A successful career can create room for ambitions that take years to emerge. For Zane Carson Carruth, years in marketing leadership and business ownership helped build the confidence to pursue a growing interest in children’s literature. She sees a connection between those chapters of her life, with each drawing on her interest in communication and creativity. Through her books, that experience has taken on a more personal purpose, creating stories she hopes will encourage curiosity, kindness, and connection between children and their families.
Carruth, the founder and president of Carson Marketing, LLC, views that connection as central to her story. Her company is a marketing firm serving small and midsize businesses with coordinated business and marketing support. Before establishing it, she says, she held senior marketing positions, including vice president roles. The work required her to communicate clearly, present ideas, and carry a project from an initial concept to a finished piece.
Today, Carruth’s creative work includes children’s books featuring Abella, an animated adaptation, and a new series intended to introduce young readers to scientific ideas through storytelling. Across those projects, she identifies a consistent interest in kindness, curiosity, and the relationships that help people grow. Her business experience remains part of that work, giving her practical confidence as she develops ideas for a younger audience.
For Carruth, the path between those chapters has become clearer with time. She sees the presentations, professional classes, career decisions, and creative assignments of earlier years as preparation for responsibilities she could scarcely have anticipated. Her account offers a personal perspective on reinvention, particularly for established professionals considering where their experience might lead next.
The Experience Behind a Change of Direction
Carruth traces her career to a customer service role in insurance, where she says her interest in sales and marketing began to take shape. When a workers’ compensation fund opening in Texas offered her an opportunity in sales, she chose to pursue it despite her employer’s efforts to retain her with higher pay.
Faith helped guide that decision, Carruth explains. Her Bible reading strengthened her resolve to follow the direction she wanted, even as the move introduced unfamiliar responsibilities and the practical adjustments of working in downtown Houston.
“I just stepped out on faith, because I knew I wanted more, but I never knew I wanted to be an author. That came later,” Carruth says.
She continued building her skills through classes, public speaking, and presentations to insurance agencies, Carruth notes. Developing marketing materials also gave her opportunities to make creative decisions and carry projects through to completion, gradually strengthening her confidence.
According to Carruth, a subsequent acquisition eliminated her corporate position, prompting her to establish her own business. She says the venture developed successfully while writing became an increasingly meaningful part of her life.
“The passion and the drive have to be strong enough to give up the big corner office,” she says.
For Carruth, changing direction required acknowledging the security and comfort her career provided while considering what she wanted next. She views those earlier experiences as preparation for authorship, giving her the communication skills, creative confidence, and determination to pursue new work that held growing personal meaning.
Learning to Trust a Different Kind of Work
Carruth’s journey into children’s literature began with a spiral notebook and a character inspired by her daughter. She says she started writing one afternoon, allowing an imagined fairy’s adventure to unfold on the page. That story eventually became The World’s First Tooth Fairy… Ever, establishing the foundation for a creative pursuit that would become increasingly important in her life.
The confidence Carruth brought to writing had developed throughout her marketing career. Preparing brochures taught her to consider words and images together, while business presentations helped her become comfortable addressing audiences. She sees those experiences as valuable preparation for book readings, public appearances, and the decisions involved in presenting her stories.
Still, Carruth acknowledges that entering unfamiliar territory can revive self-doubt. A friend’s encouragement helped her recognize what she had accomplished across different roles. She says his belief in her abilities stayed with her, offering reassurance when another challenge required her to rebuild confidence.
“It takes a lifetime to trust your instincts, and to trust yourself,” Carruth says. She considers supportive relationships important to that process, particularly when a new direction brings uncertainty.
Writing for children also required practical adjustments, Carruth explains. Her early drafts included lengthy descriptions, which she later shortened to improve pacing and suit young readers. Revising familiar passages meant making difficult choices about what the story needed. For Carruth, the experience reinforced the value of trusting her creative judgment while remaining willing to refine the work until it better served children and the adults reading alongside them.
Giving Mistakes a Place in the Story
The values Carruth wants children to encounter are closely connected to the qualities she considers important in adult life. She emphasizes kindness, encouragement, and the influence of the people surrounding an individual. In her view, the messages absorbed through everyday relationships can affect how someone approaches challenges and understands personal worth. Those concerns help explain her interest in stories where a character has room to learn.
Through Abella, Carruth explores decisions and their consequences in an imaginative setting. Her creative emphasis allows uncertainty, surprise, and imperfect outcomes to become part of an adventure. Within that approach, a character can discover that an idea has gone wrong and still find a way forward. Carruth’s interest lies in making those experiences accessible to children through situations they can follow and enjoy.
Her story Abella Gets a New Hairdo! offers a playful example of that approach. Carruth’s heroine decides she wants curls and uses a home perm kit, then has to deal with an unexpected result. With her friend Darcie alongside her, Abella works through the situation. Carruth presents the episode as an opportunity to explore decisions, self-acceptance, and the ability to find humor in an imperfect outcome.
Carruth’s emphasis on supportive company extends naturally into that fictional friendship. She considers the people around an individual an important influence throughout life, including during periods of change. In the world she creates for young readers, companionship gives an adventure emotional warmth. A setback can unfold in the presence of someone who remains caring and involved.
The Fairy at the Center of an Expanding World
In Carruth’s first Abella story, an unexpected journey provides the beginnings of a familiar childhood tradition. Abella is carried away from Tulip Hollow by a bee, encounters children, and must find a way home. The adventure becomes a fictional explanation for the tooth fairy tradition, giving Carruth a foundation on which to build further stories about the character and her world.
Carruth has continued that world across titles including The Adventures of Abella and Her Magic Wand, Abella Starts a Tooth Fairy School, and Abella Goes to the Rodeo. Different settings and experiences allow the character’s adventures to develop while retaining the friendship and imaginative tone at the center of the series. The books give readers additional ways to spend time with a familiar heroine.
For Carruth, the tone of those encounters is a deliberate creative choice. She favors illustrations and stories that preserve the gentleness she wants associated with childhood. She says finding an illustrator whose work matched that preference took care. Her own experience of selecting visual collaborators reinforced how important it was to communicate the kind of world she wanted children to enter.
That attention to visual identity connects with the marketing work Carruth previously undertook. She remembers choosing photographs, composing language, and bringing materials together until the finished result felt right. In her present work, she applies the same confidence in creative judgment to a character whose appearance, surroundings, and adventures need to feel consistent with her intentions.
Why Parents Belong in the Story
Carruth sees children’s books as an opportunity for parents and caregivers to share attention, affection, and discovery with a child. Alongside vocabulary and knowledge, she values the connection those moments can create. “Children look to their parents for everything, obviously for love, for acceptance, for guidance,” Carruth says. She believes sharing a story offers a simple way to communicate care.
Carruth acknowledges that reading aloud was not a regular part of her parenting and wishes its value had been explained earlier. She sang to her children and says music remained meaningful in their lives, reinforcing her belief in the lasting influence of shared experiences. Recognizing pressures on parents’ time, finances, and emotional capacity, Carruth wants families to understand shared reading’s value within their own circumstances.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2024 policy statement, published in Pediatrics, recommends that pediatricians encourage shared reading from birth through at least kindergarten. It links the practice with stronger caregiver relationships and language, literacy, and social-emotional development.
A 2025 study reported by University College London analyzed American Time Use Survey data from more than 236,000 people. Reading for pleasure on an average day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023, while reading with children remained unchanged. These findings concern broader reading habits rather than Carruth’s books.
For Carruth, the goal is to help children feel loved and valued. She sees reading together as kindness expressed through attention, with a shared story gaining personal meaning through the relationship between a child and their caregiver.
Bringing a Gentle Creative Vision to the Screen
Carruth has also taken Abella into animation, extending her creative work into a format that combines images, movement, and music. A full-color 3D video, Abella’s First Tooth, brought the character to life with producer Rick Siggelkow and songwriter Dennis Scott. Her purpose was to carry forward the innocence and warmth she values in the books while exploring another way for audiences to encounter Abella.
The collaborators brought established experience in children’s entertainment. New York University lists Siggelkow’s showrunner credits on Shining Time Station, which introduced Thomas the Tank Engine to North American audiences, as well as Noddy and Little People. The Recording Academy confirms Scott’s two Grammy wins. Carruth credits Scott with creating the opening song for her animated project.
For Carruth, working with them was personally meaningful as well as creatively useful. She appreciated their enthusiasm for children’s entertainment and the ease with which they could discuss imaginative ideas. The experience connected her own vision with people accustomed to developing material for young audiences, and she speaks warmly about the relationships formed through the work.
The project also brought a business challenge familiar to many creators. According to Carruth, the video was completed, but the promotional support she had anticipated did not develop as planned. She says the work remains available on YouTube and wants it to reach a broader audience. Her account makes clear that producing something she values and bringing attention to it are separate responsibilities.
Carruth remains interested in opportunities that could allow the animated work to develop further. She presents those possibilities as ambitions for the project’s future. At the center of her interest is a consistent creative preference for gentle entertainment, with music and storytelling supporting a world she hopes families will enjoy together.
A New Chapter Built Around Curiosity
Carruth’s latest book initiative extends that interest in discovery. She identifies the new series as Abella’s Curious Nature Quest and says it includes two books so far: Tooth Traditions Around the World and Abella and the Lost Hermit Crab. The series adds another direction to her work with the character, bringing factual material into the imaginative experiences she creates for young readers.
“I begin with a little-known fact about a creature and build an engaging story around it, bringing real science to life in a way that is imaginative, accurate, and age-appropriate for young readers,” Carruth explains.
Her creative aim for the new series is clear. Scientific accuracy and accessibility are priorities she wants to hold together as she develops each story. Within that approach, an unfamiliar detail about the natural world becomes a starting point for curiosity. Carruth intends the narrative to give young readers an enjoyable way to encounter information they may never have considered before.
The expansion also reflects the willingness to explore that Carruth sees throughout her professional life. She once pursued a sales opportunity from a customer service role, later founded a marketing business, and eventually devoted more energy to writing. Each move required her to learn while drawing on experience already gained. She now sees that accumulated experience supporting further creative choices.
For Carruth, the next chapter remains connected to the reasons she began. She wants to create work that children can enjoy, give parents opportunities for connection, and remain open to ideas that carry personal meaning. Her understanding of success has room for those aims alongside the achievements of her business career. The experience she once used to shape a brochure now helps her shape a story, with another young reader waiting to discover where it leads.
