Mirabella the Mermaid Detective is number one in a series of first chapter eBooks for 7 to 10 year old girls.

Mirabella is an undersea Nancy Drew type who loves exploring, solving puzzles, helping others and going on adventures with her friends. Set in the fictitious underwater city of Muria on the Great Barrier Reef, the Mirabella stories are full of fun and color.

Strong-willed, smart, loyal, adventurous, caring and passionate, Mirabella is an engaging role model who just happens to be a mermaid.

Book 1: Mirabella the Mermaid Detective.

After breaking centuries of tradition and becoming the first mermaid to ever cut her hair, Mirabella must put herself in unimaginable danger when trying to locate a family of fish who have mysteriously disappeared in the open ocean.

Book 2: Mirabella the Mermaid Detective and the Dirty Dilemma.

All the cleaners in Muria have gone on strike just before the annual coral spawning. Can Mirabella find a solution before all life on the reef is threatened forever?

Book 3: Mirabella the Mermaid Detective and the Case of the Missing Cousin.

When Mirabella’s young cousin Ariana goes missing, could a day of following false leads mean that time had run out for Mirabella to find her?

Who We Are:

Margo & Emma Gibbs are a mother-daughter writing team from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland Australia. We’re the cliché family best friends, who have always loved storytelling and will happily spend hours discussing the importance of one word.

Margo is a published author, past primary school teacher and natural storyteller, who had been weaving tales from her childhood in Glasgow, to the classroom and bedrooms of Emma and her brother when they were young.

Emma’s love for story from a very young age has led to a career as a budding film & television producer, with a passion for creating, developing and writing content for all story platforms.

Mirabella the Mermaid Detective is based on a story that Margo used to tell Emma when she was growing up. Emma loved listening to Margo's stories about the amazing mermaid because Mirabella was adventurous, brave, smart and fun. Secretly Emma has always wished she was a mermaid. 

In 2011, we decided that we’d like to do something with the idea and gave it the twist of the always adventurous Mirabella being a Mermaid Detective in the amazing world of the Great Barrier Reef.

A little over a year, volumes of research and lots of fun later we are getting ready to launch our first book.

Mirabella the Mermaid Detective is to be illustrated by the amazingly talented Laurent Lalo, an illustrator with over 40 years experience. Laurent, who lives in Noumea and regularly swims on the New Caledonian Reef, captures the undersea world of Mirabella with incredible life, colour and energy.

Vision:

It is our goal for Mirabella the Mermaid Detective to become an ongoing series of both eBooks and hard copy books, with an interactive website, engaging Apps and down the track a television series.

Along with a strong role-model, the Mirabella books will be full of interesting and engaging educational content, with a strong environmental message. Setting the books in the real-life wonderland of the Great Barrier Reef has enabled us to draw on the amazing reef environment and its creatures. As part of our vision for Mirabella, we would love to use the stories as a platform for reef awareness around the world, partnering with organisations that support maintaining reef biodiversity. We see the Mirabella story world as a great way to raise awareness and support the tireless global reef conservation effort that so many champion every day. 

The first step for us is to self-publish eBook 1, making it available in multiple formats across the world. The eBook industry has opened up incredible possibilities for storytellers like us and we are very excited about the potential for Mirabella and her adventures to reach a global audience.

We need your help:

We need your help to cover some of the costs of self-publishing Mirabella the Mermaid Detective Book 1, to get the book illustrated and out into the world.

The manuscript is completed, edited and locked and we are currently working with Laurent on around 20 illustrations that will bring the world of Muria to life. After that, the book will be laid out, optimized and released through Amazon, iTunes Store, Smashwords and more.

We have a strategic marketing plan in place, as well as heaps of ideas for the rest of the series and different ways that we can extend the story world experience of Mirabella for our readers, but we can’t do it without your help.

The anticipated total cost for book 1 is approximately $10,000, which includes editing, 20 full colour illustrations, layout and design, base marketing and a preliminary Mirabella website. Any additional funds we raise will help us to move the series further forward, enabling us to better market Mirabella, publish more books and create a free interactive website for our readers full of fun information about Mirabella and The Great Barrier Reef. 

We need you. Mirabella needs you. For your help, not only will you have our endless gratitude and bragging rights for when Mirabella becomes a hit (fingers crossed), but you will have access to some really cool thank you gifts, the very least of which being a copy of eBook 1 before it hits estores.

With your help we can get this amazing project off the ground and into the hands of young girls (and some boys) who are inquisitive with vivid imaginations. Of course we’re biased, but we think that they will love Mirabella, just as Emma did when Margo was telling her the very first incarnation of this story.

Test image of Mirabella with her two best friends - Luna the (master of disguise) cuttlefish and Seamese the (scardie cat) lionfish.