We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brailynn Camille Granville a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Brailynn Camille, thanks for joining us today. How do you feel about asking friends and family to support your business? What’s appropriate, what’s not? Where do you draw the line?
From mom: As a young black girl with Autism, they tend to be overlooked and undercelebrated for their accomplishments. We would love for our friends and family to support our business, The Ausome Kid through our available sponsorship opportunities. All proceeds will go to marketing materials, merchandise for consumer products, legalities, and other requirements that are necessary for expansion. Join us on our continuous journey to Autism awareness, acceptance, and inclusion.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?
Brailynn Camille is a ten-year-old girl from Madison, Alabama and the CEO of her own company, Brailynn Camille Enterprises LLC. What sets her apart from the rest is how she has overcome a lot of challenges since she was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Language Disorder, Sensory Processing Disorder, and other illnesses. She was inspired to go into business when she started getting bullied by children. This was a great start to allow Brailynn to educate her peers and allow them to get a become aware of what Autism is and how to treat others who are different.
PROBLEM: Times became even more difficult when Brailynn started being mistreated and misjudged by organizations and businesses that claimed they supported children. Unfortunately, there was so much lack of diversity and understanding that she was not given a fair chance in competitions and even unfairly removed from a tutoring program. With so many forces going against her, there was an urgent need for adults to become more accepting of children with Autism as well.
SOLUTION: We branded Brailynn as a little black supergirl with Autism, The Ausome Kid. Her superpower is Autism and she explains how she view the world differently than other children. We created a book series, Adventures of the Ausome Kid, which tells the story of how she uses her imagination to travel the world spreading Autism awareness with her best friends during playdates. During their exploration, they also learn about different cultures and foreign languages. Her first book, Brailynn goes to Paris, France, was based on our vacation to Paris in 2019. Each story will encourage children to take interest in traveling, learn how to display kindness, and treat others with dignity and respect. Our goal is to continue to spotlight little black girls with Autism who are often overlooked and undercelebrated for their uniqueness. We plan to change the narrative and contribute to diversity of our culture.
We are most proud of Brailynn earning the title as a # 1 bestselling author, winning 2021 Youth Entrepreneur of the Year award, and 2022 Junior Queenpreneur Bravery Pitch Winner as a result of the success of her first book in her Adventure of the Ausome Kid book series Brailynn goes to Paris, France.
We would like potential followers and fans to know that every investment, donation, contribution, effort, and any other type of support goes towards the empowerment of children like Brailynn Camille.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
Brailynn’s business partner is her mommy, Brittnie Granville. They are the best business partners because they both are part of two separate target markets impacted by Autism with opposing point of views. Brailynn is living with Autism and is internally affected by the disorder where her mommy is affected by Autism externally through caring for Brailynn. They make the perfect mother/daughter dynamic duo since they have been on this journey with the ups and downs together since the beginning.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
We decided to test 2 out of the 3 ways of publishing the children’s books. The first way we chose is through self-publishing. We used Amazon KDP as our testing tool and published a short story in 4 weeks that made best seller and #1 new release on launch day. Then we decided to try something called hybrid publishing which is a combination of self publishing and traditional publishing. Hybrid publishing ensured we still owned all the rights to our story, materials, name, image, and likeness. However, hybrid publishing does not accept every manuscript submitted and they have standards about what they choose to publish. Traditional publishing have even more stipulations and limits that we knew our best route would be through hybrid or self publishing. We researched the best hybrid publishers and submitted our manuscript, concepts, ideas, etc and hoped for the best. So when we found out our publisher accepted our manuscript, we were ecstatic.
The lessons we learned were there are benefits to all 3 ways of publishing. You just have to do the research and figure out which one fits your needs as well as ensuring you are able to serve your target market effectively. The cheaper way is not always the best way; however, there are strategies that can be employed where you can find it beneficial to publish in multiple ways like we did. Research and preparation (especially for the cost) is where you should began this path to publishing your own children’s book.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theausomekid.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/theausomekid
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/theausomekid
- Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/brailynncamille
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/theausomekid
- Youtube: https://bit.ly/theausomekidyoutube
- Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/theausomekid
- Other: https://linktr.ee/theausomekid http://amazon.com/author/brailynncamille www.instagram.com/brailynncamille www.facebook.com/brailynncamille
Image Credits
Creative Soul Photography Alexis Blue, BPO+ Digital Media