How Not To Make a Book

Terrible Perfect Prototypes

The most important thing in the world is a prototype. It doesn’t matter if you’re making a book, a website, a billion dollar app or a rocket ship, you can sit there and have a calendar full of meetings and pat yourself on the back about how great this detailed plan is, but all that work will turn to nothing without a prototype.

After thinking about the format last week I knew I needed to get something in my hands right away. Yet the great thing about a prototype is that it can be crude, childish, embarrassing but, most important of all, easy to make: the best kind are spun up within a few hours.

So last night I got book angry, hopped out of bed after binge-watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (holy shit, what a great show) threw some quick mockups into InDesign, typeset everything in my trusty LfA Aluminia, and on my black and white printer I had it done in a minute flat.

In the kitchen, and in the dark, I rush-cut the pages down to the right size and here they were: all the problems with margins and typography and my kinda half-baked writing...

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...but I had a book! Okay, well, technically, all I’ve done above is print a single sheet and thrown it into an existing book of the same size and format just to get a feel for things. But: I have a book! Something to poke and prod, something to push me to the next stage.

Let’s ignore the bad margins and, okay okay, the line-height kerfuffle too. That’s not what this prototype is testing, and I can figure out all those details later. All I care about today is the shape of my writing and the width and height and physical-ness of the book: does this feel right? What options do I have at this size for a bit of playfulness? Should I change the tone of my writing for this format? What constraints can I turn to my advantage?

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Yikes! Isn’t this horrible?

No: it’s perfect! With this information I can see if my writing fits in this container or whether I should make the book smaller and more intimate or expand the book entirely. I can easily see all the faults and flaws with this thing that I couldn’t see in my mind before I hit print or if I just left everything in InDesign for weeks on end.

I think a lot of books are made without thinking too much about the format, but when it comes to the websites I’ve made in the past I’ve found that the magic happens when I write and design them at the same time. The design can help inform when to pack that writing punch or when to let the visuals take over for a bit.

Printing the book out at this early stage reminds me that in future editing rounds I can play with the space of the book a bit more and I don’t have to make each text block look like a humble novel.

Would all this be more organized if I just sat down and wrote the whole book and edited it perfectly from scratch then designed it, printed it, etc.? Yes, sure. But I think something would be lost in that process. Also, after doing these side projects for a while I realize that I’m extremely messy at the beginning whilst I figure it all out. Eventually things will become focused.

For now I can enjoy this absolute mess on my kitchen table because even the worst prototype is a wonder. A bad prototype is evidence of the work being done.

Until, finally, a good prototype and then you know your book is finished.