So I am spending a good portion of my day writing The Story. Yes, it is my 14th book, but nothing like the other 13 in terms of how it is coming together.
Take a look at the image above and you see that two weeks into the start of my writing of The Story, we can see actual “screens” for the look & feel of this book. It is amazing. It is surprising. It is the way we do storytelling on a daily basis in the newsroom too.
The parallels
The process of writing a digital book aimed to be consumed on the phone, which is the goal of The Story, runs parallel with the strategies that we recommend to newsrooms for how they cover news.
The old model: Planning, then writing, then production, then publication.
The new model: Writing/Designing go hand in hand. Not only that, we have begun “slicing” The Story for social media promotions, long before the writing of the book is completed.
Indeed, the “slicing of the melon”, one of the concepts I present in The Story, and which is known to all those who attend my workshops, is upfront in how we are developing this book. Take a look at some of those promotional “slices”:
I find that the process of writing/editing/designing and slicing the content for social media promotions is exhilarating. I am pushed to write more frequently because I am getting reactions to our postings of The Story.
No print edition!
After three weeks of philosophical discussions, I think I finally convinced my editor/publisher, Thane Boulton, that this is not a book to be “translated” for a print edition. In fact, I insist I don’t want to do to a print edition what so many publications do to mobile ones: dumping what is created for one platform into another. No way!
So you will enjoy The Story on your mobile devices, which is how the book is created.
Oh, the good old days
I remember when writing a book involved just that —writing for months. Then it would be months before one would see galleys with a sense of the look and feel. Months would pass again before final page proofs would become available. And months later, publication.
The new technology has taken the waiting out of the process.
The technology also poses dilemmas: we want The Story to be a true representation of mobile storytelling. For book publishing it is a new concept, so even our developers, who try to please, ponder how to make it happen.
We are hoping that you will be able to sample pages of the book perhaps as early as June.
Stay tuned for more of The Story: the making of……
TheMarioBlog post #2999