… birthing this book baby of ours! Seriously, somebody get us to Lamaze class. Yup, it’s coming in early November (our official “due date” is the 6th, although it varies slightly depending on where you look). Excuse me while I practice my deep breathing (hee, hee, hoooooo, hee, hee, hoooooo).
Perhaps the craziest part about it is that this might be the longest baby gestation ever recorded – over three whole years! Seriously. Labor of love could not apply more. So for everyone who has been asking about pre-order details, you can click on any of the logos below to pre-order from any of these affiliates. And of course don’t forget the local guys – the book will be available at your favorite bookstore, and if you stop by, many local bookstores can pre-order it for ya too. Fun fact – pre-orders don’t just score you a discounted price, they’re also good for us authors too. And we hear they can show up before the actual release date, so that’s another added bonus.
Speaking of a nice long gestation, this was John’s Facebook status almost exactly a year ago (and yes, that’s the Jamie you know from this post).
But today somehow we’re holding a 336 page mocked-up book full of hundreds of house-sprucing ideas that are about to go off to the printer this week to be made into a real life book. Like one you can hold in your hands and read and put on the coffee table. Actually lots of them since it would be weird just to print one. As for what it’s about, it’s definitely not a formal decorating bible with designer terms and upscale rooms. Please, we’re not that fancy. It’s more of an idea book for folks like us. A heaping portion of doable and affordable suggestions to pick and choose from – and adapt to fit your home. Some are more involved, some are super easy. Some are free, some might be something that you’d save up for. Basically it’s the blog. Only a book. And instead of getting a post or two a day, you get 243 ideas with photos, checklists, tutorials, and illustrations galore (along with bonus tips, sidebars, and added commentary). And a little dorky humor a la us.
Wait, and did we mention that we packed it with over 200 photos and 100 illustrations that have never been seen before on the blog? I guess we just did. In fact, none of the tips in this book are just regurgitated from our blog posts (zero cutting and pasting here!). Some of the general ideas and basic tutorials may be familiar (how could we not include must-have how-tos like painting furniture or upholstering a headboard?) but we wanted to present them in a fresh way. So instead of seeing the same table that I painted three years ago for the blog, you might see a brand new dresser makeover that we secretly completed back in January. Sure it was extra work, but we really wanted the book to look fresh and be full of different “takes” on a ton of decorating ideas – both classic and unexpected (and pretty much everything in between).
It’s so funny because we distinctly remember every single phase: signing on with an agent well before Clara was born, writing a 100 page proposal in 2010, pitching it to publishers and picking the right one for the job right after moving in 2011, turning our proposal into a complete book outline and then a complete manuscript right around New Year’s, shooting for three straight weeks in our house back in February of this year, and then refining and proofing and proofing some more, and finally – finally! – sending this baby off to be printed. Whew.
Whirlwind? Yes. Lots of fun? Yes. Lots of work? Yes. Still feels like it’s all a dream? Yes. One big, flipping-the-house-upside-down dream…
So needless to say, when we look down at the final layouts and triple check that we didn’t write something like “hang your fart” instead of “hang your art” (don’t worry, we have proofreaders) it really is sort of a chest-swelly moment. Not in that “we’re a big deal” way, but in that “we didn’t know we had it in us” way. I mean, of course when we signed on to write a book we thought we could do it, but as we went we kept saying “ooh, wouldn’t it be cool if we added this too?” – and every time we did we’d worry if we had just bitten off more than we could chew. But oh happy day we didn’t! We survived. We lived to tell the tale. We wrote the book we were dying to write. And I think it’s going to feel even more unreal when we’re actually holding it in our hot little hands. There might be tears the ugly cry.
And since the final cover has officially been pinned down, we thought it would be fun to chat about that process, since it was completely different than we thought it would be (as was almost every aspect of writing a book – did you know you edit the entire thing with a pencil on printed layouts over about five to six rounds of revisions – there’s no computer involved at all?!). I’d say the two overall most surprising things about writing this book were:
- how little the publishers changed the inside of the book (aka, the meat)
- how much the publishers have to do with the outside (aka, the bread)
Isn’t that funny? Every time we submitted outlines and even the final manuscript we expected tons of crossed out stuff and rearranged stuff and suggestions about what to move/do/change. But other than typos and grammar fixes, it was really all us. Which is kind of awesome. I mean, in the book we’re the same pun-loving weirdos as we are on this blog. I guess we somehow thought they’d try to “polish us” but they totally let us be us. Our freak flag is waving, baby. And we’re so grateful.
Then when it came to the cover, we learned that most authors actually only get to give “feedback” but the publisher always has the final say. Thank goodness we love our editors and they seem to like us back, so it was a pretty collaborative process in the end. First we shot some of their initial concepts amidst our three-week photography extravaganza back in Feburary, and out of all three cover concepts there was one that we did our darndest to wiggle out of: putting our mugs on the cover.
We just didn’t want to be sitting there (or standing there) posing in some styled room because… I don’t know… it just felt so… serious. We really wanted the cover to feel playful and happy and fun (it’s not a lofty book about box pleats, it’s a happy-go-lucky home idea book). So after we shot all three concepts, including some terribly awkward photos of us sitting on the sofa like this…
… we heard they officially weren’t going with the pose-on-the-sofa idea for the cover (they agreed that it was looking really forced). Wahoooooo! We celebrated. There might have been an entire box of Oreos that were sacrificed to the We’re-Not-On-The-Cover Book Gods (by way of our bellies). Then about a month later we heard they were going with a fourth concept that a new designer came up with (with us on the cover, but not as big, and not us posing in a room). Whaaaaa? Here was the very first draft they sent over just with initial ideas from their team:
We opened the PDF while holding our breath… and then we stared at it for a while. And then we realized that we kind of liked it. Not because we’re on the cover of course, but just because of the vibe. The playful look and feel of the different typefaces, the wood letters, the blue stitched spine detail, the paint can in the O – they were all fun and cheeky and definitely not stodgy or serious. Of course the designers asked us for feedback, so we gave it lots of thought, still kind of cringed at the idea of seeing our faces on the cover, and offered up a few general suggestions like:
- what if we made the spine more of a teal tone and less of a baby blue?
- what if we added some house keys hanging at the bottom from the “e” in the word love?
- what if we used wood letters in a chunkier, more modern font?
- what if we took ourselves off the darn cover? (this became a joke, how many times we tried to weasel our way out of it)
And they came back with:
- Sure! Color picks are just preliminary, so you can definitely weigh in on those!
- Sure! We love that idea!
- Sure! We’ll get them hand-carved by an artisan in the typeface that you pick and then shoot them in a studio so they look real and have real shadows (how cool is that?! they were made just for the book, and yes we have totally begged them to send them to us so we can keep them forever!)
- Nope, you’re staying right there. Everyone here loves that it makes it personal and it’s not a giant stiff looking photo so hopefully you’ll learn to love it too.
Oh and some other changes happened over those months of development. Some tips got changed to bonus tips instead of numbered tips (to help keep the page count – and therefore the price – from getting too high). So we ended up with 243 tips, which is our lucky number (it’s old pager code for We Love You, which we thought was fitting). The subtitle also got more specific thanks to some focus-group feedback. So here’s the final design – mocked up to look 3D:
Clean and still fun. Not too kid-ish, but still playful and cheeky with that awesome zing of color down the spine and a few more pops on the front and back. We also love how there’s a mixture of masculine (the wood letters) and feminine (the scripty ones). And everything from the stitched spine to the paint can and the house keys feels – I don’t know – homey?
Just for kicks, here’s the front, spine, and the back (the back is so much fun up close since our website’s heart background is subtly worked into some of the colored boxes):
Thanks to that teal spine, we think it’ll look so cute on a coffee table, or even stacked between our horse head bookends with the other decorating books that we love. Can’t you picture it squished in here?
As for why the book cover doesn’t look like our blog header, we actually thought that wouldn’t be a good idea since:
- It’s kinda boring if it’s a direct lift from our blog
- The book isn’t just repackaged blog stuff, so we didn’t want the cover to look so much like our blog that people assumed it was just the same stuff (all of the projects that we photographed were secretly done just for this book, so they’re all never-before-seen images)
- We love to redesign the blog every few years, so we didn’t want the book to look dated (to us and our readers) once we outgrew the current design
- It’s actually a really fun process to see what a professional book designer can do with your “look.” They know what they’re doing and have so much interesting reasoning behind certain choices that we never would have even thought about. And it’s not everyday that you get to see yourself through a book designer’s eyes.
So that’s the story of being completely convinced that we had successfully weaseled our way out of being on the cover (we even said we had done it in this post) and then ended up there anyway. But at least we’re not sitting on the sofa smiling. Haha. And there are bunny ears. And I’m wearing red shoes. And we’re little. So if we put a cute little paper weight over that part of it when it’s on the coffee table we won’t even be visible. #crouchingtigerhidden$herdog
Another fun fact? That photo actually wasn’t shot for the cover. It was just a random portrait that we snapped back in February while shooting all of our projects (just in case they needed an author photo for the back or something).
Oh, and what’s the funny thing you notice about John’s hand in the original pic? Yup, no drill. They cut his arm holding a drill from another process photo in the book and stuck it on there. We love that. I don’t know why. It’s like one of those behind-the-movie tidbits about the magic of book cover building. John’s Frankensteined Drill-Arm.
Oh and while Clara and Burger pop up inside, they didn’t make the cover because our editors rightfully pointed out that the Young House Love title was in danger of looking like it was some sort of relationship/family book, and not a decorating book (which is also why the designers chose to emphasize the word HOUSE with wood letters). But we made up for it inside the book. Seriously, Burger is without a doubt our favorite part of the book. He basically walks in and out of chapters and says hilarious Burger-esque things (yes, he talks to us when nobody’s around) and Clara got in there more than a few times too (she even got to do a project with us).
So in the end we feel like the book really represents us and our blog. There’s tons more that we’re itching to tell you about this, but we don’t want your head (ok, our heads) to explode. So we’ll occasionally be diving into more behind-the-scenes details about finishing this book of ours, sharing a video that we shot and edited with some sneak peeks, and finally dishing out the dates and cities for our book tour once that’s all set in stone. For now, all of this jabbering is just to say: holy cow this book baby is actually coming out and we love you all for the amazing support and encouragement that you’ve shown us during this intense and incredible journey. Couldn’t have done it without you. For reals, guys. Love, love, love.
Psst- You can check out a bunch of links to other book-related happenings, like when we announced that we were writing a book, how we picked a publisher, how we prepped for photo shoots, and how we shared a little photo-shoot sneak peek. Plus you can swing by our new book landing page with more info that we’ll update as soon as we know more about things like book tour details (along with other fun behind the scenes stuff).
Mayara says
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #99 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > How-to & Home Improvements > Remodeling & Renovation
#1 in Books > Professional & Technical > Architecture > Interior Design
#1 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Interior Design > Decorating
YAY!!!
YoungHouseLove says
Isn’t that crazy?! We’re in shock.
xo,
s
karine says
Just came back from my holidays and saw this post and went straight to amazon.fr and bought the book !!! can’t wait for it !! any book signing in France ? lol
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks Karine! What we wouldn’t do to end up in France!
xo,
s
Jennifer says
AAAA! I’m so excited! :) Without question, yours is my favorite blog ever – I can’t tell you how many projects you have inspired me to do. I absolutely cannot freakin wait for the book! Congratulations! :)
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks so much Jennifer!
xo,
s
Stephany says
Pre-ordered mine!
Congrats from South FL :-)
-Stephany
Shannon Burke says
I’m really psyched…and will be happy to be able to show people the book, since I don’t always have my ipad to show off your awesomness via the interwebs. Yay!
Jen says
I just sent my mother in law the link to pre-order so she could get it on my Christmas list
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks Jen!
xo,
s
Chris Wilson says
Xmas list just got bigger!! CANNOT WAIT! Love the cover! and will be waiting for more book tidbits. Stealing the yellow door idea although I think coral is the new yellow…but it’s fun!
Diana says
Just preordered four copies – I’m sure our family will love you guys as much as we do! :)
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks Diana! You’re so sweet!
xo,
s
Amanda says
I pre-ordered my copy the other day! Congratulations! I cannot wait to get it in the mail!
Jenna says
Congrats on the book guys. You deserve all the accolades that you get from it. You are the most hard-working bloggers out there.
I also want to compliment the colours of the book (please don’t change it!). Right now I’m decorating our office using the colours red, teal, black, brown and grey. Even though I’m not a big home-decorator/DIYer, I’m still going to purchase the book because it’ll fit perfectly on our shelving in there. Your book won’t only be a practical tome to those crafty people out their itching to improve their homes – it’ll be an art object in and of itself!
Jenna
YoungHouseLove says
Thanks so much, Jenna! We love it when a book fits into a decor scheme!
-John
Angie Brack says
Just pre- ordered! I am due on November 2nd and this will be a surprise when it ships as I am sure it will slip my mind until then. Looking forward to it!
Corinne says
Another pre-order here from the UK been reading your blog for years and when I saw your book was available on UK Amazon I had to have it
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks Corinne! You guys are all so sweet :)
xo,
s
Ravid says
Hi,
My wife and I are your readers and fans from Israel.
We were excited to see that the book is finally ready so we
pre ordered… we wish you guys could sign it but i guess Israel is not one of your tour sites :)
Keep up the good work!
YoungHouseLove says
Thanks so much for ordering Ravid!
-John
Tammy says
John and Sherry, I came across your blog about 3-4 weeks ago and have literally read the whole thing from start to finish. Whew! My husband will be happy to have a wife back instead of seeing my the back of my head as I stare at my computer screen. I have gotten so much inspiration from your blog! I love it!! We are preparing to sell everything we own and move with our children across the country and start a new life. I am storing up ideas for when we “start fresh”. This is the first time I have commented, but I had to say OMG!!! about your 243 pager code! My husband and I started dating way back in dinosaur times when there weren’t cell phones, but we had pagers from work. We paged each other 143 all the time. No one knew what that meant, so it was our little secret. The evening our first son was born and he went home for a bit, I paged him 243. He knew instantly what that meant and loved it. To this day, even though we have smart phones that can text a verbal message to each other, our most often text is 143 or 243. It has been 13 years and I think we will be texting that for a long time. I love that you do that too. I have yet to find anyone else who knows what it means. =)
YoungHouseLove says
Haha, so cute! I love it!
xo,
s
Mayra Navarro says
This is sooo cool. I remember you guys from a while back. You were barely starting to come up with a home office, showing us all your progress was the coolest thing ever. So motivating for me in this case. I am so glad you came this far. It is not easy for sure to come up with a new baby, but this one will totally rock my library of inspirations. Yes, I want to Preorder. Hugs! Kisses to your Chihuahua. My bebe say hey! :)
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks so much Mayra!
xo,
s
Tracy a says
Wow, what a great quote from Gretchen! Must feel great to be validated by another author! Looking forward to getting the book!
YoungHouseLove says
It was amazing to read her quote. Totally got choked up.
xo,
s
Brooke Renfro says
I am so freaking excited for you guys! I have preordered my copy and will pretty much stare longingly at the UPS guy every time he drives by until November!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw you’re so cute! Thanks for ordering!
xo,
s
Emily says
pre-ordered and SO excited!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks, Emily!
xo,
s
Chrystal @ Snowdrop Dreams of Books says
Added to my wishlist! :) So happy for you and can’t wait to read this book!
Jaz says
Congratulations on your book, John & Sherry! I just pre-ordered it on Amazon. :-)
This blog has been so inspirational and FUN for me to read…it is still the ONLY blog I read with consistency. I have learned so much from your DIY posts and am now finding myself reading up on other topics (such as diapers) as we are expecting our first human addition to the family.
Thank you for the fantastic blog, and thank you for the book that I am so excited to read!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw that’s so excicing Jaz! Congrats on the wee one on the way! And thanks for pre-ordering our book :)
xo
s
Liz O says
I just pre-ordered! I hope you guys make a stop in Philly!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw, we’d love to!
xo,
s
EFritz says
I have requested this as a birthday present. My husband is desperate to come up with ideas, so he was super happy to pre-order it. Of course my birthday is next week, but I can wait for it :) Congratulations on publication! You guys have totally inspired us!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks!
xo
s
Brydee says
Woo hoo! I just preordered the book! CAN.NOT.WAIT! :)
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks Brydee!
xo
s
Jenn says
Sooo excited that you’ll be coming to Toronto!! I’ve recently re-fallen in love with your blog (actually, it’s probably more accurate to say I am re-infatuated with your blog). Cannot wait to pick up a copy!
Angel says
Im so excited for you! I love and support you guys so much That I’ve preordered mine! We are closing on our first home! 904 sqft condo in west Seattle! I’m so excited! I have a couple questions for ya… How do you feel about beige vs gray for a tufted nail head wingback headboard (I’m actually considering one from joss & main, skyline: Leanna bed in either chalk or charcoal) and depending on that decision beige/cream or gray sofa!? Any feedback would be awesome… I just can’t decide! Thanks!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw, you’re so sweet! Thanks for pre-ordering our book! As for the colors, they both sound awesome. Gray might hide slightly more, so if you’re worried about sofa stains (ex: you have a dog or a pet, or plan to have one…) you might love how charcoal seems to hide everything (we have a charcoal sofa and love it). You also could go with a dark sofa and a beige headboard for a lighter look in the bedroom (our headboard is lighter and our sofa is super dark and since they’re in different rooms it totally works!
xo
s (& the fam)
Jill M-P says
I have followed your blog for years, this is my first time commenting. I just wanted to say how much I love reading your posts, especially when there’s a good pun thrown in ;) I can’t wait for your book to come out- It’s on my Christmas list. Not sure if it will be available at the bookstores here in Newfoundland, Canada but thankfully there’s always the option of ordering online :)
– Jill
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks so much Jill! You’re so sweet!
xo
s
Ellie B says
See, it says the book isn’t out till 11/6 but I went out to my Madison, WI Barnes & Noble and picked up my very own copy today! So excited, you guys did a fantastic job!! Can’t wait to try some of these ideas out. I may or may not have spent my afternoon reading it from cover to cover C-:
PS your book has given me more inspiration for wedding decor than a ton of wedding blogs combined. Thank you!
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thaks so much Ellie! So excited that you were able to snag it early! Wahoo! I think when we actually see it in a bookstore we might fall on the floor. Hahah!
xo
s
Shani says
Super excited! I just ordered your book! looking forward to post about it in my blog @ http://www.alifespleasure.com in book of the week! You guys are awesome!! Congrats :)
YoungHouseLove says
Aw thanks so much Shani!
xo
s
Laura says
Hi, absolutely love the book!
Really off subject, but where did you get your necklace in the pic of you and John on the couch?
YoungHouseLove says
That was from Target a while back- I think they still sell them!
xo
s