Gabriel Achayo Shares Of His Encounter With CLC Kenya As Key To His Authorship Journey

My writing journey started in 2016; One of my mentors had written a book ‘I Believe’.

In this book he had collected simple statements of things he believed in. Simple things like brushing your teeth in the morning, taking long walks to faith matters etc. He gave me the book and as I read it, I decided to also write my I believe statements. This I did the whole of 2016 to 2017. Everyday… A total of 365 ‘I believe’ statements.

Somewhere in the course of 2017, I got an idea to start writing blog articles on each of the statements. This I did up to over 70 articles and they would be posted on a blog platform for a movement I run called Africa Youth Leadership Forum, AYLF.

People seemed to enjoy these articles; in 2019, I started imagining what it would mean to turn the articles into a book. I asked a number of people what it means to publish a book. I’d get diverse responses. But I wasn’t sure I would be one to authors of a book. I thought this was meant for other people not me. After a lot of thinking, I decided to send the articles to one of the young people in AYLF who had been doing some editing work. My intention was to get her to read through the articles and give me her feedback. It took her some time and I thought maybe she wasn’t even reading them.

One day, she came back to me with her feedback, she was so excited about the content and felt that they would make a book. My response to her was ‘I really don’t think so! She proceeded to start looking for people who would help edit the book. Meanwhile, I personally started believing that maybe this could be something. I reached out to another mentor of mine who had authored some two books and asked enquired of him on how to go about the process of authoring a book.

He referred me to a lady who would help me see how to go through the process. I sent the articles to the lady. She read them and gave me her assessment. Her feedback was encouraging. She told me, that those articles would easily give me 3 books. That was great. I paid her for her service and then went quiet.

A few weeks if not months, I started looking for alternative publishers to really get to understand the process. All this time, my wife kept encouraging me to go ahead and do it. I’d wake up sometimes wondering why and that maybe I shouldn’t. After some time, she came back to me and told me about CLC publishers. I made some calls and visited the CLC Kenya office to see whether they were legitimate.

So in around September 2021, I turned over the articles to CLC. Surprisingly, their response was the same, i could produce 3 books: Leadership, Youth Focus and Marriage books from the over 70 articles, this is how i started my publishing journey.

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