It’s just a few days ago that the Internet celebrated its 25th birthday and the topic of the day seemed to be ‘what has the internet done for you?’ This did set me thinking actually and I realised that it has pretty much saved my life. Given that the ME frequently leaves me housebound, the internet really is a lifeline for me: it enables me to buy beads (and food!) and it has allowed me to meet new people and have some sort of social life. No, it’s not perfect and no, this lifestyle is not a substitute for going out into the real world, but when I need it to, the internet does enlarge my life beyond the walls of my house. Now I find myself using it to do an online book launch!
What is an online book launch?
This is a good question, so the best way for me to answer that is to tell you how this came about. The book I’m launching is ‘Bead Flowers and Corsages‘, my second ebook about French beading. I have been a member of a great Facebook group about French beading for a few years now and I got to know the founder, Lisa Lilge a while back. (Don’t tell anyone, but I think Lisa might have contacted me to tell me off for breaking one of the group rules…!) Lisa really monitors the group closely and is very strict about keeping it to a place where we can all share a love of French beading, not a sales pitch. It is also a great place of education, so I’ve just been following a great series of posts about copyright. The group has a fantastic range of members from the amazingly talented professionals to people who are just starting their own French beading journeys and everyone there is really friendly and keen to share tips on techniques and materials as well as photos of their beautiful work.
Anyway, I digress…the point is, I somehow came to mention to Lisa that I was writing Bead Flowers and Corsages and she suggested maybe when it was ready I could do an online book launch in the group. I thought this was a fantastic idea. That was probably over a year ago (as you’re about to find out, this book has had a very long production time!), so I finally got back to Lisa when it was ready to publish, a few weeks ago, and said, ‘so what about that online book launch?’
We put our heads together and brainstormed a few ideas and between us have come up with our version of an online book launch. It is being kept strictly within the group, so although I know a lot of my regular readers will be reading this, I’m sorry you won’t get to experience it if you’re not a group member. I guess that’s the nearest it gets to a real book launch which takes place at a particular venue and may be invite only. The online book launch is going to be lasting for the next two weeks. Lisa has organised some material from the publisher which is to be shared just within the group, so this includes some extracts and a free sample pattern. I’m going to be answering questions from group members and it will be a great chance for a group of French beading enthusiasts to come together and talk about what they love!
Bead Flowers and Corsages
I thought I might as well share with you all a little bit about the production of Bead Flowers and Corsages. It came about as a sequel to my first French beading ebook, ‘Bead Flowers and Wedding Bouquets‘. I have to confess, it feels like a lot of pressure to write a sequel. There is no pressure with the first book – it may be popular, it may not – but with the second book, there are 
expectations! This was driven home to me in an email from the publisher to say that the wholesaler had just placed a much larger first order than normal with the explanation that ‘if this is as popular as the first book, we expect sales to go really well’…pressure!! What if it isn’t as popular as the first book, or as good. I never think about these things as I’m writing the book – I’m just focusing on what I want to say in it, but as soon as publication time comes around, the self-doubt demons emerge. This happens every time, with every book. I live in constant fear that I am about to expose myself as a fraud, a mediocre beader who has no right whatsoever to be daring to tell other people how to bead. Anyway, nobody has told me that to my face yet, so I shall put aside my personal demons and get back to the ebook.
Vivenne, my publisher, and I discussed the possibility of a sequel quite soon after the first book had been published. In order to avoid digressing any more here, I’ll point you to another blog post that I wrote about how to write a beading book, so you’ll get some idea of the processes involved…here you go!…So, it all starts with an idea. This bit was easy: French beading. I needed 
an angle though. My first book had been about wedding bouquets and weddings are always a popular subject, so I thought about other areas where the beaded flowers can focus and corsages were the most obvious. Also, corsages have become really popular for school proms, so I thought it was great that this would take the book beyond just the wedding market. I also needed an angle from the French beading perspective. I’m going to come back to talk about print books versus ebooks later on, but all I want to say now is videos! The ebook allowed me to include video demonstrations, so I wanted to use these to introduce different techniques. It seemed a little superfluous to just use the same old techniques that I had used in the first book – I wanted to bring something new.
So, this was my starting point. I designed the corsages and picked the flowers based purely on whether or not they would allow me to showcase a particular technique. Of necessity, the techniques I am featuring in Bead Flowers and Corsages are more advanced than in my previous book. I saw this as a means of taking the readers on a journey – a learning curve. So if you already have the first book, this is your chance to grow your skills some more. I wanted the book to be about learning skills, not just making corsages. So I spent a lot of time focusing on explaining the techniques in a long chapter, then using those techniques to make individual flowers. Finally, you get to the corsages themselves. Here I also got creative. For me, design is about practicality as well as beauty (I think if you just focus on beauty then it is really art more than design). Anyone who has made French beaded flowers will know that they can be very heavy. So, as I was designing corsages, I was also thinking about the practicality of wearing them. I created some that are lightweight, with simple flowers, so these can be worn on the lapel in the traditional way. I also wanted to create some stunning looking designs, but the weight of these led to me thinking about wrist corsages or handbag corsages.
In a final twist to the design process, my brother got married whilst I was in the midst of writing this book, so it seemed like a great excuse to make myself a corsage for the wedding. I was wearing a beautiful silk jacket, so I found myself confronted with a common dilemma: how do I fix the corsage on without ruining the jacket? Well, guess what, I developed a special fastening, using a magnet to do the job. This is also included in the ebook. So, on the day, both my Mum and I wore our beaded corsages, colour schemed to go with our outfits, and attached to our jackets in a way that did no damage whatsoever!
So, here we are, I’ve chosen the flowers I want to make, experimented with techniques and bead counts to actually make them. I’ve documented the techniques I’m using and written up the patterns for the flowers and corsages. All this has gone to the publisher as my first draft manuscript. For the ebook, the next step is the videos and photos. In the past I have done photoshoots in the photographer’s studio: it’s a really time-consuming process, but a lot of fun. I actually wrote in detail about some of them here. This time around, Vivienne and her husband 
Trevor (he shoots the videos for the ebooks) came up to my beading studio for a couple of days. There is quite a lot of video footage in this ebook, so I think we were pretty lucky to get it all done in that time. The first few hours were spent setting up lighting and discussing shots, then we moved on to the actual videos. It’s a really exhausting process actually, with so much concentration to try and make sure I don’t say anything stupid (because that means a re-take) and constant checking to see that the camera shows what it should and the details are clear enough…if they’re not, then this also involves a re-take! You can see one of the finished videos from the book, here.
From here on in, it’s over to the publisher. Vivienne and Trevor had a lot of video editing to do (not a reflection on my videos, just a standard process!) and Vivienne edits all my manuscript onto the actual pages, adding in the photos. This time, Trevor took some of the detailed shots and some of the technique photos. The main corsage photos were all done down in Devon by the lovely Jonathan Bosley, who I’ve worked with in the past (as you can see in the photo above!).
Print Book or Ebook?
If you read my blog posts regularly, then you will know I like to finish with a thought for the day. So this one is about the endless debate over the relative merits of print books and ebooks. Given that I’ve now published six ebooks, you might imagine that I am a huge fan of this medium. Actually, I fall on the print book side of the fence. If you’re talking about a novel to read, then I cannot imagine the day when I would rather sit with an ebook reader instead of an actual book. Nothing beats the smell of printed books, or the feel of turning the pages. But I also happen to think that ebooks do have their place. Yes, there are of course the arguments that it’s easier to pack your ebook reader rather than weighing your suitcase down with books, but that’s not the reason that I think ebooks have their place.
In the craft market in particular, books are a learning tool and when you are learning something new the more tools you have to hand the better. A written description of a technique is fine, but it usually needs pictures to allow it to make more sense. Better still is to actually watch someone doing it, especially if they are also describing what they’re doing and giving you a few tips along the way. Ebooks allow you to embed videos, so you can do just that. I think that French beading especially is hard to convey in words and photos when you start out – so much of the techniques involve understanding the difference between twisting wire and wrapping wire and it is hard to show that in a photo, much clearer in a video.
So, I’ll leave that thought with you…! Right, I’m off to do that online book launch now – I look forward to seeing some of you there over the next two weeks. Meantime, don’t forget to buy my book!!
