Today is a MAJOR milestone for my book !

Tomorrow is a special date for three reasons.  Firstly, it means my book is now officially finished ! It has been written, designed, fact checked, photographed and it is now sent off to be printed ! The Second is that it is now about six five months until the official release date in the shops, which is the 3rd February 2014 in the UK and 4th March 2014 in the USA (a month earlier than I originally thought). Thirdly, it is now almost exactly a year since TickTock first contacted me to ask if I was interested in doing a book.

LOADS has happened since then, and LOADS more work is still to come !

After I first said I might be interested last year , they did a sketch based my my blog posts of how the book might look if it was 48 pages. Then they found there was so much I had written about that they made it 64 pages ! The publisher Tim and my editor Jo came up to Edinburgh and I showed them some example pages I had sketched out in a scrapbook, and we made a new page plan with some new ideas, including ideas I had for new posts. I was nervous about the meeting but it was nice to meet everyone. I took loads of skulls to show Jo and Tim and put them on the table and I don't think the waitress liked that because it was a very nice restaurant.

Then everyone decided that this going to be a great book and my editor and I chose a cartoonist to do the cartoon me (and my cartoon cats and dog). In March, there were enough pages produced and designed to show big booksellers at the Bologna Book Fair, which is one of the biggest book fairs for children's books. I didn't know this before but publishers show booksellers their books even before they are written to see if they like them and to see what changes should they would like to be made. 

Then everything seemed to go really really fast and I was sending my drafts back to my editor and getting designed pages back every week. It was really exciting doing that, but it wasn't until I had a meeting at my publishers in London that I got to see all the pages together as a whole book !

Almost the very last thing to be done was the cover. The cover design was INCREDIBLY important because a great book with a rubbish cover won't sell many copies. The job of the cover is to encourage people to pick up the book in a bookshop to look at it, or to click on it on Amazon. The one colour we knew it couldn't be was the same bright red I use on my website because people aren't supposed to like books with red covers, so it's a nice blue.

The cover design changes a bit between different countries. In the UK, the back cover has a picture on it like the picture at the top of my blog. In the US, it has a different picture of me. That picture was the last one to be taken for the book. 

The last bits of text I wrote were the dedication, which is who you thank, and an extra bit about mole humeri which is pretty interesting too and I'm glad I got that in.

Even though the book has gone to the printers there is still LOADS more that will happen.

There is a whole department at my publishers whose job it is to get publicity for books, get them reviewed, get people talking about them and getting people to buy them. They will be working really, really hard before the book is launched.

I will have a big job before the book comes out in helping the book get lots of publicity as well. I can't say what I'll be doing yet, but it'll be very exciting and I'll write about it here at the time.

The book is being released in a lot of countries and languages. From February next year the places I know it'll be available in are the UK (duh), the US, Canada, Japan, Sweden, India and Australia, and possibly more as well.

There probably won't be much more to say until after Christmas, but when there is I'll write about it here first !

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