How sharing my scrapbooking journal on Instagram got me an international book deal

Detailing the entire book process for a first time author/sentimental crafty girl

Backstory:

I’ve been a journaler my whole life.

When I was 8 years old my mother handed me a travel diary and told me to fill one page a day, for the entirety of our Europe trip. Having German and Italian parents, I would be visiting their homelands for the first time and my mother (now a teacher) recognised how important it was for me to document my impressions and memories.

These journals are now a precious time capsule from my childhood: pages filled with postcards, lolly wrappers, notes, drawings and other tangible keepsakes I collected and pasted from our trips.

It’s weirdly comforting to look back on my old diaries and find familiar echoes of who I am today- as much as I think I’ve changed, the same person has still been there inside.

I’m still just a girl who loves art and craft, collecting little things, taking photos and writing my thoughts.

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The Art of Memory Collecting

Scrapbooking, junk journaling and scribbling in a diary isn’t anything new. For many of us it’s a nostalgic pastime, something we maybe dropped and never picked up again.

Since childhood I’ve kept up journaling and crafting, keeping photos and ephemera to remind me of the times I didn’t want to forget. I called my form of journaling ‘memory collecting’- a combination of imperfect, intuitive creativity and documentation with no rules:

20 years later, I have a stack of over 30 journals scattered in my room. An entire history of my life so far, from girlhood to womanhood, in paper form.

Just last year, I shared a reel on my Instagram of all my journals, with the caption ‘The Art of Memory Collecting’.

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A post shared by @martinamartian

I felt vulnerable sharing my private diaries with over 100,000 followers at the time, let alone the 4 million it’s reached at the time I’m writing this.

But my goal as an online creator has always been to embrace sharing my creativity and motivate others to embrace the same, and the dozens of messages and comments I’ve received remind me that I’m achieving just that.

THE OFFER:
A few weeks later I opened my message requests (note to self: always, always check that hidden folder!) to find a message from not just a publisher- but THE only publisher I’d ever dreamed of working of.

(Hardie Grant UK publish all my favourite crafty books, and are an imprint of Penguin/Random House aka. the publishing house who MADE Harry Potter)

At first glance, I thought the message was fake or spam. It wasn’t.

This message (from darling Isabel, my future/now editor) led to an international phone call, a few emails, and finally: an international book deal. My book would be available in Australia, the U.K and the U.S

The next few months were a blur.

THE BOOK PROCESS