It took us a year to make a book, but we spent almost 8 months pitching various versions of the ideas to publishers and waiting to hear responses. This is time that is lost, never to be reclaimed, and the best I can say for that period is that we learned a lot about a business model that is stuck in a view of the world that hasn’t changed since 1950.
During this period we were forced to conceive and re-conceive our ideas so many times, that we began to see the mutability of book-ness in our modern age. Without even trying we managed to think of dozens of ways that our book could be experienced by “readers” including: paperback, hardcover, serialized in magazine, social nexus organized by topic, podcast, bookcast (episodic delivery of topics), video podcast (dramatic reading and demonstration of each topic), TV show, serialized curriculum, regionalized books with locally pertinent topics – and so forth.
Without the rigorous classic structure of a book to guide us, we had to invent a new way to create the book that would support all of these possible opportunities. Rather than re-tell it, I include here the last page of the book, which tells a condensed story of how the book was made:
How This Book Was Made
It all started with a mention in a presentation at TED 2007: Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do (http://on.ted.com/272G). The presentation was posted online where more than two million people have watched it, many of whom started asking about the book. After trying several different approaches to get it published by traditional means, we decided to do it ourselves.We began by collecting potential topic ideas in a Google Spreadsheet. Each topic was marked with a list of possible dangers, expected duration, difficulty, and so forth. That list grew to more than 80 possible topics; from there we sifted and sorted until we had the best 50. While the list was being refined, versions of possible page designs (inspired by after-market car repair books) were generated and reviewed with friends and designers. That said, all of the poor design choices herein are the fault of our own inabilities to execute on the excellent advice and design feedback we received.
Each topic was expanded into a separate Google Document and versions were sent to volunteers to review and test. Meanwhile, illustrations were created in Adobe Illustrator. Because the topic categories (Activity, Project, Experience, and Skill) had yet to be finalized, every illustration had to be created in a way that let us pick the base color at the last moment.
As feedback came in, the topics were refined and updated. The final layout was still not quite ready, so these versions of the topics were ported to XML so that they could be ingested by Adobe InDesign. The book template was set up so content would automatically flow into whatever became the final design (made more interesting by the fact that this was the first time Julie had ever used InDesign). Perforce was used to version-track all of the XML and InDesign files and scripts (and should have been used for the illustrations as well).
While Gever was at a conference in Qatar, Julie threw together a cover design in Adobe Photoshop and an alpha test print of the book was produced to check colors and margins. Little did we know, her Photoshop project would take on a life of its own and be the on-going hiccup in our otherwise orderly Illustrator/XML/InDesign-based workflow. Third-draft versions of the topics were updated in XML to fit into the latest, and near-final, version of the page layout. These were sent to a smaller group of dedicated testers. Colors for the topics were chosen and two copies of a beta-version of the book were printed. During this review (which included extensive fact-checking), hazard icons were created, the book front and back cover designs were refined, and the front-matter (foreword, introduction, table of contents, etc.) was finalized as well. Final feedback was integrated and the last tweaks were made in InDesign. This page was written, and then the book was rendered as a PDF and sent to the CreateSpace print-on-demand facility.
Total elapsed time: three months of continuous effort while laundry and email piled up. Because of the process and the tools we are using, this book can easily be rendered to different page sizes and different output media. Every bit of this book was made by Julie and Gever, but we couldn’t have done it without all the help from family and friends. Your suggestions and feedback will help us improve future efforts: gever@fiftydangerousthings.com
gever & julie, december 2009
