Book Construction Blueprint, Creativity, WriteWell Writer’s Journals–An Update

POSTED ON Aug 28, 2017

Joel Friedlander

Written by Joel Friedlander

Home > Blog > Project Focus, Writing > Book Construction Blueprint, Creativity, WriteWell Writer’s Journals–An Update

I know readers come here for practical help making and marketing their books, but today I want to give you an update on the things I have lined up in the coming months for indie authors, all of which are now coming to fruition.

Over the past few years I’ve spent so much time writing and speaking about publishing, creating books for clients, designing and selling templates and other tools for authors, that I haven’t taken the time to publish my own books.

I decided that had to change.

My mandate has always been to help authors achieve their goals, and that’s what’s driven my interest in each of these projects. My way of trying to make the world a better place, believe it or not.

Here’s a report on these projects and when you’ll get to see them.

Book Construction Blueprint

You often hear marketing professionals talk about how useful and profitable it is to “repurpose” content and package expert advice for specific audiences. For a long time I’ve wanted to bring together all the writing I’ve done over the years about how to put together industry standard print books.

That’s exactly what I did in putting together Book Construction Blueprint. I asked Kathryn Mazur to comb through my blog archives and organize all the material into a logical whole.

Then I gave her Printed Book Design, the PDF I had written years ago for BookBaby, as well as the section on offset printing I contributed in 2013 to Guy Kawasaki’s APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur.

There were a few “holes” Kathryn identified at the end, and I’ve been writing and posting those parts as blog posts over the last few weeks.

Now it’s a 200+ page fully illustrated paperback that I’ll be launching in October. But you won’t have to wait that long to see it. Thanks to a partnership with one of the largest companies in our field, you’ll be seeing quite a bit of this book in the last three months of 2017.

I’m very excited to publish Book Construction Blueprint because it makes accessible all the tips, explanation, and advice that will be useful to any self-publishers who aim to publish print books, including offset printed books.

WriteWell Writer’s Journal

Just recently I dropped a hint about the work I’ve been doing behind the scenes to create my first physical product, the WriteWell Writer’s Journal.

I love writing in journals, and have a pretty big stack of them to prove it. Whether I’m journaling (not so much), making notes for articles, drawing mind maps, or organizing projects, I frequently turn to a journal.

Problem is, it’s not that easy to find a journal that has all the elements I think make a truly great journal. It has to lie flat, be good for writing, and many other seemingly small details you need to get right.

Since you—like virtually all my readers—are a writer, I hit on the idea of using my book design and construction expertise to create the ultimate writer’s journal.

That’s what the first model of WriteWell Journals is intended to be.

After months of research and development work with a variety of book printers and material suppliers, I’ve now got them in production, and I can’t wait to show them to you.

I’m getting lots of help building the site we’ll sell the journals from and, like all these projects, this is very much a team effort.

If you, like me, love journals, sign up for our mail list and we’ll let you know as soon as they are ready (I also habitually extend special discounts to people on my email lists. Just saying.): WriteWell Writer’s Journal Notification List

Creativity

This project first made its appearance on my blog late last year in a post called A Life of Creativity.

Like everything else in life, this project, which initially looked like a fairly simple expansion of a blog post into a short book, quickly became much more complex as it developed in the real world.

Months of work, editing, re-writing, and re-thinking took 3 or 4 times as long as I thought it would.

This project has a lot of meaning for me. Even though I’ve worked as a creative professional of one kind or another most of my life, it wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I began to think of myself that way. That’s when I really started getting interested in creativity and how it works in the real world.

The book (not yet titled) draws together many of the ideas, practices, attitudes, and ways to overcome the obstacles to creativity that I’ve learned over the years.

Also, it has a chapter titled, “Welcome to the Fourth Dimension,” among others.

Being productive, turning out new and useful products and ideas year after year, learning how to make them work in practice—these are all things I’ve been working at and thinking about for a long time.

The good news is that the book is finished (still needs a title), beta readers have read and commented, and it’s on the way to editorial in the next few days. I expect an early-2018 publication date.

Well, that’s my update. How about you, what are you working on? Let us know in the comments.

Photo: bigstockphoto.com

Joel Friedlander

Written by
Joel Friedlander

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