Book update: The pre-mortem.

Since we agreed our deal with Random House, the first big steps have been pre-mortem meetings: one among the writing team, and another with our editor.

I made all sorts of mistakes with my first two books, and spotted many, many opportunities to improve. The function of these pre-mortems was for the team to share our collected observations, learnings and concerns — and put plans in place to address them.

I’ll spare you the gory details of what’s gone wrong before, since I'll expand on these as we go. But to give you a rough idea, issues span everything from coming up with good titles and foreign rights sales, through to coordinating activities with the publisher. The upshot is we’ve got very good plans in place to avoid past problems entirely (or at least make better mistakes this time) and a team that's already benefitting from a diversity of experience, expertise and resources.

A pre-mortem — ensuring you learn from the past and tackle known risks early — is a valuable exercise on any project, and creating a book is no exception. I highly recommend doing this well in advance of putting pen to paper, and coming up with a rough project plan.

See this post on LinkedIn