Hodder’s Offices in London
Like the new title for the book? Presentation Genius. Far better, I think, than “The science of presenting”. Much snappier. I wish I could take credit, but it was the idea of Iain, my editor at Hodder & Stoughton.
Other things that have changed about the book since my last post are legion. The most important thing is this: it’s finished. Well that’s a lie, there’s one more chapter to write but the substantive parts are done – the forty chapters of actual content. (The outstanding chapter is the introduction, by the way, which should always be written last in almost anything!)
For those of you who like checklists, here’s my process for each chapter.
- Research, research, research and more research. I’ve used evernote to capture thoughts whenever they occurred to me and in particular I’ve used evernote’s clipper widget of my chrome browser to capture stuff I find online
- When I’ve got the time I’ve linked, tagged and sorted my thoughts and research. I’d like to say that was all electronic but the truth is that while a lot of it was, I’ve also gone through quite a lot of paper, printing researched materials and putting it into piles of linked/related material
- Draft. There comes a point when it’s just gotta be done. Sit down and belt it out. Don’t stop to think and save the drafted stuff in Google drive (better sharing and backup than just having it on my own hard-drive). I’ve also backed it up, obviously, I’m not an idiot! ;)
- Whenever I’ve run into the sand I’ve been kind to myself and just stopped, before moving on to a different chapter/topic. After a break I find I can always go back to things with a fresh eye. That means I’ve had to do relatively little re-writing because instead of writing tosh, I’ve simply stopped writing
- Export from .pages format to .doc format and put into a different folder in Googledrive which is then shared with an editor (and lots of other people for feedback). Clare (the editor’s job wasn’t to proof-read (although she did) because Hodder will do that (I hope!) but more to check for mistakes and make general suggestions. Mistakes are obvious grammar issues such as mismatching plural and singulars in a sentence but also bigger things like accidentally missing the word “not” from a sentence. That’s a biggie. :) There were surprisingly few of these.
- Review the feedback. Chat and talk. And talk more… :) It’s great to see what someone who knows nothing about the book says – it’s the only way to find out where I’ve made assumptions, for example… Clare also gave me feedback and suggestions on a whole broad range of things such as the order of chapters. She’s expensive, for sure, but in my mind it’s so very worth it because of the whole ‘fresh eye’ thing she brings to it.An important note about Clare = she knows me. She knows me well. She’s known me for 15 years of close work (and friendship). What that means is that she can change things but (and here’s the important bit) she can stay in my ‘voice’ as she does so.
I really, really, recommend this kind of relationship. If you’re not lucky enough to have a friend who’s an editor, shop around. - When stuff came back to me, check it all using the ‘track changes’ function (whatever word processor you’re using, learn to use this!) and comments left in the file and save the resultant ‘finished’ chapter in a new folder.
- After a break check the file once more – this time I didn’t bother putting things into a new folder as it was all smaller, incremental tweaks.
- Do the whole process of sending it out to someone else and getting it back again once more, this time to a completely different person. (Specifically I used a VA) who checked for mistakes and did the necessary reformatting I’d decided I needed after feedback from Clare (and others)
- Export and send to the editors. Brace for comments ;)
A couple of points are worth pulling out from that list which are simple but profound. The first is that whenever I moved on a step in the creative process, the outputs were put in a new folder. Not only did it help keep my backups but – importantly – it was a simple-yet-effective way of keeping my administration straight. By looking at what files (one file = one chapter) were in each of the folders I could see how far each one had progressed.
The second point is one I’ve already laboured but stands repeating. Get feedback from someone who doesn’t know the topic but does know you.
