It’s still hard to believe that my new book, Pure Soapmaking, is finally here. The book has been such a labor of love for more than two years; to finally hold it in my hands is incredibly exciting. Even more exciting is seeing other soapers with the book! It’s been an affirmation (and, a relief!) to hear all the positive feedback. Thank you all so much for the support. =)
Now that the book has been out for several weeks, I have begun to reflect on the process of creating the book. If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, let me tell you…it’s a lot of work. Fun? Absolutely. It’s a fun and rewarding gift to share your passion and knowledge with others. But, creating a book requires an insane amount of time and resources. I was lucky to have access to both during the writing process. My Bramble Berry team and family helped me find time to work on the book. They also were invaluable in assisting me with recipes and other aspects of the testing process. It takes a village to create, photograph & lay-out 32, fully-tested, cold process projects!
The first step in writing this book was creating a book proposal for the publishing company, Storey Publishing. This is essentially an overview of what information the book will contain. Below, you can see a few pages of the original 2013 proposal, including the cover page and an overview of some of the chapters. After sending in the proposal to the editors, we began to work on the framework of the book and what information it should contain. A lot of the proposed topics made it into the book, while some did not. This is another reason why having input during the writing process is important. Talking about these topics and how they should be organized with soapers and non-soapers helped to lay out the book in the most cohesive way.
