Mark Boulton

The inter­est­ing thing about try­ing some­thing com­pletely new is that you learn almost all the time. True, you make plenty of mis­takes along the way. That’s how it’s been writ­ing this book. But, it’s not just the writ­ing you see. Book pub­lish­ing involves a whole team of people, from edit­ors and proof-readers to pro­ject man­agers and design­ers. I’m lucky that I have a semi-experienced team at Mark Boulton Design to help me get the book fin­ished and out of the door.

Robert Mills is our Pro­ject Man­ager. He comes from a media research and journ­al­ism back­ground, so is not scared of the writ­ten word. It was his job to really push the pub­lic­a­tion over the past four months or so. I asked him to pen a few words on our approach, and this is what he came up with… 

Writ­ing

A Prac­tical Guide to Design­ing for the Web star­ted out as a few blog posts. Though it has evolved sig­ni­fic­antly since then, those blog posts provided a great stepping-stone for Mark to write the book, and proved early on that people were inter­ested in this sub­ject and Mark’s thoughts on it. 

The main thing was just to write, to get the major­ity of the copy down on the page. Until draft one is done there is noth­ing to edit, delete, proof read and add to. The key to writ­ing is time and loc­a­tion, form­ing a timetable and isol­at­ing your­self may be use­ful, whatever works for you, but it takes ded­ic­a­tion, sac­ri­fice and many, many hours. 

There were many hours spent research­ing and plan­ning the book before pen could be put to paper or fin­ger could be put to key­board. Bey­ond the ini­tial plan­ning and dis­cov­ery it was a case of writ­ing, writ­ing some more and then writ­ing even more. 

Design

Mark had writ­ten the chapters. Next we were to turn them from bland word doc­u­ments to impress­ive, visu­ally stun­ning pages in a design book. Nick, the designer at MBD with a fair amount of pub­lish­ing exper­i­ence, was tasked with type­set­ting the copy under Mark’s art dir­ec­tion. This imme­di­ately cre­ated an issue as Nick was work­ing out of Manchester and we were work­ing out of Cardiff. Skype proved to be an invalu­able tool at this stage of the pro­cess, not only for keep­ing each other in the loop with the latest devel­op­ments but in order to design via webcam! 

Some ele­ments of the design were agreed early on before the pro­cess had even star­ted (it was always going to be A5 and in full col­our), but nat­ur­ally it was a case of put­ting into prac­tice the work method we adopt with cli­ents – iter­a­tion and refine­ment. Some of the pages in the final copy are ori­ginal ver­sions, some have changed dra­mat­ic­ally through­out the design pro­cess – it has been painstak­ingly tough at times as a book about design clearly had to be a visual feast. 

Pub­li­city

Hav­ing an author who hap­pens to be well known within his field, and a book that has been prom­ised for the last two years, all helps build the pub­li­city momentum.

We cre­ated a Flickr account. Through­out the pro­cess we uploaded sneak peeks of the vari­ous pages to give people a taster of the fin­ished book but also to doc­u­ment some of the ini­tial sketches and behind the scenes process. 

A Five Simple Steps Twit­ter account was also set up. As I write this we have 874 fol­low­ers! (Thanks to you if you are amongst that group) Again the pur­pose of tweet­ing was to pub­li­cise the book but also to con­nect to the poten­tial read­ers. Our tweets ranged from quotes lif­ted straight from the pages of the book, links to the Flickr group, to more gen­eral news updates and count­downs to launch day. 

Blog­ging was also a fun­da­mental part of the pro­cess simply because the book idea evolved from one of Mark’s blog posts about five simple steps to bet­ter typo­graphy so we took the book right back to where it ori­gin­ated from and Mark has blogged about why he chose to self pub­lish, and about the tech­nical require­ments involved in writ­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing your own book. 

Logist­ics

Thank­fully some ele­ments were straight­for­ward, all the inform­a­tion we needed on pur­chas­ing ISBN num­bers was read­ily avail­able online and it was noth­ing more than a simple applic­a­tion form out­lining the con­tent and spe­cific­a­tion of the book. Hav­ing to buy them in blocks of ten also ensured we have ISBN num­bers for nine future pub­lic­a­tions (if we decide the pub­lish more that is!). 

Get­ting to grids with the pro­cess, and our first of 10 alloc­ated ISBN num­bers together with the bar code

Although not a neces­sity, there is the option of sub­mit­ting a copy of the book to the Brit­ish Lib­rary. For prin­ted books this is a legal require­ment, whilst they agree on the policy for elec­tronic books, they recom­mend depos­it­ing the book in the interim. 

Many hours also went into research­ing print on demand offer­ings, Amazon ful­fill­ment, and other print­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion meth­ods. There are many options and it is a case of find­ing one that meets all your needs. For us it was self pub­lish­ing (please see Mark’s other blog posts for more inform­a­tion on this). 

Look­ing forward

At the moment we don’t know if all the hard work, blood, sweat and tears has paid off. We hope so as we are immensely proud of the book but all we can do now is sit back and wait for the feed­back and reviews to roll in.