Workshopping open source book publishing with Booktype

What happens when you get a bunch of creative people in one room and set them up with a book publishing tool like Booktype? We at Sourcefabric thought we should try exactly that. And so, last week, we ran a book publishing workshop at the great venue Supermarkt in Berlin, Germany.

Inspiration calls from New Zealand

The weather was stormy and rainy when almost 25 participants arrived. Booktype 'guru' and Book Sprint expert Adam Hyde called in from New Zealand to welcome the guests. His message to the excited crowd was, 'get comfortable with being accessible. You can see what everyone else is working on - and so can they. This is open source publishing.'

One of the biggest advantages of Booktype is to prevent painful writers block. That means, when you work in a team you can always find help and bounce off other ideas. 'You are not alone', said Adam Hyde at the end of his introduction, 'talk with your facilitator'. This sparked a lively discussion around how to run, lead and operate a book publishing team and touched on the topic of workflow that kept coming up throughout the workshop!

Workshopping workflow

Booktype can help organizing your workflow quite a bit. This starts with the dedicated chat window for team conversations, the history log and the setup for work groups that can make your editorial tasks much easier. Before we got started on the "hard work", the entire group was allowed to go on a little spin around the venue. The task was to take pictures, scout for ideas and chat with the other participants.

The real deal

 we wanted to run the workshop like a realistic publishing set up we set deadlines. After less than one hour we produced our first version of our workshop book. 25 pictures, 12 chapters, six teams - easy. But this was not enough for us, we wanted more! For the second round we set up the participants to operate from different countries like Italy, Romania and Spain. The publishers had to communicate using the chat and through the chapters only. With the added new deadline, this round became a bit more tricky - just like in the real world. However, it also showed how easy it can be to publish a book with people around the world if we all communicate in the same 'virtual' room and take advantage of the technology on hand.

Just an hour later, we proudly pushed the 'publish' button and the first edition of A Day at Supermarkt, popped out, ready to go.

• Do you want to participate in our next workshop or have us run a workshop for you? Contact us here!