Book

Bailey’s Adventures…Learning to Read

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The Process…

I am the sole author and illustrator of the book, Bailey’s Adventures…Learning to Read. I began writing this book during the summer of 2021, with the hopes of mixing my love for art with my love for writing. The book’s main character, Bailey, is inspired by my younger sister. It was my dad who first proposed the idea of me writing a book. One day while in the car with my sisters and I, he mentioned that it would be cool if I wrote a book about my little sister Bailey. At the beginning of this writing journey, Bailey was still learning how to read. I saw an opportunity to spread my creativity to others, as well as put a smile on my little sisters face, when she saw herself in the book. I believe that reading is important. Although I loved reading to my sister, I noticed she did not always enjoy, nor understand the books I read to her. My hope was that the words in the book would be easy enough for beginning readers to hear and recite, and learning readers to read easily and learn from. Bailey’s Adventures…Learning to Read was written to cater to the age group associated with children in Kindergarten to 3rd grade, and their level of understanding.

The writing process itself took me about a day and a half to complete. I enjoyed rhyming throughout the text, and including silly references to animals and people. While writing the book, I outlined picture descriptions for each page, and would often find myself in moments of creative block. Certain pages took significantly longer than others to draw, and caused me a lot of frustration. Rather than enduring the anger that can come from constantly illustrating each page in long sessions, I would take much needed breaks. These breaks could range from a day to a few months, but when I did refocus, I would illustrate multiple pages at a time, in order to make progress. However, as time passed, the challenges I faced continued to grow and deviate from my expectations of writing a book. There was a point in time where I had almost lost all my illustrations due to a technological issue. I don’t think I have ever felt more panic than in that moment. I thought I had lost a years worth of work in an instant, and it was honestly discouraging. Ultimately, I was able to recover my work a month later, and return to illustrating. After that incident, I dedicated more of my time to the completion of my book, as well as the backing up of my work on multiple devices. I finished the interior illustrations of the book not long after. Drawing the book’s cover took approximately a month to do, as I ran through about 10 versions before I was satisfied. I wanted something simple, yet purple, sticking to a color theme to ease my already overstimulated mind. Once the cover was done the next step was combining the words with the illustrations, and formatting the overall book. The first time I saw the book put together page by page, it was truly surreal. The process itself was an elongated process, however, my fault lied in thinking that “finishing” the book meant I was done.

I began research into the book copyrighting, after meeting with my family friend, Mr. Finley of The Listening Tree Bookstore, and discussing with him the next steps of the book process. I applied for a copyright that same night, and was fortunate enough to receive notice of an approved copyright, in my name, a few weeks later. That alone was an accomplishment that I reveled in for quite some time. After I received my copyright documentation, I reached out to my Aunt Dottie, the author of Outstanding Black Women of Yalobusha County: Their Stories and Their Contributions to a Mississippi Community, to assist me with looking into publishing. At the time I was open to either traditional publishing or self-publishing, since I knew very little about the steps of publishing. My Aunt Dottie was able to provide a variety of resources and contacts for me, as well as helpful information to continue my research. While unfortunately the traditional publishers did not work out, for a variety of reasons, her support and resources led me towards choosing to self-publish. Self-publishing for me was but another thing accredited to me that I could be proud of, especially with it being my first book. The research into self-publishing took quite some time, as it was important to me and my parents that the way we went about it was cost efficient, and manageable on our own. We looked into self-publishing printers, as well as the process of obtaining an ISBN for my now completed book. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2023 that I was assigned an ISBN for my book. Not long after that, I was able to find a self-publishing and printing company to print my book. When I received the first preview copies of my book, I was overwhelmed with a sense of happiness. There was a feeling of relief and pride that rushed over me as well. I was proud of how hard I worked to get to that point. Thanks to the obstacles, support from my family (largely my parents), friends, prayer and my persistence, my book Bailey’s Adventures…Learning to Read is now available for purchase.

If you chose to purchase a copy, I would like to say thank you in advance for investing just a little bit of your time and money, into me and my work!