Remember the book I told you I was writing? You know, the one that compiles the Portrait of a Seamstress interviews with patternmaking tutorials and inspirational and comical commentary on the sewing world. A few months after I revealed the project, I wanted to give you an update so that you knew it was still in the works and hasn’t been thrown away. So, what’s the status? It’s finished! All one hundred plus pages are now written, photographed and drawn. It was an amazing feeling to put the finishing touches on it, and it is fun to look at where it started and where it ended. It definitely evolved into something I never imagined.
The next step is publishing and I’m teetering back and forth between self publishing and going through a publisher (sorry for the redundancy; I hate using the same word in one sentence). Self publishing used to connote that a book wasn’t good or worthy enough to be picked up by a major book house, but that’s not the case today and in many instances, the payoff is greater. Amy sent me great article that proves this. Thanks Amy! But the mission of my book is to inspire both sewer and non sewer and to spread the world about our community to a wide audience, and to reach that amount of people, I need the help of someone else. Although I like to think of myself as superwoman, large bust and all, I have only do so much. I’ve have contacted a couple literary agents and have sent proposals to several publishers, but no decisions have been made. I’ve slowly started to realize that writing a book is easy, finding a publisher is the hard part. One thing I learned from Tilly’s story is that publishing takes time.
So that’s where I am. What are your thoughts on self publishing versus publishing with a major book house? Does anyone have any recommendations for publishers or agents?
