Busy farmer finds writing success
RUNNING a 1400cow dairy farm, a ‘‘small’’ lavender farm and accommodation for up to 12 people with her husband Luke Campbell — while raising two daughters, Daisy (7) and Sylvie (6) — keeps Kurow’s Sam Laugesen ‘‘super busy’’.
And yet Ms Laugesen has found the time to turn herself into a selfpublishing children’s author.
She has now printed 17,000 copies, in five print runs, of her first book Stuck in Poo, what to do?, and 10,000 copies of her second book featuring Luke the Pook, Who Did It?, were due to be printed in February next year, she said.
With everything going on at Westmere Farm in an increasingly busy Waitaki Valley, she did not have time to spend hours hunkered down in a writer’s retreat.
‘‘I keep a little notebook on me and beside the bed,’’ she said.
‘‘And I’ll get good lines that just come and so I’ve got to scribble it down, because I’ve found that if you don’t scribble it down, you think, ‘Oh, I’ll remember that’ and then a day later ‘Oh, that was brilliant! Where has that idea gone?’
‘‘And actually, you never get it back.’’
She had found that the first draft of the five stories she had written had ‘‘come really quickly, like within a couple, two to three days . . . and I’m not sitting down for hours’’.
‘‘I’ll get on a roll, and then put it down, and then look at it again in a month. And look at it with a new set of eyes. And then play around with it a little bit more. And then send it off to the script assessor who says ‘yay’ or ‘nay’.
‘‘It’s quite important when you’re reading books to children, that you enjoy reading the book as well.’’
But finding a script assessor, was ‘‘the most important’’ thing she did before she selfpublished and it came from a desire not to ‘‘embarrass’’ herself.
When she had the idea for her first book Stuck in Poo, what to do? she ‘‘researched and researched’’ how to go about publishing it.
‘‘They [script assessors] are neutral, independent people the publishing industry uses and they assess your work and give you constructive criticism.
‘‘That’s what they’re there for, and they know the market, and they know what else is out there.’’
And though the script assessor she found said ‘‘she loved it’’ — it was simple, made good use of repetition, and the rhymes worked — accepting the initial criticism offered was difficult.
However, with time Ms Laugesen had been able to see the basis for every suggestion the assessor made.
In 2014, the first print run of 1000 copies of Stuck in Poo, what to do? sold out in a week before Christmas through ‘‘the power of Facebook really’’, Ms Laugesen said.
She posted a photo of the book’s cover to a Facebook group for farming mums in New Zealand and the book sold out in a week.
So she ordered another print run of 1000 copies and it sold out before Christmas, too.
‘‘It really struck a chord with the rural community and they all went crazy buying it up for Christmas,’’ Ms Laugesen said.
‘‘I can remember telling my husband that if I sold 500, I’d be ecstatic.
‘‘I harboured a secret hope that it would do well, but it exceeded expectations.’’
Since selling her first several thousand copies, Ms Laugesen has set up a website, and her own Facebook page, and now has two distributors.
Although she had been approached by a ‘‘wellknown traditional publisher’’ earlier this year wanting to publish the next Luke the Pook book, Ms Laugesen said she wanted to keep it local and would continue to get her books printed at Brackens Print in Oamaru.