Still selling well

This is almost as exciting as seeing seeds come up. Sales charts! Working in publishing, in the end you live or die (or at least get paid or don't) according to whether your stuff sells or not. And last Sunday I opened the newspaper and in the book reviews section they had a sales chart for Australia's Top 10 gardening books, and our book is number one! That's such a thrill.

In fact, to be more accurate, we're still number one. A similar gardening books sales chart came out last November, just a few months after our book, 'Organic', was released, and while we were absolutely delighted to be the top seller then, we knew it was a great book and our high hopes for it were confirmed by that first result. Now, a few more months down the track and we're still number one. That's an even bigger thrill somehow.

Now, working in publishing for many years, this isn't the first book I've worked on, but this is the most important one for me, personally. For one thing there's a chapter on our little inner-city garden in it, and for another thing I worked very hard on every single page – I must have read it at least a dozen times now, and there are a few of my photos in it too, plus a few words here and there, and my name's in it, too, so is Pam's (she did the planting plan illustrations, and they're lovely).

Mind you, it's Don's book from cover to cover, and especially it was his vision for how it would look, how it would be based on real people's vegie gardens, with an emphasis on kids and parents growing healthy food together. But everyone who works on a book or magazine feels like they own a part of it, and I'm sure everyone on the team who helped to put this book together feels that way, and that's a good, natural outcome of so much work.

So, please forgive me for blabbing on about a simple sales chart and a book. But in publishing a sales chart can be cause for either celebration or drowned sorrows (either way we hit the bottle, but that's just a journalist thing).