Our Book Journey: A Love Letter in Progress
So we’re making a book.
Not just any book — a bold, beautiful, unapologetic celebration of birth in all its wonder.
And right now? We’re deep in it.
It’s long days filled with big ideas, endless problem solving, good food breaks (an absolute must) and non-stop cuddles with Onyx — Bel’s strange little sausage dog who thinks he’s the boss.
We’re halfway through and it’s wild how alive this process feels. Some days we’re sifting through images for hours — getting lost in the softness of a forehead kiss or the grit in a clenched jaw. Other days, we’re fumbling our way through the back end of self-publishing — figuring out budgets and deadlines and marketing plans and and and andddddd… It feels never-ending.
We took a trip to the State Library of NSW to see if anything like this book exists — spoiler: it doesn’t. That made us even more excited to tell these stories.
Our research also led us to Kinokuniya, our favourite bookstore. This is our happy place! We pored over their incredible curation of photography, art and design books… in search of inspiration.
We’re deep in the trenches with Ryan Pernovski, our self-publishing guru (proud dad of three and a complete hero of this book project). There’s a lot of emails and facetimes about cover materials, paper weight, colour codes and special finishes.
Ryan’s patience and wisdom are our secret weapons as we chase that elusive “just right” feeling for the first physical glimpse of our work. To be honest, we’re being extremely picky. It HAS to be stunning to hold in our hands.
And then there’s Ash Vos — our marketing wizard — who is throwing us all her ideas and setting us up to run with them. She’s helping us mastermind how to get this book off the ground and into your hands. Between strategising and brainstorming over facetime with us, she’s also caring for her baby Paloma.
There’s a kind of beautiful chaos in our conversations: ideas flowing freely while a little one peacefully breastfeeds in her arms. Or not so peacefully, as even the sweetest of babies are at times. It’s a reminder of the real, lived stories behind the scenes — that this project is shaped by life’s messy, wonderful moments just as much as by our creative vision.
This journey has also led us to Kylie Beach — a brilliant writer, deep thinker and one of our dearest friends. She’s crafting the introduction to the book, and every time we read her words, it feels like someone has cracked our hearts open in the best possible way.
She’s watched our full 10 year journey building The First Hello and she just gets it — the reverence, the tenderness, the grit, the wild strength of birth and the power of our roles capturing it. Sitting with her on Bel’s bedroom floor as she read her first draft had us SCREAMING. We had to order pizza and knock back a glass of red to bring us back down to earth directly after. Ha. Her words have given language to so much of what we’ve felt but hadn’t yet said — and we couldn’t imagine telling this story without her voice introducing it.
This whole project is a big leap of faith. We’re not a publishing house or a big company — just two people with cameras, a vision and a decade of stories we believe matter.
Truthfully, we’re nervous.
Self-publishing a book of this scale is uncharted territory for us, and it comes with real risk — late nights, spreadsheets we barely understand and the very real hope that we can simply break even and not go into debt.
But even in the fear, there’s fire.
We believe in this book. We believe in these stories. And we’re trusting that the community that has stood with us all these years will continue to cheer us on as we take this bold next step.
It’s messy. It’s real. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
