The book is finished! But the hard work isn't....

Woohoo, the first draft of the book is finally finished and with the publishers!  It has been pretty all consuming the last few months which is why I haven't gotten around to writing any updates.   I won't lie, writing tens of thousands of words is pretty physically and emotionally draining and makes it hard to write anything else.

When I started this book I thought I can easily write this in 3-4 months.  What I hadn't counted on was life getting in the way, with both my son and husband being hospitalised and very ill, suddenly deciding to move house (which wasn't planned when I started the book) and The Sewing Directory being busier than it ever has it was hard to find the time to fit in writing.

When you are writing ideally you need several hours of uninterrupted silence so you can really concentrate and get into the flow.  When you have a small child, and a husband who also works from home it is pretty hard to get that!  I ended up going to the library for a few afternoons just to get that peace and quiet.

But now that the book is finished it is still not the end of the work.  I have been sending the book through to my publishers one section at a time.  So now they have had chance to edit the first few sections and will be sending them back to me to go over again, one section per week starting from next week.

I will need to review any changes they have made, respond to any questions and expand on anything they have asked me to cover in more detail.  Once I've done that for the whole book, which is going to take around 2 month, it then passes to the art team so we can work on the design side of the book.

The book finally goes to print in June (for a November release date).  But the work doesn't end then, the next step is the marketing of the book.  If I want to secure press coverage most the magazines work at least 3 months ahead so I need to be working on that from June onwards.  I bought a very useful book called How to Market a book by Joanna Penn.  Hopefully that will give me lots of useful advice for the marketing stage, plus I have a few ideas up my sleeve.

The book itself comes out in November so I will be marketing up to the end of the year at least.  So all in all the book writing process will have taken 2 years from start to finish.