Short Term Sacrifices for Long Term Gain
Looking at what I’ve publicly released over the past three weeks – it’s quite a drop compared to my usual frenetic release schedule. Although I do miss the amount of designing, printing, cutting and video work I’d normally be doing this month – it’s for a greater good.
Publishing a book takes an incredible amount of time, going back over sections, editing, taking photography or finding that one picture that works perfect doesn’t get any easier. I remember my first book took me months to build and work on and that was ONLY 100 pages. This volume is 4x the size of my first book and double that of my previous volume! The good news is I build these books up slowly over time, each new model that I release after my previous volume gets added to the book but this time around, I wanted to get insights from others as well from both the manufacturer’s and designer’s perspective. If it was just me, I can easily say “get x pages done a day and after y days, z goal is achieved” but when dealing with others, that isn’t so easy. Nailing people down for an interview, the back and forth to gather relevant photography or renders then several rounds of refining take their tolll as well.
Although I do build these books (assembly instructions) slowly over time as mentioned, standards and ways of presenting things does evolve so although I have work done, for consistency, I have to go back on each model and make it flow with everything else – otherwise the experience is jarring.
I’m really looking forward to getting back to non-book activities though it will still suck-up quite a bit of my time over the next two months but nowhere near as much as it is now. The way I look at it, June, July and August are traditionally sleeping months – people are out and about enjoying the summer and relaxing before business resumes in September. Sure, I could release my book in December but that would mean missing the whole Christmas Book-Buying Season which is very big with related digital sales.
Rest assured, once this is all behind me, I’ll be developing, designing and producing a bunch more projects – I want to make bigger and more complicated yet interesting and easy to build projects.
Volume 5 will be quite a departure from this volume… but that’s YEARS down the track. As I look back, this 4th volume of designs is a good closing on what I’ve been doing since I began. It will be the end of a chapter and the opening of an entirely new one that I’m anxious to embark upon.