For Hampshire author Sarah McLeavy the challenge to find £12,000 to maintain St. Mary’s Church in Newton has provided the backdrop for her children’s story Snail Trail. 

“When I arrived in the village eight years ago one of the ladies showed me her pet African Land Snails,” Sarah explains.  “They are fascinating creatures and extremely educational for young children.”

With a young baby in tow, Sarah was given a rather special present: a baby African Land Snail sitting squarely on a mass of peat at the bottom of a fish tank with a cuttlefish and a slab of cucumber for food. Shortly after, another baby came along and so did another two snails.  As the children grew so did the snails.  The snails also had babies, over one hundred of them! The children named the adult snails Tricky, Ricky and Sticky.

 “The seed for an unusual story was germinating in my head,” Sarah continues.  “Nobody had ever written a children’s story about an African Land Snail, especially connected to raising money for a village church and with so many of our village households having these snails as pets it gave me an idea for a great story.”

At the same time, both Sarah and her husband had been reading to their children at bed-time and they kept running out of stories so Sarah began to write the story for parents, grandparents and carers to read to their children, and for older girls to read for themselves.

Now Amy, Sarah’s daughter, is 11 years old and Sarah has jumped into the deep end of the self-publishing game; having worked with Cradduck Design Co. in a previous capacity of professional (legal) marketing, she approached David Cradduck for advice on how to get her draft script and Amy’s outline illustrations into a printed book that would be affordable to produce but that would stand up against any other children’s book on the bookshelf.