What’s That Noise

What’s That Noise is a story about a sassy, beautiful kitty whose imagination runs wild, allowing her fears to take over. In the end, she realizes things are not as scary as they seem.

Follow along in this picture book as Emma becomes frightened by a scary noise that disrupts her day-to-day activities as a cat. As she keeps hearing the noise, she starts to imagine what it could be…any one of a cat’s worst nightmares.

This quirky book will speak to cat-people, animal-lovers, and children alike – sharing the message that it’s okay to be afraid, but you shouldn’t let it keep you from enjoying the things you love.

In October 2020, I started writing my second children’s book, What’s That Noise, and in January 2021 I started working on creating my character and illustrating my book. This illustration process, which I did primarily live on my Twitch channel, took me around 7 months to complete, not including final changes to background images and page layout.

From there, I started researching and planning a Kickstarter campaign that ran from October to November – a campaign that unfortunately ended up unsuccessful in the end. I learned a lot from this campaign endeavor and I’m glad I did it. It was a lot of hard work and, honestly, a little disheartening to have it fail, but it was a great learning point. I really do need to build up my email list and maybe even do advertising for a longer period of time before I even launch a campaign in the future.

One thing is for sure, I learned how to film and edit my own video to advertise for my campaign. It was shot on iPhone with a gimbal stabilizer, the scary noise was created with my voice and Adobe Audition, and I created the animations/transitions with Adobe After Effects. I cannot tell you how many outtakes I have, there are way too many to count.

Even though the Kickstarter was unsuccessful, I had created additional advertising through social media and email to take pre-orders for my book. As of December 2021, these are now in production and will be in hand in February 2022.

If you are interested in a physical copy of my book please visit shop.tiatieman.com/collections/whats-that-noise

ISBN: 978-1-7354737-2-7