IN THE PIPELINE: MY NEW BOOK - TOY BUNNIES ON PLASTIC SCOOTERS

Eight years ago I wrote and published a short book, The Art of S.W.O.R.D, through the online publisher Blurb.

It was great fun putting it together so I decided to start another one at the same time.

This one has taken much much longer to pull together but after 8 years I'm more or less there.

It's called Toy Bunnies on Plastic Scooters and is a pictorial field guide to spotting the animal-based and simpler plastic toys released by Jack Rosenthal's toy company.

I fell in love with these novelty toys when I first discovered them through blogging over a decade ago and after collecting a few at Moonbase wanted to celebrate them in some way from the off.

A book was the ideal platform and as I like toy reference books so much myself it was the obvious choice. 

Its been a long journey as the toys themselves are pretty hard to spot but its been a lot of fun tracking them down.

Writing Toy Bunnies was made even more lengthy as I could only afford to use the no-cost editing suite on Blurb called Bookify. I produced The Art of SWORD like this too. The big advantage for me is that it was free. The downside is that its a suite that's a little cumbersome to use [although Blurb have improved it over the years] and the finished books can't be converted into Blurb's newer formats like mini-books [which Wotan Bill published his micronauts book in last year] and magazines, which are much cheaper to buy than larger formats. 

E-books may offer a cheaper alternative on Blurb but that is another kettle of fish and needs research once I'm live.

So, Toy Bunnies on Plastic Scooters will be published as a large format book, as what I would call a coffee table book. As a result, as set by Blurb's own tariffs, it will be expensive and I imagine too expensive for most people. 

There is little I can do about this as Blurb set the price of Bookify-produced books by page and mine required quite a few to do the toys justice. When I began back in 2012 I hadn't foreseen the high price tag Blurb would eventually set.

Despite these issues I am thrilled to have got to the end of the project and finally publish the book! Phew!

The next step is for me to save up this summer - maybe sell a few toys! - and buy the first proof copy of my book and check for obvious mistakes and typos [which can be edited] before I publish openly [yep, there's nothing free in online publishing!]

Watch this space!

In the meantime here is the cover of my soon-to be published tome with ace cover art done by our very own Wotan Bill.