Style Cure Day 10: Success and failure

Well, today is Style Cure Day 10, and the task is to make a shopping list and a budget. I basically already have that done, except that I’m still waiting on window treatment quotes. But I had a bit of a finances scare nothing truly outlandish, but because I’ve been under the weather for so long, I’ve been less diligent about keeping tabs on our finances these past few weeks. And in checking into those, I’ve come to realize that my months of less-than-affluent entrepreneurship have been slowly taking their toll on our income and savings. So I suspect that my Style Cure will be put on hold until we feel more comfortable spending on bigger purchases like sofas. (We might still get the rug we have in mind since it’s a relatively inexpensive way to make a bold visual impact.)

I did get up the energy to paint my gorgeous Farrow & Ball large paint samples yesterday, so I’ll photograph and blog that soon. But that’s less exciting than the OTHER project I finally took on, haha.

The cover image for my ebook, "Window Treatments for Modern Pragmatists"I wrote a book! Sort of. A libellus, a brochure, a petit livre. I finally just went ahead and hit publish on this little ditty about curtains. I’m still looking into converting it to iBooks, but that’s in the works.

Why the heck did I write about curtains when I’m an online dating coach by trade? Well, I’ve been pondering and researching window treatments ever since we bought our house, and this really kicked into high gear since the room we were planning to redo for Style Cure is our living room that faces directly west. The windows have been bare for two and a half years, because we just haven’t been decisive enough about exactly what would work and look best. After all, it’s hard to part with money on an expensive fixed element like that when you know you’re going to change your whole look eventually, ya know?

But we recently had some house guests stay with us, whose squinting and sweating in the hot July sun made us realize it was time to suck it up and dress those windows. So I researched, and I blogged, and at some point my blog post was so dang extensive that it just seemed fit for book format. And I’ve been working on an online dating book for ages, so this is a convenient safe little test run just to make sure I know how Kindle plays and can hammer out any kinks before my *important* book comes out eventually.

So! As soon as Amazon lets me, I plan to switch the price to free, so my friends and clients can snag it for no money if they want. I’d make it free forever, but I kind of want to test how royalties and payment works as an Amazon author, so I priced it at the lowest US value possible. (I also made it a 99-like price in all other markets, even when that meant it cost slightly more. I doubt all of Europe and Asia will rise up in outrage over it!)

Anyway, there you have it! This is very much geared towards people with similar taste to mine, but if you’re designing a clean, modern space and you’re stuck on window treatment ideas, it just might help you out. And yeah, that goofy cover image is in fact a picture of some of my curtains, haha. I’ll probably change both the cover and title eventually, but I wanted to just hit go and get it out there, ya know?