I am excited to report that I have self-published a book about my sheds project. Begun in 2015, this piece of work consists of 54 pieced and stitched fabric blocks, each representing one of the 54 sheds on the site where I have an allotment. The shed-keepers were invited to give their written responses to questions about how their shed came into existence and what they liked and disliked about it.
Shedloads was exhibited at The Lovely Gallery in London SE26 in 2017 and some of the individual shed blocks were sold.
A book seemed a good way of presenting the work in an alternative format, making it accessible to a wider audience and preserving it as a cohesive whole. I chose to self-publish with www.blurb.co.uk using their Photobook format and a good quality paper. In this way I could retain total control and I do the whole thing from my desktop. The experience for someone like me with only basic computer skills was slightly nerve-wracking but a friend gave me two important pieces of advice, which I tried to follow: assemble all your images and text in one place first and don’t work on the book when you are tired. Simple and elementary, but it needed saying. The piece of advice that I would pass on to anyone else who wants to try self-publishing, and I do encourage you to try, is get someone else to proofread the book. I didn’t do this and I see the importance now of having an independent eye cast over it before you press “Publish”: I confess that there are one or two typos in my book.
But I am very pleased that I have published the book. I wrote an Introduction and an Acknowledgement page and included all my photographs of the 54 sheds, photographs of my pieced blocks and all the comments written by the shed-keepers. Regrettably, because of the quality of the format and the paper I used and the number of pages (113), it is quite expensive to buy. If you would like to do so and see a preview of the book on-line, there is a link here http://www.blurb.co.uk/books/8732337-shedloads
And sometimes discounts are available….
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