keeping our fingers crossed that we’d find an amazing illustrator who got it, too.
I know now that you have a reputation for being an artist who’s always up for a challenge. When you first read this manuscript, could you imagine right away how it would work? Or did you have to sit with it a while before deciding that it was a project you wanted to take on?
Brian: I had no idea how it would work. Which is exactly why I took it on.
The message from Anne was exactly as you described. There’s this crazy manuscript, and we’re looking for someone who is just that kind of crazy. Well, flattery will get you everywhere, you know. But more importantly, here was this thing that came to me not because I had a hole in my schedule, or because something I’d made previously sold well or won some award. But because someone got me. This project started with “this is a puzzle, but we know you like puzzles.” It felt collaborative, and boy, has it been.
Kate: I love knowing this! And yes – Anne had told me that the book was a challenge (to put it nicely!) but she had just the illustrator in mind. I’m so glad she brought us together! So where’d you start with the project? It lands in your inbox and…?
Brian: Something you might not know is that you were instrumental to making this work, visually. When I first received the manuscript for Whale’s Tale, it was just the text. Anne and I had several conversations and emails about how this might work, and one day she mentioned that you’d included illustration notes and maybe she’d send them to me.
Author’s illustration notes are a mixed bag, as you might imagine. Some are pretty straightforward – just setting a stage, indicating intent, and so on. But my delight in drawing other people’s stories is to see where these weird texts – and picture book texts by themselves are always weird – take me. I don’t often want notes. I want puzzles.
Picture book texts are often such that, if a story begins with, oh I don’t know, “Kate and Brian were having the time of their lives,” then somehow even the illustrator needs to know who are Kate and Brian, what are they doing. A good author gives just the right amount of information to open the important windows into her imagination, so the illustrator at least knows where we are and what’s going on.
Illus note: Kate and Brian are two young bears, who live in separate forests, and are writing letters to each other about storytelling.
Okay, good. Because otherwise I might have imagined Kate and Brian to be two grownup humans riding bicycles. Whew. Glad I didn’t waste time with those sketches.
But waste time I did. Where is Whale, and where is Otter? Are they talking to each other? Are they talking to someone else? What’s the context? Why isn’t this working? Page turns are usually the first puzzle to solve, but in the case of this story, that was easy. There was only one way to do it. Everything else though… whew. It was a Rube Goldberg machine.
As I was running in circles, Anne kind of apologetically suggested that, hey, maybe, if you want, if they’re useful, but only if, you know, here are Kate’s notes. Feel free to ignore them.
You’d written something about a lectern, like a TED talk. I scoffed, until I didn’t. It gave me a stage, literally, to set these illustrations and anchor things. I have an email that basically screams “EUREKA!”
Wait, in fact, I have it right here, from April 2024:
I’m glad you sent that script with Kate’s notes. This isn’t my first rodeo, of course, and I have no problem totally ignoring author’s notes (and editor’s too at times!). But this is actually useful. If only because it gives a different POV for the narration. The presentation idea is interesting. I don’t think it’s what I’d want to draw on each page, but it allows me to think about it differently.
So what I want to know is where did this idea come from???
Were you just talking to yourself one day and a manuscript fell out? Did you set off knowing you wanted to be tricky? Or did you begin on the other side of the door, where you noticed these things that whales and otters do and don’t have in common, and just found a fun trick that allowed you to tell that story? Which came first, the egg or the chicken?
Kate: I didn’t mean to be tricky. Not exactly. This book is actually a mashup of two different ideas from my writer’s notebook. One lovely sunny afternoon years ago, we were sea kayaking with our kids in Elkhorn Slough on Monterey Bay. There were sea otters galore and somewhere along the way, I made a terrible mom-joke about waiting to hear “the otter’s side of the story.” And I realized it could be part of a fun book title! But in order to have another side of the story, you need two points of view and the idea of “the whale’s tale” came to mind (because if you’re going to have puns in your title, you might as well go all in). That title – The Whale’s Tale and the Otter’s Side of the Story – lived in my writer’s notebook for years.
Writing is very much an act of play for me; I craft some of my best books when I’m goofing off, and I like to give myself weird little challenges. One day I had the notion that it would be fun to write a picture book that could be read from front to back or back to front, using transitional phrases that allowed for two different points of view depending on how the story was being read. When I went to put this in my writer’s notebook, there was my earlier note – that punny title in search of a story – and the two ideas merged together: The Whale’s Tale and the Otter’s Side of the Story: A Book to Read from Front to Back and Back to Front.
Writing it was very much a mystery at first, but once I had cracked the story’s code – statement/transitional phrase/statement – it was so much fun to puzzle out.
What about you? Once you figured out how to approach the illustrations, were there any other challenges that came up?
Brian: Ah, so neither the chicken nor the egg, but rather a terrific title in need of a story! As a writer, which I am occasionally, my own books have often had the title long before the story or a main character. But as an illustrator, since this puzzle-solving is often mostly done by the time I see the script, the first thing I tackle is usually the character. Whether this is a dinosaur, or a robot, or a six-year-old kid, figuring out who it is that lives within these pages begins my journey with whatever words the author has given me. With Whale & Otter, things went a bit differently. By the way, Whale & Otter is how I’ve referred to this book since I began working on it. I have to remind myself that it has a longer, and a much more interesting title. I suppose shortening it to A Whale’s Tale would have made sense, but in my head it was never fair to Otter.
For the first several weeks that I worked on this book, I had no real Whale character or Otter character in my head. I was much more concerned with the mechanics of this story. Some books need what is basically engineering, and this was definitely one of them. I was working with colored grids representing the pages of the book with green representing whale and yellow representing otter, long before I had drawn an actual whale or an otter.
At some point either the puzzle was solved or I just needed to put it aside, and I began looking at whales and otters, and drawing them. Though I had to deal with the enormous disparity in scale between the two animals, the “characters” came quickly. These two drawings were, in fact, the first whale and the first otter I drew.
I sometimes send an editor and art director what amounts to a “mood board,” something like a Pinterest board, as I collect ideas and reference. In this case, these two drawings captured both the attitude of the whale and otter, and the graphic design of how I imagined the book. I sketched the entire book with these characters in mind, but something about Otter kept bugging me. Our otter needed to be very expressive, much more so than our whale, and this otter, while he looked like an otter, seemed more droll, less emotional. As I worked to figure out how to draw this guy, what to keep, what to change, I struggled to figure out what makes an otter look… otterish. And, more specifically, what makes the otter SEA-otterish. The tail, sure. The long torso, yes. But my otter faces kept looking like squirrels. Or sad, wet cats. It wasn’t until I noticed that an otter’s nose is, how do I put this, upside down, than it began to work. A cat, a squirrel, when one draws their noses, they’re often shaped like little triangles standing upright on their point. I spent an hour one day watching videos of sea otters, and I finally noticed that otter’s noses are, sort of, upside down. I flipped that triangle, and there was my otter!
These are some of my favorite reference materials for this book.
As I drew these two characters, their personalities seemed very different to me. I think this was necessitated by the scale and possibly the shape of the characters, but Whale was sort of chill as she argued her case. While Otter seemed almost annoyed and frantic. They had distinct personalities even though they were speaking the exact same words! I was happy with my drawing and illustration chops here, but I secretly felt that you’d done this, not me. Did you aim to give them each a unique voice, even though they had the exact same dialog?
Kate: I did! And honestly, the whole time I was writing this book, I was imagining how much fun it would be at storytime – with librarians and teachers and caregivers doing their best Whale and Otter voices. This book is SO much fun to read aloud!
Okay – I have one more question for you and that’s about the cover. As the author, I don’t always get to see every iteration of a book cover, and I recall this one coming to me pretty much finished. It looked easy (but I bet it wasn’t that simple!) Can you share a little about how the book’s cover evolved? Because I love it so much (and don’t get me started on the case cover underneath the dust jacket!)
Brian: Yes yes, happily, because I love this cover.
Book covers are odd ducks, in that they have to perform several jobs and must do them each very well. First, they have to sell the book. If a cover doesn’t grab someone’s attention and make them want open the book, then what’s the point? But they can’t do this without honestly representing whatever is inside the book, the story and the illustrations, and hopefully do this without any spoilers. Since you were able to get away with this back and forth trick in the narrative, my first inclination was to see what I could get away with with this cover. In line with the way the book reads, the first idea I tried was to split the title of the book in half. On the front cover we would see our whale, with “The Whale’s Tale…” as the cover. Then, if you flip the book over, we get our otter with “and the Otter’s Side of the Story.” I’ve designed enough picture book covers that I knew there was only a slim possibility that our wonderful publisher would go for this. My argument was that if one sees the book in a store, you flip it over and there’s the whole thing. If you’re seeing it online, the full title would be there in the text description anyway. I felt it was the best way to really stay true to the whole trick of the book.
Alas, my instincts were on the money and Clarion just sort of laughed as they collectively said “not a chance.” I guess there are sales and marketing reasons for these things out there, and whatever, it was worth a try.
But the footnote to the sad news was from our editor, Anne, who suggested maybe we try playing some similar game with the case cover.
Now the goal with the cover became figuring out a way to get that long title on there, as well as our two characters, one of which is an enormous whale. A book jacket is only so big! But there was the answer, right there in the title itself! The Whale’s Tale. The whale’s TAIL! Yes that’s it! The whale is only visible through her tail on the cover, and she’s so big that she wraps around to the back cover. It didn’t take many sketches to get this right, and was approved quickly.
I gave two options with the case cover. One had the title split into two, as I mentioned. But, again, since the case cover doesn’t have to sell the book at all, I wondered if we even needed a title. Could we just represent the story with our grinning whale, and our grumpy otter?
(Number 2 is the winner!)
The answer was yes, and I was thrilled. That illustration of grumpy, annoyed Otter is my favorite drawing in the entire book and I was so so happy about this.
Kate, The Whale’s Tale and the Otter’s Side of the Story is a fun, tricky, and even a secretly educational book, and I am so happy to have been your collaborator on it. I can’t wait til we get to visit bookstores and schools in a couple of weeks and read it aloud. And I can’t wait to unleash it to the world and have readers and their parents do the same.
Kate: I’m so glad that when Anne reached out, you were up for the challenge! (But of course, I think we both know that she had a feeling you wouldn’t be able to resist the puzzle of this book, right?) At any rate, I’m SO excited that our book is making its way into the world.
Not long after we started this conversation, you might have noticed that I was absent from the Google doc for a few days. I was visiting schools in Dublin and New Albany, Ohio…and I couldn’t resist treating them to an early read-aloud of THE WHALE’S TALE AND THE OTTER’S SIDE OF THE STORY. Their librarian had told them about the book and they wanted to know HOW? HOW do you make a book that works when it’s read both ways? So we read it aloud together…from the first page to the last page…and then from the last page to the first page. I wish you could have seen the looks on their faces, Brian. They were amazed and immediately started trying to figure out how it worked. There was more than one request to “Read it again!” but alas, we were out of time and they had to go to lunch. But thankfully, their librarian already had a copy on order, so very soon, they’ll be able to read and puzzle out the HOW of it all to their hearts’ consent.
All this to say that Whale and Otter and I are all SUPER grateful that you were game to take on this project. It’s going to be so much fun sharing it with readers!
You can find Brian Biggs on Instagram @BrianBiggsStudio. You should probably also subscribe to his super-cool and artsy newsletter BrianBiggs.Substack.com, and visit his website BrianBiggs.com.
The Whale’s Tale and the Otter’s Side of the Story comes out April 21. You can order a copy (signed by both of us!) from Children’s Book World, in Haverford, PA. We’ll sign your book when we visit the store for our book birthday party on the evening of April 21. And if you live nearby, please come join us! (And be thinking about whether you’re #TeamWhale or #TeamOtter!) More info here:
