The typesetters and design people at New Society Publishers are now laying out the pages and photos. We’re getting closer! This has not all been plain sailing. Today I’m working on replacing a dozen of the photos that didn’t have enough dots per inch or were too small to work well. We’re having two eight-page sections of color photos as well as the B&W photos as advertised!
I’ve also had to shorten the text a bit because what I sent in was too long. People buying the electronic version will still get the “deleted scenes” and people buying the print version will get a link where they can read what we couldn’t print (so to speak!).
I have postcards and fliers to distribute at events too, and bookmarks will be coming along later when the covers get printed (they’re printed at the side of the covers and trimmed off, as far as I understand it).
My next job directly for the book is to make a list of well-known people who might read the electronic proofs and write those “advance praise” comments that you see on back covers and in the front of books. That list is one of my jobs for today too.
Then, in a few days, I get to proofread the whole book, in the electronic proofs. And if there’s nothing major that would change the page flow, Kathryn Simmons at Twin Oaks will make the index. She’s not only one of the members of the Twin Oaks Indexing crew, but also a very experienced vegetable grower herself. (Maybe you’ve never thought about how a book comes to have an index. It doesn’t happen by magic! Click on the link to learn more.)
I’m also continuing to work on marketing ideas, compiling lists of magazines, websites and organizations that are a good match with my book, and good places to put reviews or advertisements. I’m also looking for events at which I’d like to make presentations in November and December. I’ll be at Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Conference in January and the Virginia Biofarming Conference in February. I’m negotiating a possible March booking too.
The book will get printed in late November and December and the publication date is February 1, 2013. I’m excited!
Meanwhile, I’m sending an article every month to Growing for Market magazine. See other blog posts for news about recent articles. People who don’t want to wait till the book comes out to start reading my work can get a sub to GfM. It’s a great magazine, full of the details small-scale growers need to be even more successful than they already are.
This weekend I gave my presentation on Succession Planting for Continuous Vegetable Harvests at the Heritage Harvest Festival. It was sold out ahead of the event. (Well, the classrooms are a bit small, only 32 chairs.) My presentation went well, and I distributed postcards and fliers for my book.
My next presentation is Growing Great Garlic at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association conference in Greenville, SC October 26-27. Soon I’ll get busy on preparing my slideshow.
Very cool! Good luck with the book!