The map is done and out and this blog is now closed for comments.
Meanwhile, we’ve started a blog about our forthcoming third edition of Walking the Camino de Santiago.
The Victoria chapter of the Canadian Company of Pilgrims is having its annual meeting on Sat. March 8th 2008. If you want more info contact Wendy who is an amazing organizer.
Wendy Loly
Canadian Company of Pilgrims
BC Chapter, Victoria Branch
250-480-0465
wendy@santiago.ca
www.santiago.ca
It is a full day and always lots of fun. We will be there talking about the camino, and bringing lots of maps! I am looking forward to meeting Robert Ward author of the book I have just finished reading All the Good Pilgrims ISBN 9780887622526 who will also be there too. We will be on the first ferry over so say hi if you see us.
On Sunday the Vancouver Chapter is having its meeting at Guildford (Surrey) Public Library on Sunday March 9, 2008 1 PM to 5PM. We will be there talking about the Via de la Plata and showing some slides. We will also have lots of maps!
The mapbook is only 88 grams. That should keep the light and fast brigade happy!
Camino de Santiago Map is now available. The first detailed map of the Camino de Santiago strips the camino down to its bare essentials, with 40 full-colour trail maps at 1:100,00 scale and 6 detailed city maps. Each map includes picture icons for accommodation, cafés, restaurants, shops, tourist information, banks and cashpoints. Seven detailed accommodation pages list every albergue (pilgrim hostel) along the way, along with hotels and other places to stay for every budget. All this in a lightweight, compact mapbook that lies flat and stays open even during the strongest gales: no wrestling or origami skills required.
Phew! Time to celebrate, I think……
At last we have it. We got a sample box back from the printers today. fantastic! Much better then I had hoped for. It is such a massive relief to have something that looks great. It is so crisp and sharp. Even the spiral binding works. I can’t wait to use it myself and sit at a café table glass of rioja in hand flicking through it planning our route.
We our building a new database with filemaker to improve our record keeping and sales processing so still lots to do. Now we have the mapbook we have to start getting it in the hands of pilgrims
Our printer has gone on holiday and will be back in January. So we are having an enforced holiday season. I guess all the computer crashes and proofing cought up with us. No worries as we will still have the map by the end of January.
We heard from Daphne del camino. She is coming back to vancouver for a while so we will be able to catch up which is great news. She has been working as a hospitalrio up and down the route. Lucky thing.
I have been thinking about the walk from Cadiz to Seville on a sort of pre-via de la plata few days. I think it maybe is a week to 10 days and is marked. Have no clue about accommodation. It may be all the christmas pudding that is making me dream of Spain.
Waiting now for the final proof to come. Hope it comes this week. The holidays will mess up things in terms of delivery so it is starting to look like it will not arrive until the new year. On the good side it will mean that bookshops will get xmas out of the way and then we can start hassling them to buy it.
It feels great to not have to spend every night working on the map. Although now the holiday season is here we seem to spend every night at some social event which after a few nights is even harder!!
proofs came back from the printer yesterday. They look great if I do say so myself. I had a look for mistakes but I hate to look to closely incase I find one. I know that is the whole point of having blueline proofs but I am still scared of finding mistakes.
Anyway we couriered them back and I guess next week they will start the print run and we will get some finished books to check just before xmas with luck.
The canadian dollar keeps falling against the US. So our usa cover price is already out of whack. Maybe we need a north american single currency!
Have been rebuilding our files from our computer crash while we wait for the book. I guess we should also do some marketing but we would rather wait to have the finished article then do our push. Which retailer wants to find out about new product in the middle of the xmas rush?
So we sent the map to the printers today! Can’t really believe it. Talk about a troubled birth. 1 year late and so much more work then we could imagine. I can’t believe we thought we could get it done in a couple of months. We must have been mad to have started this especially as we had Owen as a newborn to deal with too. Stupid and crazy but you live and learn.
I like the end product there are always more things I would have changed and sorted out but sometimes you just got to send it to the printers before you go nuts. So we will save those changes for the second edition.
Time to rest and catch up on sleep
We have a handfull of corections that need to be done but all the files are in the right format and the images are checked. We are almost there finally. We have one major thing to decide on and that is the binding, Our printers are sending us a couple more samples as we where not happy with the first ones. Hope to get that sorted out by tomorrow and then send everything off. Finally.
So many changes and so little time. trying to get the map off to the printers by the 22nd. I think we can do it. We are going to sell it at $15 canadian and $17 us. That way we may even make some money selling to Baker and Taylor.
As for the binding we are going to Wire-O bound instead of perfect bound. The reason is that the book is too small to do perfect bound properly and might be so tight that half the map would be hidden when someone tried to read it. Also with the wire bound the book will sit flat. The spine will be covered so it will look ok on a bookshelf. It may mean the map book falls apart quicker. This is a concern but not sure what we can do about it. Also no waterproof paper as that is so expensive we would have to print @10000 for it even to begin to be worth it.
Back to the proofing
Proofing is never my favourite job. I’m not exactly the world’s most patient person, nor am I a natural perfectionist. But I grit my teeth & picture the perfect (or perfectly accurate) map. And it’s wonderful to be on the home stretch!
It has taken about 3 days to do the bloody map key! Talk about fiddle fiddle fiddle. Switching between indesign and illustrator and stupid lining things up. Now cracked it and just got to make it look pretty. My eyes are going nuts! Why are the guides so stupid in illustrator? Anyway we are still making progress. Beth is pushing for wire bound with a spine. She does not think it will look good perfect bound her main point being it might bind too tight making the maps hard to read. Oh the horror if that happened!!! I hate post production horror stories make my blood run cold! Need to look at some samples and talk with people who know.
Also the american green back keeps falling making it harder to nail down the US price. Maybe $15 dollars canadian and $400 american? If their economy keeps going south no one will be travelling from there anyway. Shudder.
And we are still backing up.
Map drawing has been delayed for an afternoon while we head over to westvan to give a slideshow on the camino. It has been a few months since we have done one so I hope that we are not too rusty. Don’t think there while be too many people there. Our babysitters just called and said they where hungover and maybe late. I pity them looking after our two whirlwinds in that state. What is worse they are doing it for free!
Need to go do the last few things before we head out.
Beth says she has had enough of Pili Pala Press. I think the computer crash has crushed her. Let’s get the map out first before we go nuts.
Started to put the corrections in to the proof map and now have some quotes to play with too. The final stages! yeah! Should not get too carried away what with our recent past. thinking of printing 3000 and maybe charge $15.95. Never done the 0.95 game before always had a flat $25. I know almost every other retailer in the world does the .95 thing and I know why they do it BUT i still don’t like it but would enable us to charge more. Is there a huge difference between 15.95 and 16? Yes there is I am beginning to think. Need more time to dwell on this.
The map is not cheap to print. Full colour means it is almost as expensive as a whole book. Ouch. Hence the need to have a higher price to cover our cost. Waterproof paper is crazy expensive so much so that we are not going to do this on our first map. Still wondering about perfect bound and Wire-O bound. We hope to have some samples soon so we can make a better judgement on this too.
Almost up to date with the reentry of data that we lost in the great computer crash. Still makes me angry just thinking about it. Oh well at least our new back up is cool.
ok so we have worked hard the last few days and have made some progress. We have all layout done but are still arguing about a few things. We need to confirm the layout as we have been having second thoughts about how the mapbook starts.
Cover, key/how the map works, overview map, maps, listings. Also the numbering of the pages. I want page one to be map one and have the key and overview map not numbered. Heritic? Maybe. But it makes no sense to have the first map number page 3 or 5. We are breaking so many rules already lets not stop now! to a point i guess. But we want to make the map simple and not be tied to convention.
The profile charts have been added to the maps and the listings are also complete. Still no word on quotes.
Ok the lay out is done and the profile charts are also done. We need to put it all together and add the key and publishing info. Also confirm our cover price. This is tricky as the canadian dollar is doing really well against the US$. I would like to see for around $15 canadian but as we have not had any quotes back I am not sure if this will be right. We could do $20 but that might be too high. We only get 50% or less of this so thats why it needs to be around this figure also printing in colour and a wierd size is very expensive. As we have said before we don’t want to take the production to asia as you don’t really know what you are getting and the enviromental standards are zip. Also we don’t know what we are doing at the best of times so having it all done in china could be more hassle. Once we get the quotes back we can sit down and work it out.
So… we now have our computer working but every time I open something I realize something else is missing. For example our inventory is totally screwed up and need to be re done all the way back to MAY! Ouch! Just thinking about it wants to make me do another back up just in case it happens again.
Had fun today though mainly playing with Indesign and working on our new ad for this years travel pub catalogue. I need Beth to finish a few things on the profile charts before I can do much more on the map. Now that the city strike is over her time is gone so that sucks. If if and if we had not had this stupid computer trouble we would have been done now we struggle again for time. This map really is having a troubled birth i hope that means it will have a good life. I need to post another picture of it so people can look at it.
Oh yeah another thing some bugger tried to kidnap our website. The registration name went missing and went to some other company which is sort of part of the company that holds our www.name. ‘Oh?” they said when we asked them why. WHAT! #%%#@! Is what I said back. The domain name business is so weird and open to abuse. All sorted again but it did meant we had no email or website for two days. I can’t believe all they offered us was a credit! Rubbish customer service. We changed companies straight away they can shove their credit. I really need to calm down. I still hate computers the next project is going to be done with crayon.
Cooking garlic prawns tonight that should do the trick.
Starting to get quotes from printers. Or I should say getting ready to send for quotes. I will be interested to see how much they have gone up since our last approach last year. Maybe the strong dollar will mean cheaper? I doubt it somehow.
Thanks to all of you who have sent emails about our computer trouble. It helps to hear that other people have had similar trouble. I have already backed up twice since we got our computer back! I think we have learnt that lesson. I don’t mind making mistakes just don’t want to make the same one twice. I also didn’t realize how many mistakes there are to make!
Winter weather is here huge amount rain. Makes us want to go to Spain again. Maybe next spring… need something to get me through the rainy season besides vino tinto.
You would think by now we would know better but we don’t. Our hard drive died and with it loads of our data. Nothing missing on the map. Or at least we have not found it yet but we have loast loads of other stuff. #%$&!!! It took us 10 deays to get the computer up again and now we have it working we are just beginning to get things rolling again. We also have a new external hard drive to store all our stuff on and so hopefully this will never happen again. So the moral of the story is always back up. Always back up always back up. I should say it again but I will spare you.
I would guess that we are still about 3 weeks away from sending the map to the printers so hopefully we will not be too much behind our planned publication date. Does this sort of thing happen to big publishers?
Anyone who was on our newsletter list should email us again with there info as we have lost all our emails. #$&@! Sorry folks.