This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, April 1.
Take a look at the image above and you will see “screens” that represent “pages” for my new mobile book, The Story.
These would have been “page proofs” in the book making process of another era, one that I remember well, having authored 13 books, and 12 of them in the traditional mode of book publishing. The #13 was Storytelling in the Age of the iPad and it was already a digital only book.
Nothing beats the experience of writing a book today, especially one that, from the get go was planned as a book to be consumed on the smallest of screens: that of the smartphone.
So, I write directly on an InDesign document. We have very strict templates for every storytelling opportunity we have designed for The Story, so it is a matter of writing my texts on those “card” templates. As soon as I draft a text for a new vignette, I can begin to see how the readers will see it. I can also make a pdf and see it on the screen of my phone immediately.
Can you imagine that? Long are the days when the author wrote text, sent it to the publisher, who corrected it and then sent it to the designer. It would be months between writing and seeing “galleys”, and months before those galleys will be poured into pages. It often took longer than the 9 months it takes for a baby to go from start to finish.
Those days are gone. What glorious potential for storytelling and what fantastic connection between the creative process and the outcome of it.
So we continue now to go into the editing mode for The Story.
As I think back, I believe that WED (Writing/Editing/Design), such a foundation of my work, never had a better chance to exist.
Covers we like
An evocative TIME cover, with illustration of a smiling and dancing President Trump by Tim O’Brien. When the cover illustration tells the story! The cover story, by TIME’s senior White House correspondent Brian Bennett.
Pre-order The Story here
The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Find out how, pre-orderThe Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.
Order here:
https://thaneandprose.com/shop-the-bookstore?olsPage=products%2Fthe-story
An interview of interest
http://www.itertranslations.com/blog/2019/3/11/fd60ybflpvlqrgrpdp5ida5rq0c3sp
TheMarioBlog post #3019