Dear Team Practical,
So, last month I told you that I’d quit my job to go fulltime on writing APW. Well. There was this one other small thing that I failed to clue you in on: I sold a book.
More specifically, I sold the APW book and it will be published by Da Capo Press, and imprint of Perseus Books in December 2011. (It’s actually due to the publisher on June 1st. JUNE FIRST!! Which is soon. Soon!) Now that the contracts are signed, and to the publisher, and and and (publishing is a slow industry), I’m finally FINALLY able to tell you all about it. Eeep! So let me back up, and walk you through all this.
The Book
First, what is the book, exactly, you ask? Well, when I started looking into writing a book two years ago, I was really convinced that the book that I wanted to write had already been written. I mean, it was such an obvious, sensible book, that it had to have been written, right? Well. After lots of digging around on bookstore shelves (which involved some horror, puzzled looks, and lots of hilarious laughter), I realized it really didn’t exist. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are a handfull of really good wedding books out there, but not this book.
I wanted to write a wedding planning handbook for normal people. A book for those of us that don’t have six figures to throw at our wedding and you know, have jobs, and don’t have infinite time for crafting. And I didn’t want to write a ‘budget wedding’ book, because it makes me irate to think that those of us who have worked hard for our budget (or whose parents have worked hard for our budget) are condescended to by being told that our wedding is a ‘budget wedding.’ I didn’t want to write a memoir, I wanted to write the no-nonsense, dead useful, wedding planning guide that I couldn’t find.
So the book, working title, A Practical Wedding: Graceful Wedding Planning That Won’t End in the Poorhouse or the Madhouse, is a how-to book, that walks you through planning a wedding in a super sane way. Like, for example, when you tell your parents that you’re not getting married in a Catholic church because you and your partner have talked it through and don’t believe in God, expect to cry a little, but know this is normal and good setting of boundaries. And, here are all the ways you can get an beautiful wedding dress for under, um, a grand. And here are ways to build a day-of wedding planning spreadsheet, so you know your wedding is organized and you can relax. And NO, of course you don’t have to feel guilty about not having X, Y, and Z nonsense because none of this was traditional in the first place. In fact, lets talk about what is really traditional…
Plus, there will be lots of quotes from wedding graduates, of course, so expect me to get in touch with you guys on that.
The bottom line is that blogs are good for lots of things. They are good for inspiration, they are good for community, they are a good real-time way to recommend businesses that are helpful. But they are terrible for actually helping you plan in a step-by-step way, because that’s not the way they are structured. Plus, you can’t hand a blog to your mom to calm her down when she’s freaking out about “what the books say”, and you can’t give a blog to your girlfriend when she gets engaged.
I started APW because I was planning a wedding, and I’d worked as a non-profit event planner, so I knew how to tackle an enormous event, plan the sh*t out of it, and get it to come out well on a ridiculously tiny budget. The book is my way to pass on a lot of those event planning skills to you, plus all the information I’ve learned writing APW for three years, boiled down in a way that makes sense, and you can reference easily when you need it.
Oh, AND I’M GOING TO BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR. So. Let’s talk about THAT.
How It Happened
{Valentine’s Day Weekend last year: Proposal writing begins}
I decided to tell you about the book on Valentine’s Day (happy Valentine’s Day!) because this is the one year anniversary of when I started, um, lying to you about what was going on. Continue reading Big News: The APW Book!!!
