Phewfo • 1 September 2006 • The SnowBlog

Phewfo

          THAT was one hell of a week. Indeed, I think the amount of coffee I've drunk has corroded a hole in my stomach, the way I feel at the moment - but you don't need to know that.

This week was the week of getting all the books to print for Christmas. Our key learning? (as they used to say at Deloitte, shudder.) Things take a lot longer than you'd think. I'll leave it there, and not mention the average time I've finished work. 

We're in a funny position at the moment: successful enough to be financially stable; successful enough to have people say lots of nice things about us, but not quite successful enough to be rolling around in wonga or to have a sufficiently large team to do all the things that need doing - or to be able to pay for external help. And in true control freak style, when I read about people saying nice things about us it worries me, because I know all the things we're doing badly. I know how bad we are at getting reviews (why, newspapers? Why don't you want to review our books? They are good books and you should review them) and how we don't have sufficient hours in the day to chat as much as we'd like with our authors. I know that I haven't updated the business plan for four months, and that I don't know enough about accounting yet, or IT, and that I still haven't finished the rights guide for Frankfurt. 

But I think the main thing is that you have to keep worrying about this stuff. Complacency would be more of a problem - thinking we were doing everything perfectly - because then we'd never keep trying. And we are trying, really hard, and we keep achieving miracles - like getting those Christmas books off to print. 

Right - back to my current reading. "Excel 2003 VBA - a programmer's guide". How do they bind these books - must be nearly three inches thick...  
Emma