My plan for this weekend was to read the first draft of MoneySaving Old Style, the book. It’s been written based on posts in the Old-Style Chat Forum, and compiled by Sue Haywood a great journalist on a brief we worked out. For those who don’t know, the Old Style board is much more ‘thrift’ than ‘system-playing based’.
My job is to edit the book, ‘Martin-ify’ it, and write the introduction and the MoneySaving context for it. I’m quite excited about it as I’m hoping it’ll be a great read and a really different approach.
The one fly in the ointment is its cover. My publisher sent a draft through which involved a big picture of me changing a light bulb. To be honest this made me baulk somewhat; in my eyes this isn’t a ‘Martin’ book like the Money Diet in which every word is mine, but a MoneySavingExpert.com book, and I feel uncomfortable being massively plastered all over it. This whole project for me is meant to reflect the community feel of the book, it’s one of the reasons I’m not taking any of the proceeds (well, technically I am as I’m going to donate them to charity, but you know what I mean).
As someone who’s on TV regularly having my face on it is important to the publisher; it helps sell books, but my original hope was for a pic of me with the main Old Style board contributors, which I thought would look fun. Yet now I’ve been told apparently ‘the format space doesn’t allow room for that’.
So where do we go from here? I really want the book to work, but it’s also important this is seen as a community project, not my work; thrift isn’t my bag and some of it even occasionally jars with MoneySaving New Style, which is more my thing.
At the moment the publisher is going for its initial cover draft for the ‘sell-in’ to book shops, but going to try and rework the cover, so that the ‘community-written not Martin-written’ message comes across. I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Either way though, I suspect it’s going to be a cracking read. The amount of info on the site’s chat forum is huge. Perhaps a Debt-free Wannabe book next?
