Turns out, the writing was the easy part.
What came next was a 3-year stop-and-start journey.
But today, I’m excited to share Rita the Cheetah.
It’s a growth mindset book for kids, told in a fun rhyming story.
The Inspiration 💡
Our then-kindergartner made up the title character: a vegetarian cheetah cub who ate glitter toast and had a tiger mom. 🐯
I thought it would be cool to turn his creativity into a little story we could put on our shelf.
But story needs conflict. What would the story be about?
Inspired by Side Hustle Show guest Matt Ralph’s Sam the Speedy Sloth (episode 450), I took the opposite approach:
What was the thing
that her friends couldn’t know?
Well, the truth of it was
Rita was… SLOW!
A Different Kind of Writing ✍️
Armed with my slow cheetah heroine, I put pen to paper … or cursor to Google Doc.
Rhyming animal poetry is quite a break from my normal non-fiction work and newsletter and website content!
I remember thinking back to the books our boys requested the most — and the ones I didn’t want to gouge my eyes out reading for the 50th time.
Children’s authors like Julia Donaldson, Andrea Beaty, and Mo Willems.
They had a few things in common:
- Consistent rhymes
- Humor
- An unexpected twist or surprise
So I tried to learn from the best in the business and apply some of those elements.
In true side hustle fashion, a good chunk of the text was drafted from a park bench while the kids were at the playground.
In between dispersing snacks, I’d be counting syllables on my fingers and drafting the next stanza.
Editing was tough. Some of my favorite lines didn’t make the final cut because it was over the target word count.
But Rita didn’t love hot dogs
or antelope roast—
she much preferred fish sticks
and glittery toast.
Kill your darlings, as Stephen King would say.
The Illustration Road Block 🎨
The other thing all those authors had in common?
Great illustrations!
You can’t have a picture book without pictures … and I’m no artist.
I put the call out to Side Hustle Nation subscribers and eventually hired an illustrator from Boston.
It was a side project for him, just like it was a side project for me, and I told him there was no rush.
That was my first mistake.
We agreed to kind of a hybrid payment structure: an upfront fee + 70% of the first-year royalties. My thought was to minimize risk while still providing some upside if the book did well.
The initial sketches looked cute, and as a gesture of goodwill, I sent over the initial payment right away.
That was my second mistake.
Three years later … still no finished illustrations.
Rita’s Revival
By this spring, I’d just about forgotten about the project until my son asked, “When are we getting the pictures for Rita?”
Heavy sigh.
“I’m sorry, buddy. Still nothing.”
At that point, my wife says, “Let me take a crack at it.”
Using Adobe Firefly — and a healthy dose of patience — she slowly built the book. Character by character, pose by pose, background by background, page by page.
Even though it was AI, it still took a tremendous effort to get it to look right. (She initially thought she might be able to bang it out in an afternoon… yeah, not so much.)
But the results were worth it! We’re super excited by how it turned out:
What’s interesting is I don’t think generative AI could have done this 3 years ago. In fact, I briefly played around with Midjourney early on, but struggled with character consistency — getting the characters to look the same on different pages or poses.
In a way, our unintentional 3-year waiting period gave the technology time to mature enough to produce something like this.
The Side Hustle Angle?
As far as side projects go, I’m not sure this will be a huge win. It’s going to take a lot of sales before we recoup our investment.
(For transparency, at the $9.99 launch price, we make around $1.50 in royalties.)
But there were other benefits of the project, too:
- Capturing a moment of our son’s imagination and turning it into a physical reminder on the bookshelf.
- Practicing creativity and a different style of writing.
- Learning a new AI skill and using it to create a real product.
And you never know. Good things can happen when you put content and evergreen products out into the world.
I’m proud of this one, and happy to finally cross it off the “pending projects” list!
