While I have written many articles for magazines and newspapers, including a weekly column in the Independent for a year or so, I had no plans to write a book. My area of expertise is home-design and I run a network of architects called Architect Your Home, as well as my own practice with my wife, Jude.

We were approached by a publishing house to write a book called Architect Your Home. The publishers seemed to be a very large and professional outfit, who among other things, specialised in branded books with such organisations as the National Trust, M&S and Good Housekeeping. Having agreed the bones in principle, they made a combined offer of a writer’s fee, an advance on royalty and a fee for the images – all of which we were going to supply.

At this point I sought out a literary agent. An author friend put me onto her agent and this proved to have been a very good move. My agent negotiated all sorts of clauses into the agreement that I would never have considered, such as the royalties on international sales, serialisation rights, the staging of payments etc. etc.

With the agreement in the bag, I made a start. Writing the book can’t be that hard, I thought. After all, it will simply be a whole collection of articles, similar to those that I rattle off for magazines all the time. The initial challenge seemed to be how to structure the book and I thought that I would talk to my publisher to see if we could work something out together.

The thing about publishers (in my limited experience) is that they are the very NICEST people in the whole wide world and they give the impression that they REALLY know what they are talking about, that they are REALLY well organised, that they have UNENDING patience having to deal with all of these batty authors all of the time.

My meeting to work out the structure led nowhere, so I decided to take the project on holiday with me and aimed to have a structure worked out while away. This proved more difficult than I imagined. In fact, after my holiday, once immersed in the daily business of work, it proved very difficult indeed to consolidate a structure that I was happy with. In the end it took me nearly six months to map out exactly how I wanted the book to be structured. No matter, I thought. Now that I have the structure, the writing will come easily.

It didn’t. Finding the time to get really stuck in proved very challenging and after a while quite demoralising. Eventually, I took a few days off and went off to a friend’s holiday cottage in Dorset, shutting myself away and just getting stuck in. This broke the back of the writing.

Alongside this, I was finding that dealing with the terribly nice publishers was not as much fun as I had thought. Being a very visual person, I wanted to have a sense of the page layout before doing most of the writing. They wanted the writing before they commissioned designers. We compromised and I wrote one spread from each of the six chapters so that they could design sample layouts. This process seemed to take ages, and when they finally came, they absolutely did not fit with the structure that I had spent so long creating.

I was told that we could include no coloured text (our brand design guide contains LOTS of coloured text). The reason given was that when the book would be re-printed in a different language, they would only have to change the black plates if all the text were black. We spent a great deal of time trying to work out how the design guide could be preserved without coloured text before they suddenly reversed the decision and said coloured text would be fine after all!

The book is essentially arranged as lots and lots of double ’spreads’, each with an essay on a subject, like for instance: planning permission or staircase design. The publishers told me to write no more than 700 words for each spread, or 400 to 500 where there would be pictures. Once I got stuck in, it was challenging to keep to this limit and many things were omitted and I suggested that I write around 1,000 words per spread so that we could edit accordingly. The publishers urged me not to write more than 700 max. Much later on, with the page design in it’s seventh or eighth version, they asked me to go back and write an extra 150 words here, 300 words there, all over the place. Trying to add 150 words to an essay that has been finished is much harder than writing more from the outset.

Every few months, the publishers would issue a new and FINAL timetable of events. They would put on their most serious voice and tell me that they really needed me to stick to this one, so I would rush about, move other commitments, work late into the night and meet the first deadline on their new schedule, only for nothing to happen for six or eight weeks once the ball was in their court. I realised that by comparison, I was FAR more organised than they were!

Images were supplied, and lost. With all of the delays I found that they were asking for the same thing three or four times. Staff would change and I had to go back over old ground with a new, terribly nice person frustratingly often.

Eventually, nearly two years after the original meetings, I was set to finish. They wanted me to go through a print-out of the book and make hand-written changes so that they could input them into the artwork. I wanted to work directly into the computer. They would not let the artwork document out of their building, so we compromised on my spending an entire week sitting in their offices, going through everything with a toothcomb. Finally, I thought. I am just about there.

Again, after the latest timetable pressure, again, nothing happened for weeks. After chasing them, they eventually sent through a “final” draft for me to check and I hit the roof. They had changed LOADS of things. Layout, design, sequence, text, they had combined spreads into two and cut other spreads entirely with no reference to me at all. I complained bitterly.

Again, nothing happened for ages, and then as if by magic, they backed down on pretty much everything and returned to where we had been weeks before.

Now, well over two years since we started, having finally formed an effective working relationship with a very nice, and for once, very well organised junior editor, we are finally there and the book is (currently) planned for publication in February 2010.

In summary, for anyone thinking of writing a book, my advice would be:

~ Listen to all those people who tell you that it will be a lot more work than you anticipate BECAUSE IT WILL BE! In my case, it has taken FIVE TIMES as long as I thought.

~ Get a literary agent.

~ Trust your own instincts. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the publishers know books so the publishers know best. This is YOUR work.

Just because publishers are the very nicest people in the world, don’t hold back from pushing them to get the book done in the way you want it.