Alt Fiber reviewed on Blogcritics
Check it out! I was one of the original writers on this site, forever ago (or so it seems), so it was cool and a bit of a surprise to see this crop up. Fun.
Her only critique (that some patterns only offer one photo) is based, really, in the realities of book publishing. You only have so many pages to work with! Ever notice how most craft books are 96 or 128 pages? What do these have in common? They’re both divisible by 8 — most modern books are bound in 8-page signatures, and when the editor has done their initial “this is how much it will cost to print this book” estimates, they probably end up sticking to the original pagecount 99% of the time to keep their supervisors happy. In other words, if you end up with one extra page, then you have to have 7 more at that point no matter what, and that’s not always feasible.
Authors often end up having to edit for length if they’re over, or do what we did in How to Knit in the Woods, which is place multiple pages of the Snake in the Woods sweater chart online instead.
Authors (and even editors!) don’t usually have full control over their titles and covers either — that’s all marketing department, all the time. Otherwise How to Knit in the Woods would’ve been named Does A Bear Knit in the Woods? (ha ha)
(FYI on the Fern Tee in Alt Fiber, though — it’s more or less the same front and back, though one side is “scoopier” than the other!)
Pagecount is yet another reason digital publishing appeals to me so much — no worries about binding types, no worries about shipping costs! If there’s something short and sweet that people would want to buy, be it a single pattern or a chapter-length how-to, you can charge for it accordingly and get it out for sale a lot sooner. One more reason I love my Kindle…
Today we’re staining the deck. I’d rather be dyeing yarn, personally. I doubt Reduran will take deck stain off my hands half as well as it does dye, though.
My jacket got a mention! Awesome!
(P.S. I’d love any photos you could pass along….)