Dr. Anne Meeker is a children's book publisher and early childhood consultant who continues to take advantage of our short run printing and custom size options to create adorable children’s books, which she uses to support early learning and kindergarten readiness.
Anne says it all started when she retired as a music therapy consultant for a large school system in the Kansas City area, where she piloted a program to support early learning in a variety of creative and engaging ways for young children, including picture books, music videos, play activities, and songs. She wanted to further develop this program and make it available to everyone so she created SING.PLAY.LOVE., an organization dedicated to expanding this educational program.
When getting started there were some complications. Most publishers want a minimum order for each book, but Anne wanted to test the waters with some samples first. “We printed a few and made significant changes to the books on the basis of focus group data. We ended up throwing out two illustrated books completely, and started over with new illustrators,” says Anne. Since we offer quantities of 10 and more here at PrintingCenterUSA, printing with us seemed like a logical and cost-effective way to produce further test copies.
Anne was sold after our first book together. “Your colors are so vibrant, I love the feel of the paper in my hands, and your prices are competitive with other online publishers. I also like that we have relationships with people we interface with on the books.” While we publish the books, Anne works with several people to design and create them. She has illustrators who do the drawings and she has an art director who places the art and adds text. Her advice when working on the design is to have lots of eyes on your final product before it goes to press. “When you look at a project for weeks, you lose the ability to see the mistakes,” she says.
SING.PLAY.LOVE. has several more upcoming projects including books called “Old House” and “The Ballad of Humpty Dumpty.” “Old House” is the “baby” of their newest illustrator, and Anne is in love with her work, as well as the amazing art of all her talented illustrators. She says it’s important to use different illustrators so the children can experience different styles of illustration as well as different styles of music.
Since PrintingCenterUSA offers custom sizes, we are also able to produce the smaller versions of the booklets, which are the perfect size for a child’s hand. “Once the children have been given enough opportunities to see the illustrations and hear the song, children typically can “read” the book independently.”
Not only does she love the look and feel of the products we produce, but we are just the right fit for Anne’s projects by offering short run digital printing for smaller quantities and custom sizes. SING.PLAY.LOVE helps promote early childhood learning and development and we are proud to be a part of the process.
Learn more about SING.PLAY.LOVE by visiting their site: https://www.singplaylove.com/ 
