PaganPaul
February 22nd, 2007, 02:27 PM
I'm Paul Richards, the author of Witching Stones, published by Llewellyn, and this is how Witching Stones came to be.
The book started out as a simple set of divination tiles, much like Runes, based on 35 symbols from witchcraft, that we hand made out of my living room in Buffalo, NY. We printed a little booklet to go with them on my cheap little HP printer and hand cut and stapled each booklet.
We started out by marketing them to local pagan shops, and eventually we were picked up by the Pyramid Collection catalog. Once the sets started to sell, suddenly Llewellyn Publishing got interested.
They asked us to expand the little booklet into a full book, including several divination methods, spells that could be preformed with the stones, and full histories of each symbol and their use in the craft, along with divination meanings for Past, Present and Future positions.
It took almost a year of our lives to completely re-do the book, and during that time Llewellyn promised us the Sun and the Moon to get us to sign the contract. They showed us cover artwork of the symbols carved into sandstone (lots of Earth tones, very dignified) and talked about signing tours and promotions. We were incredibly excited about the whole project.
Once the contracts were signed however, things changed overnight. The original artwork was replaced with something that looked like it was straight out of Harry Potter. We sent them an email expressing our concerns that this was not what we had agreed on, and they replied with a simple "Our marketing department has decided to go another route." End of story.
There were no signing tours, and there were no promotions. We did get a full page write up in their own magazine, but that was about it. We complained to Llewellyn, but since none of their promises were actually in the contract we signed we had no recourse.
I'm not here to bad-mouth Llewellyn or anyone else, but just take this as a warning. Beware of signing contracts for your work that don't specifically state all the things that have been promised.
The book started out as a simple set of divination tiles, much like Runes, based on 35 symbols from witchcraft, that we hand made out of my living room in Buffalo, NY. We printed a little booklet to go with them on my cheap little HP printer and hand cut and stapled each booklet.
We started out by marketing them to local pagan shops, and eventually we were picked up by the Pyramid Collection catalog. Once the sets started to sell, suddenly Llewellyn Publishing got interested.
They asked us to expand the little booklet into a full book, including several divination methods, spells that could be preformed with the stones, and full histories of each symbol and their use in the craft, along with divination meanings for Past, Present and Future positions.
It took almost a year of our lives to completely re-do the book, and during that time Llewellyn promised us the Sun and the Moon to get us to sign the contract. They showed us cover artwork of the symbols carved into sandstone (lots of Earth tones, very dignified) and talked about signing tours and promotions. We were incredibly excited about the whole project.
Once the contracts were signed however, things changed overnight. The original artwork was replaced with something that looked like it was straight out of Harry Potter. We sent them an email expressing our concerns that this was not what we had agreed on, and they replied with a simple "Our marketing department has decided to go another route." End of story.
There were no signing tours, and there were no promotions. We did get a full page write up in their own magazine, but that was about it. We complained to Llewellyn, but since none of their promises were actually in the contract we signed we had no recourse.
I'm not here to bad-mouth Llewellyn or anyone else, but just take this as a warning. Beware of signing contracts for your work that don't specifically state all the things that have been promised.