Apparently, Writing the Book Was the Easy Part

Starting MK McNally Creations from scratch

There is something nobody tells you when you decide to create books At some point, you actually have to tell people they exist.

Apparently, writing them, designing them, obsessing over tiny details, changing your mind seventeen times, and finally creating something you're proud of isn't the end of the process.

Then comes marketing.

And social media.

And websites.

And TikTok.

Yes. TikTok.

Welcome to MK McNally Creations.

I'm Michelle, the person behind MK McNally, and if you're reading this, you've arrived pretty close to the beginning of this particular adventure.

So, what exactly is MK McNally Creations?

That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer because I've never been very good at staying in one creative lane.

I love stories. I love fantasy and magic. I love creating characters and worlds. I also love art, intricate coloring pages, Celtic-inspired designs, steampunk machinery, dragons, books, and taking an innocent little idea and making it significantly more complicated than it needed to be.

Which is how projects like Gaelic Steampunk happen.

The original concept sounds simple enough: combine Celtic-inspired imagery with the wonderfully strange world of steampunk and turn it into an adult coloring book.

Then came the mechanical forests.

And the Victorian Druid.

And the Celtic fox.

And the airships.

And somewhere along the way, I realized I hadn't simply made some coloring pages. I'd created another world.

That's pretty typical of how my imagination works.

The part I'm still learning

Creating things comes naturally to me.

Promoting them? That's another story.

I deliberately kept my business accounts separate from my personal social media, which meant MK McNally Creations recently began this journey with an impressive 5 Facebook followers, 9 Instagram followers, and 19 TikTok followers.

You have to start somewhere.

Instead of pretending there's already a giant audience waiting on the other side of the screen, I've decided to embrace it.

We're building this thing from scratch.

I'm learning TikTok. I'm figuring out what people actually want to see on Instagram. I'm sharing works in progress, asking readers and colorists for opinions, and slowly learning that creating the finished book is only one part of being an independent creator.

And I'm going to share some of that journey here too—the successes, the experiments, the things that don't work, and probably a few moments when I wonder what possessed me to start doing any of this in the first place.

What's coming

MK McNally Creations isn't going to be about one book or even one genre.

There will be coloring books and fiction. Fantasy and magic. Characters you'll get to meet while they're still being developed. Behind-the-scenes glimpses of projects before they're finished.

Cover decisions, artwork, excerpts, ideas, and probably the occasional creative disaster.

Most importantly, I want this to become a place where the people who enjoy these worlds can actually be part of creating them.

You might get asked which coloring page belongs in a book.

You might meet a character before anyone else does.

You might help choose between two designs.

And someday, when there are hopefully considerably more than five of us hanging around on Facebook, we'll be able to look back at this first post and remember where it started.

So, welcome.

I'm genuinely glad you're here this early.

Let's see where this goes.

— MichelleMK McNally Creations