1. Eve Godfrey
Tillery 7th Period
Senior Boards Presentation Date: April 18th, 2012
Senior Project Speech
Approximately 5 million to 7 million companion animals enter animal
shelters nationwide every year, and approximately 3 million to 4 million of
those animals, are euthanized. As a young child, I always dreamt of ways
that I could contribute to the rescue and support of abused and neglected
animals. I’m sure we can all relate to the sad feeling that overcomes you
when you watch an ASPCA commercial. That feeling is why I chose to help.
(Change Slide) Hi, my name is Eve Godfrey and I chose to write a
children’s book and sell them, and give the proceeds to the ASPCA for my
senior project.
Not only did I choose to write a book to help support abused animals,
but I also chose it because I love to write, and I wanted to experience the
writing process.
(Change Slide) As my research topic, I chose literacy for this very reason. I
chose this topic because it relates to me selling the book that I have created
and it relates to the people that will be reading the book. I learned a lot
about how many people in America actually don’t know how to read, and it
really intrigued me.
(Change Slide) My project was tangible and also intangible. My
tangible product was the hardboundbook. This took extensive preparation.
2. My intangible portion of the project is the donation of the funds that I collect
from selling the book.
(Change Slide) I chose to do this for my senior project because of my
project facilitator, Karrie Westphal. My project facilitator has taken several
writing classes and is currently writing a book of her own. I chose her as my
facilitator because she has extensive knowledge about writing techniques.
We met several times and she helped me with editing and formatting of my
book. Most importantly, Ms. Karriealso helped me start my book. In the
beginning, I had a hard time coming up with ideas as far as what the book
would be about, and the storyline. She was a huge help.
(Change Slide) I began the creation of my product in January. First I
had to do extensive research on “do it yourself” book publishers. I had a hard
time finding book prices that were in a good range for me. I had to keep in
mind that I would need to sell them for more than it cost to make them. I
finally found a program that worked well with my whole project. This
program was called “BookSmart” and I had to download it to my Mac laptop.
At first I thought this program would be a risk because it was downloaded
from the Internet, but it proved to be quite the opposite.
(SHOW COPUTER) Basically you started with a skeleton and followed
the program to plug in information. It was difficult to find a way to write the
book, but still have it be in a children’s book format. My facilitator told me to
have double spacing and as little words as possible. I also wanted to have
each page formatted differently, to keep the interest of the reader. I decided
to have my story be about cats, and my inspiration came from my own cat,
3. and my project facilitators’ two cats. The basis of the book is one cat, Mr.
Sparky, gets very ill and so the two other cats, Miss Kitty and Kiki, have to
go find the magical flower that will save his life. It ends up being a happy
ending of course, but the story wasn’t the only part of the book. I also had to
do pictures.
(Change Slide) Unfortunately, I am not able to draw pictures well
enough to be published, so I had to recruit an illustrator. My illustrator was
Caylee Geller. We met several times and looked at the formatting of the book
so that she could decide whether she should draw a picture landscape or
portrait style. It took a good portion of time to get everything drawn and
sent to me, but that was only because she was also becoming familiar with
the new equipment she was using to create the pictures. Once I finally got all
the pictures in, I ran into my biggest problem. When I got a picture off an
email, my computer couldn’t read the file, so I was having to screen shot
each picture, and then put the picture into Power Point so that I could add a
border. The pictures looked good, but when I went to insert them in the
book, the program said that the resolution of the pictures was too low to be
printed well. This was a problem because each picture was very small and
didn’t give the book the effect that I wanted. What I did to correct that
problem was, I had to just take a screen shot of the picture and add the
border through the program. That increased the size of the pictures enough
to make it look right.
(Change Slide) However, pictures weren’t my only issue. I had a hard
time with getting everything to look the way I wanted it to. When it finally
4. came to the point where I was happy with the appearance, I then had to
worry about the content. The book went through three different people to be
edited, and truthfully a lot had to be changed. There were a lot of
grammatical errors.
(Change Slide) I was worried about my time limit as far as how long it
would take for BookSmart to print my books and have them shipped to me.
It took about a week from purchase to arrival at my house. I ended up
paying $10.50 for each book. That helped me decide to ultimately sell each
book for 12 dollars a piece. (SHOW JAR) So far I have had several people
buy a copy. I have collected money from each individual and I hope to end
up with over $200 dollars in donation money by the end of the year. Once I
have all the donations I can get, I will be doing a “One Time Donation” to the
ASPCA through their website. It is said that each level of donation helps
animals in different ways such as feeding them for several weeks, or helping
pay for crucial shots. My last issue with this project involved donations. I
wasn’t sure how to tell people to donate because I wanted to make sure the
donations all went to the right place. Ultimately I had to decide to put the
money into an account and donate through the online method. As far as
continuing the donations, my facilitator has asked to purchase 10 copies of
my book, so I have to order her another shipment within the coming weeks.
I decided to only order 10 the first time because I was afraid they wouldn’t
come out right, or something was going to be incorrect. In the end, it was
quite the opposite, and I am very pleased with my final product.
5. (Change Slide) I have learned a lot about myself through this project.
I have learned that I am a procrastinator but also a perfectionist, and that
those two personality traits do not mix very efficiently. As far as pursuing
this as an actual career, I have to say that I am not considering it at this
point in time. I do enjoy writing, and being creative, but I feel like choosing
this as my product helped me more in the business aspect. I intend to go to
Berry College in the fall and major in Business Administration. I hope to
maybe minor and English and continue to write in my spare time.
Thank you for taking the time to view my presentation. Are there any
questions at this time?
