“The Reelsmith’s Primer” manuscript is done!

EclecticGuy December 13, 2009 book, fly fishing, rave, reel building 2 Comments

small redThe manuscript for my book on reel making, The Reelsmith’s Primer is finally done! I will send a copy of it to my publisher, The Whitefish Press, tomorrow. I feel really good about it and learned a lot in the process. Early on, I created a reelsmithing community and used it to solicit ideas, provide feedback, and sanity check my writing and instructions. It was a huge success!

One of my goals for the book was to make it practical for people to actually make a brass reel. I realized early on that the book would be a lot better if I could get a few people to read a draft version and build a reel.  I set a goal to have between 3 and 5 people successfully build a reel before I would publish the book. To accomplish that goal, I created the “Reelsmith’s Primer Challenge“ and gave draft copies of my book to anyone who wanted to build a reel. Dozens of people all over the world participated. During the challenge, anyone who finished and posted photos of the completed reel will get a copy of the book when it goes to press. To date, 5 new reelsmiths have completed the challenge and several more are near completion! Their dedication, feedback, and craftsmanship is outstanding. Many improvements were made to the book as part of this process.

A few of these early reelsmiths asked me if I would put together a package of all of the materials to build a reel — a one stop shop for reel building materials! I did and set up The Eclectic Angler to sell these packages, my reels, and other angling items. All of these efforts are interconnected and reinforce each other and they were all developed at the request of actual “users”. I even used the community to help design the book’s cover. The cover concept is shown above. Completing the cover is my next project.

I’ll be writing more about my publishing experience and updates on the book in future posts.

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2 Responses to ““The Reelsmith’s Primer” manuscript is done!”

  1. Rob Cohen said:

    Dec 20, 09 at 7:31 pm

    Michael,
    Congratulations. It’s not only a fantastic accomplishment, but the way you did it, by working with your customers and advisors is really impressive. Best of luck with the book.
    Rob

  2. EclecticGuy said:

    Dec 20, 09 at 7:35 pm

    Thanks Rob!

    cheers,
    EG

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