In this short article, I want to share a few changes that I'm making in my writing process.

In summary

Here are two things I'm changing in my writing process compared to the last books:

• Making the ebook step by step instead of at the end

• Extracting principles from video interviews done with sustainability experts

A bit of context first

A few days ago, I published the fourth book in the Service Design Principles series.

But I've promised myself that around the time my kid would get to school, I'll have written 5 books in this series. My kid is starting his first year of school this August, which means that if I want to be done before the end of his first year of school, I should get started right now.

Making the ebook step by step instead of at the end

I now write directly in the community where people can give feedback, and right after, I copy and paste the content into Apple Pages. Apple Pages is the app I'm using to create the ebook that will then be sold.

For the previous books in the series, I transferred the content to Apple Pages only once I had all the content of the book at the first or second draft stage.

Now, I'm doing it each time I write a new principle.

The first two principles in the Apple Pages app

Why am I doing this?

Because there is a shit load of boring work to do to get a principle from the community site to an ebook format, like:

• Shortening the length to fit the page size

• Adding footnotes

• Adding the illustration in a vector format

• Transforming the links into footnotes that have a Harvard-style structure with date, author, date of publication, backup, etc.

Doing this each time I write a new principle, makes the boring moment just a 10 minute process, instead of making it something that takes me hours because I do it in one go for all the principles.

In the end it might take me longer, but the sensation of doing boring work feels shorter in the moment.

Other benefits of this approach: motivation and pre-releases

I also see the book slowly take form, which is pretty cool for boosting my motivation.

And I could then create pre-release events where I could share the first 10, 25, 50 principles for everyone to discover, which is a good way to make people aware that the book is coming.

Basing principles on video interviews done with sustainability experts

Based on a vote made by people who follow my work, I've decided that the focus of the fifth book in this series will be sustainability. I'm not an expert myself on this topic, and I'm taking this as an opportunity to "learn by teaching".

So to find interesting principles that could help us better serve humans and the planet I'll do video interviews with expert from the sustainability world.

With each interview, I can extract 1-5 principles that I could then write up.

This is based on my experience with the book tour for the fourth book in the series, during which I had a lot of fun speaking with experts worldwide.

Let's see how it goes

I've already taken action to make these changes happen. We'll see in a few months if these ideas work out well.