Process and Tools

We employ a powerful process for developing and creating books that is based on an atelier, or studio, model.

For each book, John Butman, principal, works closely with a team, especially assembled for the project, that is composed of a project manager, associate writer and a number of skilled contributors, as needed. These may include interviewers, secondary source researchers, infographics specialists, fact checkers, copy editors, social media designers, and others.

John collaborates closely with authors during the conceptualization and development phase, oversees the creation of the team and the research, writes critical portions of the book, and acts as top editor of complete drafts. The book is carefully constructed by creating a chapter outline and continuously building it out with story segments, data, analysis, and selected comments from interviews.

As part of the process, we have refined a number of practices and assembled a portfolio of tools that give our authors a great deal of support and resource needed to build successful idea platforms.

The Charrette

To facilitate idea development at various stages of the book-writing process, we sometimes host a charrette—a salon that brings together selected experts from our network of affiliates. They have diverse backgrounds — in publishing, in business, in education, and in particular content areas — and bring a wide range of perspectives and experiences to the discussion. The charrette can not only sharpen and enrich an idea, it can speed up the refinement process.

The Idea Platform Seminar

We offer a seminar that describes the elements of the idea platform, analyzes how they can be created and made successful, and details the process of writing a book. Because each author, idea, and idea platform is unique, we can customize the seminar accordingly.

Sourcerer™

Our proprietary research tool offers all the stability of the Filemaker database, with advanced features including effortless capture of online sources and their citations, full-text keyword and category search, and tagging so the original source is never lost.

iThenticate

To ensure that everything is always correctly cited and never overlooked, iThenticate compares the author’s manuscript to billions of online pages, cached sources, books, and articles. LexisNexis®: Search thousands of academic articles, studies, and reports in this impressive research database.

Nvivo

Nvivo enables us to code massive amounts of qualitative research. Whether we are working with interviews, videos, or graphics, Nvivo helps us analyze data rapidly and effectively.

BookScan

Recognized as the leading tool to track U.S. book sales, BookScan collects and publishes weekly sales data. As subscribers, we monitor industry trends so we can better advise our clients.

PubTrack

PubTrack’s Annual Consumer Report allows us an inside look at consumer behavior so we know who is buying what and why.

Document Templates

Navigating a 300-page manuscript is easy when it’s formatted in our template, and our naming conventions clearly identify every document so version control is straightforward.