For those of you that follow my weekly blog you likely already remember that one of my goals this year was to publish another book and so I’m very excited to announce that I just signed with Friesen Press to publish my second book.  This next book (yet to be titled) is going to be a coffee table book with a selection of my photography from my travels.

Clearly the signing is the easy part!   The more difficult part are the hours that I now need to spend creating my manuscript…and the clock is ticking.   Yikes!

The format of my next book could take so many forms, initially I’d been toying with the idea of a photography book based purely on Italy, but after much discussion, I’ve decided to cover a handful of specific travel destinations which will broaden my appeal and potential audience.  Don’t worry, they’ll definitely be a chapter on Italy…but only a chapter this time.  Perhaps my next book will only be about Italy!  🙂

Now, you might think that this exercise should be relatively simple and straight forward given that I have just over 100,000 photos in my archive, but actually that’s the tricky part.  How do I choose only enough for the 150 or so pages without leaving sooooooo many great photos behind?

Yes, perplexing indeed!

I’m planning on starting each chapter with some background on my trip and the location where the photos were taken.  Not surprisingly there is still a ton of writing to be done, even for a coffee table book.  Although to be fair I have no shortage of stories to give context and color to the photos…

The first task is to identify the locations that I want to include…as you know there are no shortage of fantastic locations in my archive.  In fact, I’m heading to Iceland in early March with Zach and Sami for school break and taking in the Northern lights, ice caving and taking the waters at the Blue Lagoon during our visit so pondering whether to leave a chapter free so I can add them before I get the manuscript finalized.

If its like last time there will be at least two full rounds of edits and mock ups, before we’re close to getting the manuscript finalized for print.  When I had originally made this an objective back in early November my master plan was to have the book ready for launch in the mid April timeframe, but its taken a tad longer that expected to get everything lined up and so its looking more like mid year before I’ll be able to have it published and “on coffee tables”.

I’m also planning on launching my book to coincide with an exhibition of my photography – again working on details but want to introduce the book with a splash, no better way than to do it in a gallery.

This book, like my last will be available in hardcover and softcover from Indigo-Chapters in Canada, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and of course my publisher in the US – Friesen Press.  You’ll also be able to get the eBook, but then its not really a coffee table book…more like a iPad type of book.  Lol!

For those of you that remember when I published my first book I spent a month on Lake Como in Northern Italy writing and editing the manuscript, but given my current travel plans it doesn’t look like I’ll have the luxury of heading somewhere exotic to craft the manuscript in preparation for submission to my publisher.  More’s the pity!!!

One realization I had when i published my first book is that you don’t put yourself through this process expecting to make money.  If you factor in the amount of time you spend writing, editing, re-writing, re-editing the manuscript just to get it to a state where you can submit it…well, its a labour of love that’s all I’m saying.

Hey, if it was so bad why am I doing it again?  For me it’s about setting myself goals and then driving to accomplish them…even it they are huge, big and some might say “overly ambitious given the talent”.  What can I say I’m an obsessed over achiever – ha!

The great thing about taking on a project like this is that it’s just one more way of highlighting the enormous change in my life since I consciously decided to focus on my own personal reinvention back in 2012.  Who could of imagined that just five short years on that I would be in the throws of publishing a second book?  Certainly not me…

Until that time I’d never put pen to paper, but now with almost 350 weekly blogs to my name and over 300,000 readers I realize that I must be doing something right, so I’m just going to keep on going.

I love the process of writing and so want to thank you all for continuing to indulge me each week as share my stories.

Until next week…ciao!