Marianne Arellano Pazos struggled to teach her daughters the language she learned as a child, and last year, she took her efforts one step further, writing her own stories and recruiting her sister, Diana Arellano, to illustrate them. Together they created a website and published six books through Amazon’s print-on-demand division.

“Arellano Pazos targets her stories to young students of Spanish in the United States and Hispanic parents who want their children to become familiar with the written form of the language. She decided to self-publish after rejections from traditional publishers. Publishers in Spain, she concluded, weren’t looking for “a Cuban girl from Miami writing these books about things that happen in the suburbs,” and U.S. publishers tended to translate books they had published first in English.” Read the complete story here.