Hi ,
Have you ever thought about writing a book?
It was never something on my bucket list but I ended up writing one anyway.
Here's how it came about...
When I first started My Chip Carving in 2007, everything I sold was produced by someone else. Books included.
For several years, Shelley told me over and over, "You have to write your own book!"
My goal was to write one chapter each month, which was as much about photography as it was about writing. When you see my book you'll quickly notice my concentration on high quality close up photography so the reader could clearly see what I'm explaining in the text.
Surprise, surprise...I was done ahead of schedule!
While I was developing content I took some time to search online for a freelance editor. I was truly blessed to find an amazing editor who had done some work on a craft, how-to book before.
She knew exactly what needed to be done to create the book, page-by-page, chapter-by-chapter, in a format the printer needed. In short order she had it ready to go.
With this approach you can tell I wanted to self-publish my book. Rather than find a publisher who would take care of printing and marketing my book and deciding whether to reprint in the future, I wanted full control of my own destiny.
Thankfully my dad spent his entire career in the printing industry. Finding a quality company to print my book was really easy.
With his inside contacts, we met at Reindl Printing in Merrill, Wisconsin to watch the first pages come off the press. Really cool to be able to see this.
A few weeks later I was back at Reindl with a small U-haul trailer to pick up my skid of books.
At the end of the process I was already thinking about my next book. But it didn't take long for reality to set in and that idea got tabled quickly.
There you have it! That's how my book happened!
