Well, now seems like the perfect time to get back to my publishing journey. My three volume series of Beaded Christmas ebooks has just been published and that brings me neatly back to my original journey into ebooks. I realised today that I am struggling to get my head around the idea that Christmas is fast approaching, then I realised why…I was putting together designs for these books back in January through to April, filmed the videos in June and have just spent the last few weeks proofing the books. It’s no wonder I feel as though I haven’t got over last Christmas yet….I’m just not quite ready for another one! Still, I will be staying in the Christmas spirit teaching lots of different Christmas decoration projects in late November through to early December, so come and join me if you can.
Back to the publishing: I had just realised that continuing to use Blurb to publish my miniature cakes was fast becoming impossible, so I began looking at other options. It was as I was talking through some of this with the very lovely (and always supportive) Heather Kingsley-Heath that I ended up on the ebook road. Heather introduced me to Vivienne Wells, owner of Vivebooks (at that time Rainbow Disks). Vivienne has many years’ experience in the publishing industry and decided to set up her own business producing ebooks, primarily in the craft world. I freely confess here that I am a traditional book-lover. I have hundreds of books (beading and non-beading) and I love the smell of printed paper and the thrill of turning real pages or drooling over pictures, in the case of beading books. I don’t own a Kindle or any other kind of e-reader and I have never actually purchased an ebook! However, in spite of all that, I very quickly realised that in the beading world, ebooks do have some amazing advantages. For starters, I get to include videos demonstrating the techniques, which just adds a brilliant extra dimension to the written instructions and diagrams. I still have to do all those as well, but even then, it’s possible to zoom in on diagrams to see thread paths more clearly as you work from an ebook.
I originally approached Vivienne with a request to turn ‘Let’s Celebrate’ into an ebook. I didn’t expect the response: a request that maybe I could consider writing a book about my beaded wedding bouquets! My personal beading journey started with French Beading…I bought a book, taught myself the techniques and the rest is history!…so the idea of now writing my own French Beading book seemed exciting, daunting and just too good an opportunity to miss. Plus I feel very strongly that French Beading is particularly difficult to describe in words and diagrams, so being able to demonstrate the techniques was perfect. We discussed the format that the book might take and fairly quickly had an outline in place, swiftly followed by a contract with a provisional publication date. It was all becoming very real! I then spent months making flowers, getting photos done and writing up the diagrams, before finally sending a manuscript over to Vivienne.
During this process, a small, but rather unfortunate incident occurred which provided a valuable, if sad, lesson for me. Around the time I was starting the process of making bouquets, I was contacted by a lady, Lorraine, from Northern Ireland who said she made crystal beaded wedding bouquets, had been selling them successfully at craft fairs and was now planning to open a shop, called ‘Love Lane’, to sell these and other items. She had found my website and thought my beaded bouquets would complement her crystal bouquets and wondered if she could buy some from me to sell. The photos she sent me of her bouquets looked lovely. This seemed like an excellent opportunity and I was in the process of making the bouquets for the book, so offered those to her. We agreed the price, she kept telling me all about her shop, sent photos, details of the opening, the press coverage that she was expecting and so forth. She had a website for the business (I checked!) and, as a shop owner, she asked if I could give her 28 days credit. This is fairly standard in business, so I agreed. I sent over the first batch of beaded goodies (some buttonholes, corsages and tiaras), well before the shop opening. Just as this was due to be paid for, she asked for the next batch (my bouquets), promising me that my first payment was on its way. Foolishly, I sent the bouquets, and it turned out the payment was nowhere to be found (aka ‘lost in the post’). Lorraine then disappeared off the face of the earth, her shop and website disappeared and nobody could track down her address or phone number. I felt cheated, upset, rather stupid, all the usual emotions that go with being ripped off. I never worked out whether this was a scam from the beginning or whether she had genuinely tried to open the business, but then gone bankrupt. I consoled myself with the thought that the bouquets had at least been photographed for the book. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the photos, so I ended up having to re-make all the bouquets which delayed the publishing process by some months! This was a very steep and painful learning curve which has made me very wary of dealing with shops now. If anyone in Northern Ireland has come across any of my beaded bouquets, at least you know where they came from! I imagine the lovely Lorraine tried to sell them!
Happily, the rest of the publication process went very smoothly. I took my newly–made bouquets down to Exeter for a photography session. Vivienne and her husband (he does the filming) came over to me to make the videos and for a day my little beading room became a film studio! That was a nerve-racking experience and a lot of work to get through in one day, but working with Vivienne and Trevor has always been such a pleasure. We work hard, but have a lot of fun as well. After that, everything left my hands for a while. The next time I saw my work, it had been beautifully laid out by Vivienne with all the diagrams and photos in place – I just had to proof it! For anyone who has never tried to proof-read a document, it’s harder than you think when it’s something you have written. There’s a tendency to see what you expect to see, so it’s very easy to overlook mistakes. The process is made a lot easier when you have a good editor who takes care as they are doing the layout and also spots possible anomalies, so it becomes a joint venture between the author and editor and hopefully everything gets picked up before the book goes into production.
I think it took almost 2 years from the time I first spoke to Vivienne until the publication of Bead Flowers and Wedding Bouquets, but it was such an enjoyable process, that I’ve now published another four books with Vivebooks and I hope to do more in the future!
