Q&A: children's author and illustrator Harriet Muncaster

Since your first Isadora Moon book was published in 2016, your writing has become a huge success. How has the publication process been for you? What has changed since then? My first published books were picture books that were only published in America, so they felt very distant. Although I'm very proud of my first few picture books, they weren't very successful or well known. Some of these early books I created on my own before they were published, but others I developed with the publishers on board from the start. I learned from this that my best work tends to come when I have time and space to develop the characters and stories in exactly the way that I envision them so that I can be really passionate about them. This is how I developed Isadora Moon. I was really pleased with my first Isadora Moon story, all about this little vampire fairy girl who wasn't sure which school she should go to, and I asked my agent to send it out to publishers. I was delighted when Oxford University Press expressed an interest and invited me and my agent for a meeting. They were also really passionate about my vampire fairy character, and they contracted me to write an initial four Isadora Moon books.