Electric Book Works Publishing reinvented for the digital age

Our process for your publishing project

Our team has been creating books and websites for over twenty years. During that time, we’ve learned many lessons about what works and doesn’t work. We’ve refined our process to make sure that projects start and run happily throughout. You will notice, if you keep reading, that we invest heavily in up-front thinking. This is because most hiccups happen as a result of early misunderstandings going unnoticed. In addition, when everyone is clear from the start on what we’re achieving together, design and development work is more fun, focused, and productive.

The discovery phase

During the discovery phase, you and we are working out together how your project will help you achieve your aims. Every publication is part of a bigger mission, and we need to be very clear on what that mission is.

At first, we’ll have a few conversations – usually video calls with our senior team members. We don’t charge for these exploratory conversations, which sometimes happen years before we do paid work together.

At this early stage, it’s not possible to predict what your project will cost. We might make some rough estimates, and we may be guided by the funding budget you have available.

Once you’re ready to take concrete steps, and you have some funding available, the strategic and planning work begins. Where possible, we start with a small, self-standing piece of the puzzle, like a strategy workshop or a minimal prototype. Every project is different.

We often begin with a strategy workshop, which may be followed by user-profile workshops. Out of these, we develop shared documents that form the foundation for all planning and briefing documents going forward.

  • In strategy workshops we use an impact-mapping process, which lets us understand and document how the project will support your mission. In discussion with you, we document underlying aims, measures of success, product strategy, and high-level deliverables. From then on, anyone who works on the project will read this to understand the why behind the project, not only the task in front of them. This makes a big difference to the quality and efficiency of the process.

  • User profiles, or personae, are descriptions of two or three imaginary people who represent your primary users. A publication (especially as a website) works best when it’s designed to completely delight the one person you most care about. While it’s unlikely that a publication ever has only one ideal user, by limiting the number of user profiles to three at most (e.g. journalist, funder, policy maker) we avoid diluting the effectiveness of the publication by trying to be all things to all people. A personae document guides the countless micro-decisions that designers, editors, and developers will make as they work.

  • Building on the personae, we develop user stories and user journeys. These document each persona’s objectives and journey through the publication.

    We all want the publication’s primary users to achieve exactly what they need as quickly and happily as possible. We document their needs in the form of user stories. Then we expand on those stories to document what each persona sees, clicks, types, or scrolls through. These are user journeys. They directly inform page layout, visual design, and software development. The landing page for The Economy 2.0, for example, is the result of extensive persona and user-journey development: the position and prominence of every item on the page is deliberately designed to optimise the experience of students, teachers and project supporters.

Occasionally, there are sensible reasons to skip or abbreviate some of these steps. That only happens if we agree that the trade-off – the risk that misunderstandings sneak in – is worth it.

At the end of the discovery phase, we have a clear, shared vision for the project, without committing to any particular technology, content, design, or personnel.

If we are both happy to proceed, we are now ready to cost and schedule the planning phase.

The planning phase

During the planning phase we make lots of decisions about the final products and how we’ll create them. We might be planning websites, printed books, ebooks, marketing material, or a combination of those.

These decisions are recorded in a project plan that we create, maintain, and share with you. This usually involves several video calls with your team to discuss options and trade-offs. It’s especially important to recognise trade-offs, which often weigh time, cost, and quality against each other.

Technology choices

At this point we must make several decisions about technology. These decisions are interrelated.

  • The project’s underlying technology and/or content management system (CMS): every option comes with pros and cons. We build most publications with our Electric Book template. Most web agencies use WordPress. There are many other options.
  • Web hosting: where will files and content be hosted online, and who will manage those costs?
  • Workflow: who will work on the publication during production and after its release? What will that process look like? Here we are balancing competing factors like ease of use, security, quality control, and long-term costs.
  • Analytics: how will you monitor downloads or your website’s performance, and learn from visitor data what to improve about the publication in future?

Content planning

Here we figure out what content for the publication already exists, and what must still be created or adapted. This can be a big project within the project, especially when working with multiple publications.

Team selection and recruitment

The most consequential choices we will make together are about who does the work. The EBW team has in-house expertise in many areas. In addition, we may bring in specialist designers, editors, and software developers. We will also confirm your project lead at EBW, who’ll coordinate the work.

Planning the build-phase

Based on everything we’ve developed to this point, our project lead will create a written plan for the build phase, including timelines and roles.

At this point it is possible to cost the build phase accurately. If, given all our planning, we agree that EBW is the right team to handle production for you, the building begins!

The build phase

The build phase usually involves these tasks, in roughly this order, often overlapping:

  • Infrastructure setup (e.g. repositories, servers, deployment systems, style guides, project-management systems)
  • Content preparation (e.g. writing, editing, digitisation, image preparation)
  • Design of the user experience (UX)
  • Design of the user interface (UI)
  • Software development
  • Proof-reading and author reviews
  • Quality assurance (QA) and testing
  • Publication, as web and ebook releases and printing
  • Marketing

Ongoing tasks and costs

Depending on how your publication is created, there may be ongoing work and costs to allow for. For example:

  • Websites can require regular updates and monitoring for performance and security.
  • Who will monitor analytics and create reports for decision-makers?
  • Domain names, web-hosting, and other infrastructure usually require ongoing subscription payments and account oversight.
  • Who do you call for different kinds of support, and what will that cost?

Find out more

If you have a project in mind, contact us for a friendly, exploratory conversation. You can read more about our team on our About page.

Arthur Attwell 13 February 2024
Post image: Brown Toy Box Character by Lisa Fotios (pexels.com)