Make room on your bookshelves!

Apologies in advance for what I suspect will devolve into an excited squeal of a blog.

It’s just that I kind of GOT A BOOK DEAL!!!

It’s official, Which Way is Starboard Again? the book is actually going to happen.

I have been grinning like an idiot since I got the call on Friday and still can’t quite believe it.

The wonderful people at David Bateman Publishing will be working with me on the book as part of their travel series. They describe it as ‘travel tales with a twist’ – so I guess that means I’m twisted enough to make the grade!

If you have a snoop around their website you will see that Bateman is a real grown-up publisher that puts out some really cool stuff  http://www.batemanpublishing.co.nz/ – which I guess will make me a real grown-up author – quite frankly I am still pinching myself!

After reading countless articles on the demise of publishing in New Zealand and having my hopes of leveraging off the America’s Cup dashed I had pretty much resigned myself to self-publishing. I was determined to get the book out there one way or another and self-publishing certainly doesn’t have the stigma it once did, but having a professional publisher pick it up is amazingly validating.

It means someone is prepared to take a punt on people wanting to read about me bumbling my way around the South Pacific, and I appreciate that more than words can say!

Since my only experience in publishing has been with newspapers and magazines this will be a whole new adventure for me – one that I plan to drag you all on too.

Writing a book has pretty much all I have ever wanted to do since I first picked up a pen and started chewing on it,  so this really is the most amazing feeling in the world!

Paddy of course will be my technical advisor to help turn descriptions like “and then he pulled on that rope over there” into something a little more nautically accurate and we both really look forward to sharing our stories with you – even the embarrassing ones!

I will keep you all up to date on how things progress and promise to spam you horribly as soon as I have something to spam you with.

– Anna the shameless self-promoter xx