Build a Book Workshop Chapter 1

You probably already have some ideas about how and why you want to run your workshop. However, it might be worth working through the following questions, reading the rest of the manual and then coming back to this chapter later.

Who will take part?

Do you want to conduct the workshop with a whole class? Several classes?  A whole year group? Across several year groups? Do you want to use an identified group – such as “the gifted and talented” or “girls who lack confidence”? Will the participants be obliged to take part or will they volunteer? How will you sell the idea to your colleagues and to the potential participants?      

Enlisting extra help

Even if you are working with your own class, you are doing something a little unusual, so some extra pairs of hands in the classroom are welcome. Your own teaching assistants are obvious choices. Doubling up classes can work well also – one teacher can lead and another can support.

If you invite outsiders your school may require    them to be CRB checked. They should also have public liability insurance. Many writers who conduct school visits do have both of these. However, at the time of writing, the Government has said that CRB checks are not always necessary for occasional visitors, such as writers or artists. The Society of Authors has argued for a long time that they are not necessary although the National Association of Writers in Education have advised their members to have them and have assisted with this. The latter also provides its professional members with £10,000,000 of public liability insurances. A sensible question for your writer might be, therefore, “Are you a professional member of NAWE?” Note that the public liability insurance is only effective if members of your own staff are present during the visit. This would be sensible anyway.

Perhaps an obvious choice is a local writer who does school visits. Be warned, however, that the Society of Authors recommended fee for a day’s visit by a writer is £350. Nevertheless, some writers are willing to do a shorter visit for travelling expenses and the opportunity to sell their books and talk about their work. New writers who are finding their feet with school visits, will often work for a reduced fee. The latter could be very useful to support your workshop; you would basically lead the workshop and they could add in valuable insights as you go along. You may find lists of writers who are happy to conduct school visits in the following places:

·         NAWE’s professional register,  http://nawe.new.hciyork.co.uk/professional-directory.html  

·         Wordpool’s Contact An Author http://www.contactanauthor.co.uk/

·         The Society of Authors’ Search for an Author http://www.societyofauthors.org/WritersAZ

You can always factor the writer’s fee into you expenses.

Obviously, one may also involve such bodies as the PTA or other support groups associated with your school.

Other good workshop supporters are creative writing students and graduates who are eager to get on PGCE courses. They are only too willing to offer free assistance in order to complete their school experience. As with the inexperienced writer, using them in this situation is ideal. They can learn from you. You retain the control. They have some expertise that you don’t have. Your school may want to get a CRB check done, despite recent pronouncements by the Government, and you must factor that into your expenses.  

In all cases, you need to allow time to acquaint these helpers with their role and to conduct any checks.   

Organizing your book

You may want to involve your students in any decision about this, but it is probably also worth having a few ideas yourself as well.  

What will you include? Do you just want to include one type of writing e.g. non-fiction or poetry? Do you want to include some work by everyone in the group? Or will you only include the very best work – even if that means that only a few students will be “published”? Will the contributions to the group be grouped by theme, type or person? Or all of these, within groups?  

Think what else you might want to include. Do you want to write an introduction? Do you want get someone else to write a foreword? Perhaps a senior person at your school or someone from the charity you are supporting or maybe your invited writer? Could you include all of these people in some way? If supporting a charity, do you want to include some information about it in the book? Could that be a project for one of your students? 

Do you want to include a contents page and / or an index? I actually advise against including an index of authors or mentioning them in the Contents; readers are likely to look only at the work of a person they know -   and could miss out on a real treat.   

Your theme

It’s actually a good idea to discuss any theme for your book with your students. Get them on board. The theme is a centralizing and motivating factor. It also allows each student to work according to their strengths and despite their weaknesses; each can make a contribution as long as what they produce fits the theme.

There are various ways of finding a theme and you can explore this with your students. Your theme may be to do with:

·         the curriculum

·         a charity you wish to support

·         something of local interest

·         what is on the students’ mind

Linked with the theme is the idea of the perceived reader. You might also like to discuss with your students who will read the book: interested adults, children the same age as the students, younger children, people who might benefit from the charity supported.

You might also like to ascertain the purpose of the book. Is it to make money for your chosen charity, raise awareness about that charity or to showcase excellent writing? Possibly it is a combination of these things.

Left to their own devices, students will conclude that they are producing the book merely to please their teachers. By providing a theme, a purpose and a perceived reader, you are providing your students with a quasi-commercial perspective on the book and replicating that balance that exists between art and commerce in the world of publishing.     

Time scale

You need to decide how much time you are going to devote to the Build a Book Workshop and how much of what needs to be done can actually be completed outside of “core” time.

For example, you might complete the whole workshop in a single day, over two days or a week off timetable. You might use it as an extracurricular activity conducted during lunch-times or a part of an after-school club. You might make it a part of normal lessons – perhaps as a joint activity between English, IT, Citizenship Art.

Incidentally, it may be easier to find funding if this is conducted as an extracurricular activity.

You need to accommodate the following tasks:

·         Negotiating theme, purpose and reader

·         Setting up writing tasks

·         Writing and word-processing work

·         Editing

·         Designing

·         Illustrating

·         Marketing

·         Launching and selling book

It may be possible to complete core tasks – e.g. setting up writing tasks, writing, editing, designing and illustrating during a designated time – for example on a day off timetable, and to complete the other tasks before and after the event. In this case, the setting up writing, writing and editing would take up about half of the time available.

Whatever you do, there will be some delay between when final version of the work is ready and when the book comes out. You or someone with technical expertise needs to get the book uploaded to a printer.

In any case, you will probably want to launch the book at a suitable time in the school year which may be at some distance in time from when your book is camera ready. You can factor that into your time plan.

It may also be possible to have a day off timetable to kick-start the project. The project could then carry on in further curriculum or extracurricular time.        

           Word-processing, collecting and collating work

Logistics are so important here. There will come a point when you need all of the work in two places – on a memory stick or similar and backed up somewhere else.

You might achieve this by rushing around at the end of the session and collecting everything onto the stick or by getting the students to save to a shared area. The first method is stressful and the second is safer but requires some effort on your part later.

And there are some unfortunate certainties:

·         Some students will fail to save their work or will save it to somewhere so obscure that neither you nor they will ever find it again

·         Some students will fail to finish 

·         You will have to do the final edit, no matter how well students have edited before 

Getting all of the work in and ready to become a book can be quite a challenge. Whilst it is reasonable to say that many students will prefer to write straight to a computer, and that asking them to do this or word-process their work later offers them the opportunity to enhance their IT skills, there is no certainty that they will actually finish the work- no matter how much time you allow.

You cannot possibly take on this work yourself and getting paid help with it would make your book’s price prohibitively high.

You have to think of a way of getting this word-processing completed. You might enlist the help of parents, or of students and graduates who are anxious to get some school experience, or you might appoint a group of IT or design experts from amongst your students. The latter may work particularly well if you are conducting the workshop over several weeks.

If you do not give this matter enough attention, you risk losing your book. Factor your decision about how to get the word-processing completed into your planning.  

Finance

If you make your Build a Book Workshop an extracurricular activity, you may be able to obtain some funding e.g. Arts Council Small Grant. However, application processes are time-consuming and applications are not always successful.

You may be able to tap into some funds at your own school – for instance, is there a special fund for the Gifted and Talented, for Special Needs or for Activities Week? Or is this workshop so much part of what you normally do that you can use part of your normal budget to fund it?

It may not be possible to get any help. But the good news is that the book can be self-funding – more or less. For example, if you use a Print On Demand company, such as Lightning Source, at the time of writing, each book costs 70p plus 1p per page to print. It costs about £48 to upload your book and cover. You will probably want a proof copy at about £21.00. Each print run costs £1.39, and you do have to pay shipping. The latter starts at about £5.00 for five books but rapidly becomes a lot cheaper the more you order. Discounts are usually given on print runs over 50. It would probably be easy to sell a hundred books if you worked with a whole year group. So, if you retail your book at £4.00, and sell 100 you cover print costs, set-up costs and shipping and have quite a bit left over for your designated charity. If your marketing campaign flops completely and you don’t sell a single book, you’ll have a nice book for the school library and you’ll have spent about £70 on a worthwhile workshop. But actually, you’re likely to sell at least as many books as there are participants in the workshop. If you put your price up to £5.00, you are some way to covering the cost of a visiting writer even if they charge full price.

We actually offer a package where we provide a visiting writer, set up the title for you, and guarantee £1.00 profit per hard copy book sold and 50% of profit on the e-book that comes automatically in the package. We do ask, though, that you pay the writer’s travel expenses.

Of course, if your budget runs to it, you might consider providing each student with a free copy of the book.

And if all of that still remains unaffordable, consider creating a web site instead. This can be done without spending a penny. You can still link to a charity. You might, however, want to consider purchasing a domain name – at about £10.99 for two years. How to do this is explained in Setting up a Web Book.    

Some post-workshop tasks  

Whichever way you time your workshop, there will be some rather tedious tasks to complete afterwards. The excitement will be over, and a book can fail at this point because a busy teacher cannot find the time or motivation to complete the tasks.

Delegation, diarising and critical time planning are important here. The next chapter deals with critical time-planning. Here is a list of what needs to be completed after the workshop:

·         Word-processing of students’ work  

·         All work to be given a final edit

·         Camera ready Word document to be produced

·         Book to be prepared for uploading to the printer (See The technical stuff) 

·         Market book

·         Order copies

·         Have a book launch

Allow about ten hours for each of these activities. Remember, it doesn’t need to be you that does the work and it needn’t be done at one sitting. Your book launch, for instance, will probably last about two hours but may need up to eight hours preparation.  

Build a Book (resource for writers and teachers) Introduction

Introduction

The Build a Book Workshop is about getting your students to create a book in a limited amount of time. They look at the whole process of how a book is made: writing, editing, selecting, designing, illustrating and marketing. This workshop enables students to see what is involved in producing a book and motivates them to start and to complete a piece of writing. 

They actually produce a book. It becomes a tangible object that sits on a shelf. You may also opt to have the book as an e-book and a web site if you wish. 

This process is very adaptable and can easily be used to build a book in a day, two days, a week, a month, a term or a year.

Some work needs to be carried out behind the scenes, some of which is quite technical, and this guide shows you how. If the technical work is too much, we also show you ways of getting help with that as effectively as possible.

Everything described in this manual for teachers is based on the experience of producing anthologies of children’s writers with schools. All of the books have supported a charity – in two cases this was the schools own library - and in all cases students’ confidence in their writing has increased.    

The Build a Book Workshop can be extremely cross-curricular and offers your students opportunities to:

·         improve their writing

·         understand the world of publishing

·         work collaboratively

·         understand the wider community

·         support the wider community

·         understand how businesses work

·         improve their IT skills

·         take part in an enterprise activity

This manual contains a step-by-step guide to setting up a Build a Book Workshop and making sure that a book is produced at the end of it. There are several choices at each stage of the process. It is probably a good idea to read it from cover to cover to start with and then work through it section by section when you have a clearer idea of your workshop shape. 

You may also order a book containing photocopiable resources from our web site. You may purchase this as a hard copy or as a PDF file. Also a template for formatting your book is available from our web site. 

 

Chains

Larry Talotta may have looked undernourished and appeared to be a pretty dumb kid but he really did know how to place the frighteners on inexperienced French teacher Gina Jones. 

“Can I have my chain back?” said Larry Talotta. He looked up at Gina, screwing one eye up against the sun. He was small for his thirteen years, yet his face was a bit like an old man’s. He reminded Gina of Wilfrid Brambell’s Steptoe.

“I told you,” said Gina, “you’ll have to see Mr Jones. It’s in his desk.”

It was quite handy that she shared a surname with her colleague who also taught French. Most of the students thought he was her husband. She never put them straight. The odd “I’ll have to let Mr Jones know about the way you’re behaving,” was too useful.  Mark Jones taught boys P.E. too and was actually the head of Lower School. Twice a week at Lower School Assembly he would read out the names of those who were in detention. Larry’s name was often on the list.  A distinct advantage, too, that she taught in Mark Jones’s classroom twice a week.  The students were always a little better behaved when they were in there. They probably expected him to walk in any minute. Gina preferred to think it was because some of his authority rubbed off on her when she was in his room.

It never made a lot of difference to 2SA, though. She had double French with them last two lessons on Tuesday in Mark’s room, just after they’d had double P.E. It was pretty difficult to get them to do anything. Larry always brought something to play with. This week it had been the chain and padlock from his bike. He’d somehow managed to wind it round his wrists and lock himself into it in such a way that he couldn’t get out. If it hadn’t have been so disruptive it would have been funny. With the help of another pupil Gina had managed to find the key and undo the padlock. She put the chain and padlock in the desk drawer.  At the end of the lesson, Larry was so eager to get out that he forgot to collect them.

“Well,” said Larry. “When can I have my chain back?”

“You’ll have to see Mr Jones,” Gina repeated. She wasn’t bluffing. She was on playground duty now and she wouldn’t be in that room again until next Monday. Still, she smiled to herself as she thought of Larry having to grovel to the Head of Lower School.

“I’m going to get my mum on to you,” said Larry, screwing up his eyes and looking  even more like Wilfrid Brambell.

Should she be scared of Larry’s mum? She knew Larry was the youngest of nine siblings, so Mrs T  probably be getting on a bit as well.

“What do you know about Larry Talotta?” she asked a colleague in the staff room later on when she had a free period.

“A bit dozy,” answered Paul Davis, the second in the Maths department. “Though I don’t suppose he or his family will worry if he doesn’t do too well with us. He’ll leave school as soon as he can and go into the family business.”

“What’s that?” asked Gina.

“They’re scrap merchants,” said Paul.

“That figures. It’s no wonder he looks like Steptoe.”

Paul laughed. “He does a bit,” he said. “Especially when he screws up his face and shuts one eye.” Paul offered a rather poor impersonation.

“He probably does it on purpose,” said Gina.

“No doubt,” replied Paul.

“Do you know anything about his mother? Only he threatened me with her.”

“You don’t want to mess with her. She won’t stand any nonsense. Mind you, she’s fair and she doesn’t let any of the kids get away with anything, either. She runs a second hand shop, I gather.”

So, not a gentle little old lady then. “Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind,” said Gina.

The bell rang and she went off to her last lesson.

“You look tired, Hinton,” said Gina that evening. She and Mike were visiting a friend of hers from college. Hinton, a police officer, was Danielle’s husband. “Have you had a tough day as well?”

“Oh yes, you could say so,” said Hinton as he passed them all bottles of beer. “The Talottas have slipped through the net yet again.”

“Talottas?” said Gina. “That’s funny. I’ve been having a bit of trouble with a kid called Talotta today.”

“The scrap merchants?” asked Hinton.

Gina nodded.

“You know they’re a British mafia set-up, don’t you?” said Hinton.

“Really?” asked Gina. Her mouth went dry and her heart started thumping. 

“Are you all right?” said Danielle. “Only you’ve gone really white.”

Gina bit her lip and nodded.

“Yep,” Hinton continued. “They use the scrap business to launder their money. They’re evil. And they’re darned clever. We can never pin anything on them.” Hinton took a slug of his beer. “So who is this kid, then?”

“Larry Talotta. His mum runs a second hand furniture business, apparently.”

“Oh, no. You’re not getting on the wrong side of Ma Talotta, are you?” said Hinton. “They say she’s actually the boss. You know. The Godmother, sort of.”

Gina yawned. She hadn’t really slept very well the night before. And she’d probably had a beer or two more than she should have done. She and Hinton had really put it away while Mike and Danielle had watched a bit bemused. Well, they didn’t have to deal with the mafia, did they? 

She was on early morning duty. When the bell rang, it just made the throbbing in her head worse. 

“Are you going to give me my chain back or do I have to get my mother on to you?” said a familiar voice. Larry’s Steptoe looked up at her.

Gina sighed.  “Come on then,” she said. “Let’s go to Mr Jones’ room now.”

“I ain’t talking to Jonesy,” said Larry.

“You won’t have to. He’ll be getting ready for Assembly,” said Gina.

Larry screwed up his jaw Wilfrid Brambell style. Then he smirked. “Just as well,” he said. “You do know my mum’s with the mafia don’t you?”     

Gina’s hands trembled as she removed the chain and padlock from the desk. She hended them to Larry.

He grinned. “Ta miss. You’re all right, you are.”

He scuttled away and joined his mates. Perhaps he was just an ordinary kid after all.