January 2, 2009

Being the tenth in a series of posts about a book proposal, from concept to print.

Click on the category ‘A journey to a book’ in the left sidebar to bring up all of the posts in the series.

Yikes! The journey is speeding up. I just did a quick count of the weeks until the release of Easy Appliqué Blocks (9) and then looked at the remaining material for this blog series. This does not compute! There’s so much more to say. I’m going to have to ramp up the series to about two posts a week. For those of you more interested in the appliqué topics, I’ll do my best to bring you some juicy ones during this time as well.

Previously, on a journey to a book… I’ve submitted the proposal, gotten the acceptance call, signed the contract, submitted a writing and coding sample, received feedback about my writing and coding, completed and submitted the draft manuscript, and sent in all of my computer illustration files.

On April 11, 2008, I received a phone call from the Martingale technical editor who had been assigned to my book, Easy Appliqué Blocks. Robin and I had the best conversation! She’s about the nicest person in the world and I felt just great after talking with her. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated hearing her approach to editing an author. She told me that it was important to her to understand where I was coming from, my philosophies, and I could tell that it was going to be wonderful working with her.

mouse.gifDuring our conversation Robin got the editing process started by asking me to think about a few things like giving suggestions for fine details. Well, there aren’t many in these simple blocks but hey, a mouse has to have whiskers and a cherry needs a stem. Since embroidery is barely present in my skill set, I was relieved to hear that the publishing house has a library of “pick-up art” to cover the embroidery stitches.

Robin also told me that after a preliminary page count the book was coming in a few pages short so they were looking at adding some quilts back in! (Ha! I KNEW it!)

This is the way it’s done… the number of pages is decided in advance, depending what the publishers feel is the appropriate length for the content. Mine is going to be 64 pages. Books are printed in signatures, I’m guessing 4 signatures of 8 pages in this case. That’s why they can’t just lop off a few pages.

Little did Robin know that I had already made a couple more quilts using the blocks. I emailed her photos of them and she said to send ‘em on in. First I had to quick-like-a-bunny quilt one of them since she said that’s what they preferred to photograph more than a top, then back the original sample quilt went to Martingale plus the two additional quilts. I also had to write the captions for them.

These quilts are going into a little gallery of examples for inspiration, with callouts giving block size, sashing and border measurements, etc., so that readers can make something similiar if they like.

There was also room for a couple of virtual examples, so Robin set me loose on that. It was like candy for me working in Illustrator, putting blocks together in simple settings to create fun little wall quilt drawings.

I got everything done and sent in that Robin and I had talked about in our initial conversation. The next step would be to wait to hear from Robin again with the first round of serious edits. Stay tuned!

Happy New Year,
Until next time,
Kay
Quilt Puppy Publications & Designs

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