Eating an elephant

Eating an elephant: Click this link for original post

by Clive Shepherd

I was talking on Skype this morning with a long-standing and much-respected colleague David Jennings. Both of us are bloggers as well as authors of books. He commented on the fact that I seemed to be able to move freely between the long form and the short form, 500 words one day and 50,000 the next. The reality, for me at least, is very different.

Once you get in the swing of it, it is relatively straightforward to write a blog post. Of course you have to start with an idea but, once you get going, an hour (incidentally the time it takes to travel by train from Brighton to London) is more than enough. In the past six years I've written about 700 posts for Clive on Learning and several hundred more for Onlignment. I feel like a seasoned old hack. But a book is a different prospect. It's a monstrous proposition, particularly when you have a busy day job to put at the top of your priority list. To make use a popular contemporary metaphor which attempts to explain the difficulty that our rational selves have in overcoming our emotional drives (see my review of the book Switch), the rider of the elephant (the intellect) says 'Let's make a start on the book right now and then keep going using every spare minute available until we finish', but the elephant itself (representing our emotive instincts) responds 'No way, mate, I'm off for a lay down. Later perhaps.'

Interestingly, elephants themselves provide the answer to this conundrum. The old question goes 'How do you eat an elephant?' (not that you'd want to, of course, and the elephant wouldn't be too keen either); the answer, as you well know, is 'One mouthful at a time.' The best way that I've found to write a book one mouthful at a time is by conceiving of it as a part work, each edition being issued as a blog posting.

With The New Learning Architect, I issued the book as a part work on the Onlignment blog subsequent to publication. While this increased the reach of the book, it achieved nothing in terms of the writing process and, as a result, the book took four years to write. On the other hand, my latest book, Digital Learning Content: A Designer's Guide, was schemed out in such a way that it could be constructed piece by piece from magazine articles and online guides, published on a regular schedule with tight deadlines. As a consequence, this book was assembled in 15 months, altogether a more satisfactory experience, particularly when the subject matter is so volatile.

Of course, a traditional book publisher would never let you work in this way, with all of the book contents made available for free in advance of formal publication; which is just one of the reasons why I would now only ever consider the self-publishing route, in my case through Lulu for paperbacks, and Kindle and the iBookStore for electronic versions.