by Judy Campbell Smith
I’ve always had a sweet tooth and one day I had an idea for a book about ice cream from different countries and cultures. In my original idea, it was a simple board book.
I had spent a few years in New Zealand and knew about their hokey pokey ice cream, and the book started to take shape in my head starting with that.
But then I started doing research, and was quickly overwhelmed by the amount of information I was finding. I had a huge spreadsheet of all the countries I wanted to look into and snippets of information I had found, but needed to do further research on. This book was definitely not going to be a board book, so I began to imagine a picture book more like Lynne Marie’s Let’s Eat!: Mealtime Around the World, or Alice B. McGinty’s Pancakes to Parathas: Breakfast Around the World.
I wrote a first draft to share with my SCBWI critique group. This first attempt featured only three countries but was already 500 words. It was really more of a test to see if I was on track with my concept. At this time, I was using the repeated phrase “It’s Sunday in…” to begin each section and form a connective thread from country to country with a little bit of a pun on the word “sundae.”
The feedback came back that people liked the stories and learning about the ice cream, but the Sunday/sundae thing wasn’t very strong. They also pointed out that the text was already getting long, so I would need to cut things down if I wanted to include more countries.
Through a webinar submission opportunity, I was able to have an agent critique this version. She also suggested that I find a way to connect each country beyond just ice cream or Sunday. She really pushed me to think about a narrative thread that could help with page turns and structure while giving the book a stronger hook.
Meanwhile, I continued to do research and realized that if I didn’t figure out a way to cut myself off, I’d never reach the end of researching. I finally concluded that if I focused on just twelve countries, I would be able to work within the 32-page picture book format.
I also made a list of ideas, words, and phrases that could be a theme connecting all my stories. Once I settled on the idea of “ice cream is joy”, I knew I had a much stronger hook for the book.
From there I started narrowing down the countries I wanted to include. I picked ones that had a nice spread across the globe, had stories I was excited about, and featured treats and cultural details that would bring a lot of variety for the readers. Thanks to some helpful posts on the Nonfiction Fest blog, I learned how to add sidebars into my manuscript which allowed me to include some fun facts on every page to support my fictional stories. I also dramatically cut down the word count for each country. In the version I ended up submitting, each spread had about 50 to 80 words of text, plus a sidebar.
It was quite a challenge to figure out how to tell twelve unique stories in one book while mixing fact and fiction but keeping to the theme of joy helped me stay focused in the writing. It’s so fun to hear from readers, both kids and adults, who tell me they learned something new, made ice cream, or tried a new ice cream after reading my book.
I hope that you enjoyed my “Story Behind the Story”! Please check out Ice Cream Everywhere: Sweet Stories from Around the World and enjoy something sweet today!
Judy Campbell-Smith writes picture books that spark curiosity and celebrate diversity. Her books are an engaging mix of fact and fiction, and she is often inspired by true stories and real people in her work. Judy’s background is African-American and Puerto Rican, and she’s always trying to write books that she wished she had as a child. Her first book, AJ’s Neighborhood, illustrated by Amanda Dowell, was self-published. Her second book, Ice Cream Everywhere: Sweet Stories from Around the World, illustrated by Lucy Semple, was published by Sleeping Bear Press in 2024. Her third book, Baseball for Breakfast, illustrated by Maggie Carroll, will be published in 2026 by Charlesbridge. Judy is very active in the kidlit community and lives in Southern California with her husband and two children.
