As a kid, I loved words, stories. I read voraciously and dreamt one day of writing, too.
But I soon realized that I didn't have stories to tell, as such. It wasn't until I became a weaver that I realized that my stories were all weaving related.
Over the years I had done 'big' projects so when it came time to write my 'thesis' (or monograph as they called it) for the Guild of Canadian Weavers master weaver certificate, I knew what I wanted to do and generally how to go about doing it.
It was a work of years. Literally. Because I made the decision to weave samples. Not just tiny postage stamp sized samples but samples large enough you could feel the drape/handle of the cloth and get a feel for how it would feel as an actual cloth. Five binders stuffed full of samples.
And once that was done, people started asking where they could get the 'book' and then urged me to write a 'proper' book.
That 'book' grew and grew. I spent a lot of time (and I mean a *lot*) crunching the numbers. How much would it cost to produce it? How many samples? How much would it cost to buy the yarn to produce the samples for that many copies? The logistics were, shall we say, daunting? (Any idea of how much space 1000 two inch ring binders take up? A small bedroom.)
Never mind much of this happened before I ever started writing. Having completed the thesis/monograph, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to include so I settled on 1000 copies and talked to a local printer who printed a fair number of local history books for local authors.
It was staggering. Quite literally staggering. And I was going to have to pay ALL the costs up front, on my own. No hefty (ha!) advance to help finance it. Because I knew that no traditional publisher would touch my 'vanity' project with all those tipped in samples.
One of the benefits of my going my own way, using local talent, financing it myself, doing ALL the promotion and marketing myself, is that this (and my subsequent) books were never 'stolen' by LLM to 'train' their AI.
At the time I just stubbornly put one foot in front of the other, doing what I needed to do, financed the thing on my credit card and took out a hefty loan.
The book sold fairly well, considering I asked a reasonable price, given all the samples. I found some unexpected support within the weaving community. And a fairly large number of people who wanted the book for 'free' because I was 'asking too much for it'.
On the other hand, some people refer to it as a 'classic' in the craft. Yes, it is still available, but no samples. While dealing with chemo (and the fatigue that caused) I took close up photos of all the samples, before and after, and produced a 'digital' version of the book. Then, when I decided to write a 2nd book, a friend oversaw the uploading of that .pdf to Blurb.com to test the site.
The site allowed the possibility of a print 'magazine' format as well as a .pdf and amazingly, there are still a few people who buy it.
And now, 22+ years later I still offer it for sale. Just me, not a traditional publishing house. And now we have to deal with LLM stealing our work and making money off it. So now me is grateful that previous me was so stubbornly set on producing a book with samples, in the first place, then continuing to publish my books myself.
This year the US president decided to 'break' Canada economically so it would make it easier to 'annex' us. I was concerned about that until I realized that the company that hosts my books is in US and the books are printed in the north east (I forget which state) so US weavers can still buy my books without paying Trump's Tariffs. (The last book is only available digitally via my ko-fi shop but I knew very few people would be interested - however, again it is tariff free because it is a digital download.)
There are still a few copies of The Intentional Weaver at Sweet Georgia Yarns, signed ones, let me add. Whether or not they will order more, I have no idea. This tariff stuff is...making decisions difficult. But you *can* still get both print and digital versions of Magic, Intentional Weaver and Stories from the Matrix at Blurb. Canadians might want to buy the digital versions to avoid whatever shenanigans with tariffs a certain someone serves up.
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