Background Blog

Some background below....... and you can click HERE to take you to the current BLOG........ and click on the calendar image (right) for pre-viewing and buying the calendar.

My love of Italy and the language stems from the year spent in Florence as an au pair, those magical days when student friends could park their minis in the centre, and I could just visit a museum every day with no queueing.

How did we get here? The usual falling through trap doors, taking the occasional idea with us, rather than a straight line career path.

Publishing is a very satisfying business to be in. There is something concrete for your efforts in the form of your newspaper, magazine or book at the end of all your hard work. More than that, the idea you had for the project is usually something you would find useful yourself, when, for instance, you need to brush up your Italian after all those years .... to be able to dip in and understand all the gossip going on around you.

So we wrote the story (no copyright tangles), trawled the internet until we found Holly our artist, badgered friends and contacts to find our team of translators/readers, and jumped...........

.................we are still in mid air.

We have met so many interesting entrepreneurs with fantastic ideas that they have had the courage to bring to life through the Independent Publishers' Guild, The Publishers' Association and at the many Language Shows and Book Fairs we have attended and exhibited at (see Links and Events Pages). I even met a stunning artist sitting next to me on the train on the way home from The London Book Fair ... despite the constant train movement, he was completing an amazingly accurate and skilled pencil sketch, said that the train journey gave him the time for illustrating his children's story and poetry books.

At one exhibition, a teacher (of French, of course) told us of a delightful fundraising event she organised at her school. She brought back 4 tins of snails from France, and they had a Sponsored Snail Eating Event. She had several volunteers from Year 9, and the head teacher had to join in as well. Children paid 20p to watch one lunchtime, (their hall was packed to bursting) and the volunteers got sponsorship from their families (per snail eaten). They raised over £1000 for the local hospice, and made the front page of the local paper.

There have been the learning curves with new software: Cubase for recording and editing the audio files; Google Sketchup for visualising what we could see from where in constructing the story book and the castle dining room (activity), all done by e-mail back and forth to Spain where Holly lives. The latest was with Actinic Catalog, the shop software, which was a severe culture shock, depite having dabbled in websites for several years now........... and we won't touch on the huge challenges of financing the enterprise, and of telling the world we exist............

But it's never 'Yay! We've done it!' ........... except in small stages, there is always the next idea and project waiting. The challenges are still coming at us.