One of our bestselling books, famous for its ability to bring parents around the world to tears. We’re revealing all the details about the creation of the book, from its initial inspiration to the final product.
We wanted to create a book that touches on the moments a parent experiences as they watch their child grow, and, at the same time, capture the most exciting-yet-everyday adventures of a child.
Your path is your own, but it’s right next to mine. We’ll tell our own story. Hand in hand, one step at a time.
On each page, there’s a moment of realization each parent has that their child is growing up, but at the same time that they’ll always be their little boy or girl at heart. Sometimes these little moments can be awkward, difficult, and joyous, all at once, but in the end, both the parent and the child grow closer together. Filled to the brim with emotion and laughter, we created it to become an incredible addition to bookshelves across the world!
The best projects demand the best teams! Working on this book brought together extraordinary individuals and we proudly present them to you:
Aimee, You’ll Always Be my Little Girl is a story of everyday family adventures filled with emotional moments of realization that there is much more to it than just riding a bike or building a tree house. The individual poems communicate a particular instance of a parent observing their child engaging in some activity or asking a particular question. The parent realizes just how much that child has grown, and yet, in the parent’s eyes, that child will always remain their little one.
As with all our books, the process of transitioning from concept to reality was a painstaking and detail-oriented process. The times we thought we had the right idea were almost euphoric, and then everything would all come crashing down days later when we scrapped it all and started over. Even once we had it, some poems went through 4 or 5 rewrites. We really wanted to embrace the variety of feelings that childhood, on one side, and parenthood, on the other, brings.
Ryan Quinn, the author of the book, admits that a huge chunk is inspired by his own experience as a father of two young boys. As he puts it: “In the end, it was a tremendously rewarding experience.”
This book’s illustration was different from everything we have done before. Mainly because there was not just one illustrator working on the book, but a whole team of talented people, each one focusing on their own task, from storyboards to character development and style to backgrounds and personalizations. This way, each team member focused only on their strongest suit, and, when all the talent and skills met in the final illustrations, we got perfection!
It took five months from the conceptualization to the final product, hot off the presses. Considering the amount of work, it wouldn’t have be possible without an extraordinary and dedicated team. Hundreds of conversations, drafts, readings, and revisions were done by our creative, illustration, concept, and editing teams. An in-house focus group was organized to help us orient ourselves, since we easily wander too far with our creativity. In the end, all the pieces perfectly fit together when our technical team turned on the green light and put the book in front of our customers. That’s always a unique and special feeling for the whole company.
Aimee, You’ll Always Be My Little Girl promises to be an amusing adventure for children and an emotional rollercoaster for parents. Just like parenthood.
This was our first book that featured families in all their various shapes and colors: we have a Daddy edition, a Mommy edition, as well as a Family edition that also includes a same-sex couple option. We believe that every family in the world deserves to have a keepsake like this.
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