Category Archives: Business

How we do regular team reflection

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A few years ago, wise friend Steve Barnett worked with us for several months on a big project. He pointed out that, as a team, we weren’t making any time for reflection. I was skeptical: we already had so much to do, the last thing I wanted was to take the team away from their work for hours for some awkward workshop. He suggested I just give him half an hour with the team, once a month. Fine.

Three years later, our monthly ’Flections, as Steve called them, have become an integral part of keeping our team happy and healthy. I honestly don’t know how we knew what we were doing before them. And, personally, I can attribute massive improvements in my personal well-being and productivity to these short monthly sessions.

Here’s what we do. We’ve experimented with variations on it over the years, and have found this works best for us. Over that time, we’ve been a team of four to six people. I imagine this would work with groups of up to ten or so before we’d need to make changes.

We meet for about 45 minutes around lunchtime on the first Friday of every month. Our process is built around three questions and a small task. Looking back on the previous month, we ask:

1. What went well?
2. What could I have done differently?
3. What did I learn?

And then we each set a SMART goal for ourselves, which is ideally designed to be habit-forming, and can be personal or professional.

A team member who is not ‘the boss’ guides the session – that helps avoid the impression that we’re reporting in on work. That person gives everyone five to ten minutes to write down their answers to the questions, and set a SMART goal, prompting us by stating each question in turn every few minutes. We each write in our regular notebooks (we all use some form of bullet journalling), because we each like to refer back to our previous month’s notes.

Then we go around – one go-around per question – each sharing some of what we’ve noted down. So, first we go around with everyone sharing what went well. Then we go around again, sharing what we could have done differently. And so on, till we share our SMART goals.

These go-arounds prompt great conversations that are often affirming and practical. It’s always explicitly optional whether and how much to share (since some of the answers may be deeply personal or private). We generally find that everyone shares something for each question, except for SMART goals, where every now and then someone will have a goal they don’t want to share, which is fine. Often in the go-around on SMART goals, we’ll also share how we did on last month’s goal.

Every time, I come away having learned something from my team, or having gained some insight into how they work, and how we work together. I’ve picked up great tips. And we’ve often discovered challenges we didn’t know we shared, and could help each other tackle. Most importantly, these conversations help us see each other for the smart, vulnerable, funny, thoughtful humans we are.

If you try something like this in your team, I’d love to know how it goes, and whether you discover improvements or effective variations.

 

How Books Are Made: a podcast

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My new podcast, How Books Are Made, is about the art and science of making books. It’s for book lovers curious about what happens behind the scenes, and for decision makers who need to get books into the world.

Just search for How Books Are Made in any podcast player. Or listen at howbooksaremade.com.

In episode one, I talk to best-selling author Sam Beckbessinger about marketing and creative freedom.

In episode two, one of SA’s most widely distributed book illustrators, Jess Jardim-Wedepohl, and I talk about her process, and making books under pressure.

And in episode three, Klara Skinner and I take a whirlwind tour through the entire book-production process.

In episode four, I’ll be talking to John Pettigrew, founder of Futureproofs, about innovation in publishing.

Plus, listen to the trailer for a quick intro, and a funny story about my engagement, my mother, and flammable book-making.

Lessons I’ve learned from dysfunctional book projects

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Over at Electric Book Works, my team and I distilled six key questions we ask when we want to diagnose problems with a project. Each question represents a lesson we’ve learned, over and over, when working on book- and web-publishing projects.

  1. Is there one leader and champion?
  2. Is there a single source of truth?
  3. Is there a reliable system for version control?
  4. Is content separated from design?
  5. Can everyone on the team open the files?
  6. Can we effortlessly export a finished publication?

Read more about why we ask those questions on the full post.

 

Book-production experts offering epub conversions

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Right now, the coronavirus is forcing publishers to convert more books to epubs quickly. I’m receiving lots of requests for this kind of work, and we can’t take them all on at Electric Book Works. I’d like to point publishers to experienced, freelance book-production pros. In particular, I’d like to support solo freelancers at this difficult time.

Below, I’ll list the pros I hear about with their details. Please contact them directly if you need epub conversions. (Note that epub conversions are essentially also Amazon Kindle conversions, since you can upload epub files to Amazon.)

Here’s how my list works:

1. There are good conversions and bad ones. Unless I say otherwise, I cannot vouch for anyone listed here, nor the quality of their work. If you’re a publisher who wants independent quality assurance, contact me at Electric Book Works.
2. For now, I am only listing individuals who do these conversions themselves. I’m interested in recording which individuals have the necessary skills. If I’m told that they do their work at or as a company, I’ll mention that.
3. If you have worked with someone listed here, you can leave a review about them in the comments. I moderate all comments on my site, so I will publish positive ones that seem credible to me. And I may choose to hide negative or unhelpful reviews. If I get a credible, negative review, I may choose to remove someone from the list. I can’t and won’t enter into any correspondence about my decisions. Unfortunately I don’t have any capacity for that.
4. I won’t be able to maintain this list often. It may get out of date, sorry!
5. If you’d like to be listed, send me your details. I need your full name, your email address, your city, and a short (one paragraph) description of your epub-conversion skills and experience. If you have a website or online resume (e.g. LinkedIn), please include its URL. Publishers are far more likely to contact you if they can read more about you online first. And I will list your website rather than your email so that you control how people contact you. If you’d like to be removed, just let me know.
6. If you are a company that does epub conversions, I won’t list your company, but you can put your details in a short, professional note in the comments below. All we need is your company name, website URL, country, and a one-line company description. If you don’t include this, and only this, I probably won’t publish your post. Sorry. I won’t be editing anything, so I’ll only approve comments that are already clear, concise and helpful.

Thanks, everyone. Here’s the list so far in reverse-alphabetical order.

 

New publishing: how big ideas, strong leaders, and new tech are changing textbooks

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For the last three years I’ve been part of a remarkable project: perhaps the biggest free-to-access university textbook in the world. The Economy is an undergraduate economics textbook that is sweeping through university classes around the world at a rate that brings tears to the eyes of publishers.

In a world of established textbooks that have had decades to build loyal followings, new and unusual textbooks rarely make an impression. But in a few short years this upstart textbook has been adopted at over 300 universities worldwide. It’s already been published in French and Italian, and half a dozen translations are underway. An adaptation for social sciences is taking off, too, even being read aloud, in full, on NPR.

What makes The Economy a different sort of textbook? For a start, it’s simply readable and engaging – from the first page it speaks to real-world issues, something traditional economics textbooks have largely managed to avoid. And importantly, it’s free: you can read it online or download the app. The 1200-page, full-colour printed edition is far cheaper than its competitors. So it’s easy for lecturers to adopt: they know that no student will go without a textbook.

How is this even possible? After all, books are expensive, complex projects. This one comprises half a million words, 1500 images, and two dozen videos. What publisher would give it away for free? A new kind of publisher: one for whom a book’s strategic value outweighs its financial cost. The kind of public-interest publisher that bewilders traditional publishing companies, and should.

The organisation behind The Economy is CORE, a non-profit in the UK founded by Wendy Carlin and Sam Bowles, both world-renowned economists at major institutions. They’re funded by foundations that recognise that CORE’s mission is among the world’s most pressing: to create a generation of economists who can tackle inequality.

As they’ve visited universities – and even central banks – around the world, Carlin and Bowles have asked their audience the same question: what is the most pressing problem for economists to solve today? And the answer is almost always the same: inequality.

The effects of inequality are expressed in every major threat we face today: from climate change, which is driven by rapacious corporations, to the crises of misogyny and xenophobia, which are fueled by cultures of power and exploitation. The work of reinventing economics is no less than helping to save humankind from itself.

Free textbooks have been around for a long time. The open-educational-resources movement is resilient. But precious few open-access textbooks have challenged the dominance of commercial ones. To achieve this, several factors had to come together for The Economy in just the right way.

A strong leader with a smart team

Every great publishing project needs a strong leader to curate its content, rally others to the cause, and build and manage a team. In a publishing company, that’s a publisher’s job. For The Economy, that person is Wendy Carlin, backed by a hand-picked team of co-authors, project managers, editors, designers and software developers. A big book project is dizzyingly complex and constantly shifting, and the only way to manage that is to have one person holding the centre, surrounded by world-class people that get things done.

Up-front funding

Publishing companies spend millions of dollars on the biggest commercial textbooks. The costs of research, writing, promotion, product design, production and logistics add up quickly, and most are incurred long before customers start paying for anything.

Free textbooks are no cheaper to produce than commercial ones. The money just flows through different channels. Instead of having customers buy a textbook at the end, funders buy the impact that that textbook might have.

Technology

Just a few years ago, it was impossible to produce truly high-quality books without expensive, proprietary software, and without recreating each format – print, ebook, web, app – as a separate project.

Today, my team maintains a single database of all of CORE’s textbook content, and we instantly generate the print, web, ebook and app versions as needed. The Android app has 4.7 stars and over ten thousand downloads. And the quality of the print edition is proven by the fact that Oxford University Press and Eyrolles put their brands on it, in print-distribution deals with CORE.

What comes next?

As this new kind of textbook takes market share from commercial incumbents, what questions get asked at universities, funders, and publishing companies? Until the economics of new publishing become clear, the questions themselves are interesting.

When students don’t have to spend a hundred dollars on a textbook, what else becomes possible? When lecturers know for sure that their students can access the textbook they’ve prescribed, how does that change teaching and learning? When their textbooks are driven by important, new ideas, rather than historical market expectations, do graduates think differently?

I’m looking forward to asking more questions, and to finding out the answers.