How not to write a craft book,

I always thought that after writing a book, I would be able to offer lots of advice and words of wisdom about making the leap from craft blogger to author, but in all honesty, the best I can do is tell 2 tales of what not to do.

 

(my design file for all the book ideas & patterns)

Tale 1 ::  During the writing process, there are a number of deadlines that come up.  Almost a year ago, I was just finishing off the first chapter which included all the basic instructions, materials and how to's, and have previously hinted at what went wrong.  Yes, I lost it all.  Something in the region of 10,000 words.  Cue a fair amount of swearing and looking for something to kick (I think it was the bin).  On the bright side, I did feel that second time around what I wrote was much clearer and an improvement on the first draft.  Since then, the Apple Time Capsule that failed has been repaired (free of charge I might add as it was a know fault), and I now have that first copy back but haven't yet dared to read it.

Tale 2 ::  As I was heading towards what they call the package date, ie the point at which everything had to be with the publisher, it dawned on me that I was going to have to sort out posting what was months worth of handmade softies over to America to the C&T Publishing offices.  I spent an hour with the 'post mistress' in my local post office packing up the box, checking and double checking paperwork, and deciding on the safest way of posting the parcel.  It was such a relief to have got to this point with the book, I left the post office and cried.  That relief was short lived.

At about 6 o'clock that evening, I had a phone call from the main sorting office to tell me the paperwork was incomplete.  How could that be?, I spent ages asking questions and filling in forms.  Turns out the person I had relied upon knowing what they were talking about, was obviously misinformed herself.  Great.  We filled in a makeshift additional invoice over the phone, and I was told the parcel would still go via UPS and was given a tracking number.  The next morning, I contacted UPS only to be told they had no record of the parcel, and it was still with Parcelforce.  Parcelforce said it was with UPS.  For 3 days, no-one could tell me where the parcel was.  For 3 days, I thought that was it, everything had gone missing and I would miss the publishing slot.  Finally it appeared on the Parcelforce online tracking system.  In New York.  It was actually supposed to be in California.  At least it was somewhere instead of untraceable.  I got drunk when I heard from my editor that it finally arrived.