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Ryan Burgess
Welcome to another episode of the front end happier podcasts. I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but our very own Shirley Wu has written and published a book with her friend naughty. We are all super excited for her and thought, why not talk about publishing books? That's an interesting subject that I definitely am not familiar with. So in this episode, we invited Nadi to talk with us and surely about their book, Nadi. Can you give us a brief introduction of who you are, what you do, and what your favorite happier beverage is?

Nadieh Bremer
Sure, of course. So my name is Nadieh Bremer, and I'm from the Netherlands I live right outside of Amsterdam, I used to be an astronomer then became a data scientist and then found out that database is even better than that, combining creative with the sort of the hard side of math and coding. So then I eventually became a freelancing data visualization designer, I work. I like to work on bigger data sets. To be able to to have anything to do with science, especially astronomy, I seem to gravitate a lot towards network like data sets, just giving myself a hard time because they're very hard to to properly visualize. Yeah, so I've been freelancing for the last four ish years, Laura have now stopped freelancing for half year because I've become a student at the Fab Academy, which is a worldwide kind of globally distributed course led by MIT, which you make you learn to make almost anything in 20 weeks that goes from 3d printing, laser cutting, CNC, milling, designing and creating your own electronics. So working with sensors, programming, all this shebang. And so what I'm doing right now, I have no other life left at this point, because every, every minute, I have a lot of fun.

Ryan Burgess
I want to go join.

Nadieh Bremer
And my favorite Happy Hour beverage would be generally something with Malibu or current affairs, or when generally I am the kind of person that knows so little about it that I just asked the waiter. Give me the sweetest thing. You have a menu.

Ryan Burgess
I like that. That's an easy way to order though. And you probably get like a mix of different drinks.

Nadieh Bremer
Yes, yes, some cocktail at least. Very good.

Ryan Burgess
All right. Well, we'll go around and introduce basically introduce surely myself surely you want to start it off?

Shirley Wu
Yeah. Hi, my name is Shirley Wu. I'm an independent creator of data visualizations.

Ryan Burgess
And I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm a software engineering manager at Netflix. In each episode of the front end happier podcast we like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. And what did we decide for our book writing episode? Draft? Draft? All right, so if we say that we're draft which I'm pretty sure this is going to come up at some point in time I'm sure you didn't write just write production book ready? I'm sure there will be a good one that will come up. I figured a good way to start is how did you both come to decide to write a book what what got that started? It was you're doing it for the money right? You're like whoa,

Shirley Wu
published author is making so much money. day in my life, not anymore. Nothing you want to take.

Nadieh Bremer
So data sketches is the book data sketches is basically

Ryan Burgess
what is the book to write like, that's, that's important.

Nadieh Bremer
So data sketches started out as a year long, 12 month, sort of installment of Shirley and I working sort of collaborating and creating data visualizations. And we had picked one topic for each of the months that we wanted to do it 12 different topics. And then from that point onward, we would both create our own visualizations based you know, having that topic as a seed, which could be anything from Olympics to music to books, nostalgia, fearless. So it's very we're wide range of topics. And the collaboration part really was in the fact that we were you know, discussing it a lot chatting, having calls and sending each other our sort of screenshots, our thoughts and then being sort of the very immediate sounding board for for each other. So that was where their collaboration came in. And not necessarily on the coding we coded separately. And we also published extensive write ups of how we created each of our projects that was just a side thought at the at the start is like, hey, let's make more projects. Because we felt like we hadn't made enough projects in the like in the year before. And, and at that point, we felt like maybe this will be a good way that we will sort of make ourselves Make more projects. And then oh, wait, let's do that, let's write a write about it as well. But then it became actually the most sort of useful thing to, to other people having these write ups where we start from basically scratch from an idea, and then to the data, sketching it out, and then actually programming it all the way to the end. And that those write ups were first online. And now we've bundled them up into into a book. And where, of course, we wrote so many other things around it, we completely refund revamped everything. But maybe I shouldn't be telling this, all of all of this. But anyway, how I turned into how the project turned into a book was actually when we sort of relaunched our project when we had completed two months, sort of internally secretly,

Shirley Wu
back in 2016. back way back in 2016. So we were I mean,

Ryan Burgess
I hear it's a lot of work. It doesn't just how

Shirley Wu
we were so young. Yes.

Nadieh Bremer
And thankfully, it was kind of, you know, picked up by by people, and they liked it. And then Alberto Cairo, who is sort of a database Guru, I guess you can say, these days, he was in a in a video chat with, with Simon Rogers, and they were just talking about things. And then their sketches came up. And he said, Well, I would really like to have the sketches be a coffee table book that I can have on my having my house and then surely had this sort of fleeting moment in that point, and maybe you should take over now.

Shirley Wu
That's, that's all it takes to convince 26 year olds really to write a book. I mean, Alberto Cairo was and still is a very big figure in the data visualization community. And he's written a lot of different books about data visualization. But yeah, that's apparently all it takes for Alberto Cairo to mention that our project should be a book and we're like, okay, I guess it's gonna be a book. And we were like, well, I was like, 90, at least we have, we will have at least one sale. At least one buyer. And literally, that's it. I was like, 90, let's do it. And she's like, that's a lot of work. And then was like, Well, how about, we go about, and we tried to find a publisher. And if there's any publisher that's interested, they'll like, you know, we can make a decision from there. And if not, then like, at least we gave it a try. I'm like, a huge believer of like, you know, if there's something that you're interested in them, like, give it a try, and at least then you wouldn't regret it. And so we started reaching out to publishers, I think this was like, early 2017 turn out that at least in early 2017, a lot of publishers were either like academic textbook publishers, or like, you know, the old Riley's, and the and, and, either and, or they were kind of like trade publishers. So like, you might think of like, the Chronicles and the, I like, how I only have one each of these examples are good

Ryan Burgess
examples, you don't need to go in a laundry list. So that make sense.

Shirley Wu
Thank you, thank you. And so we, we wanted to do something that was kind of a hybrid that was because we have so many projects with like, these that are like so heavy and imagery, we wanted to have something that was like, halfway between a beautiful big, beautiful coffee table book, which is what like a lot of trade publishers are known for. And but then like side by side with like, very technical write ups, because that's, that's kind of like, what we found people really liking about our projects was being like not, he said, being able to see the behind the scenes look, the thought process that went into like, creating full data visualizations from scratch. And so we wanted to, like have that very technical write up side by side with those big beautiful imagery. And the technical writer part is like very much in the domain of academic publishers. But we found in 2017 that there wasn't we couldn't get in touch with any publishers that wanted to do both. And that was a very very interesting and very interesting lesson of even trying to get in contact with a publisher was really hard of it felt like another one of those like you you need the network like you need to know somebody on the inside to be able to like pitch them your book so I don't think we even got to pitch them any different publishers right nobody

Nadieh Bremer
know maybe two or three that were willing to listen at least at the start

Shirley Wu
for yeah and those we got from like intros from friends that introduce us to their editors or like yeah does to somebody they knew on the inside so I don't know about you know, trying to write for a Riley or trying to write for I think we actually talked to a Riley we talked

Nadieh Bremer
that was not gonna happen with the coffee table part full color.

Shirley Wu
No, they were very much at least in 2017 they really didn't want to do that. Yeah, I guess um, since we are trying to keep this episode more generally about right Adding a book, I guess, the very first step is pitching a book is already pretty hard. And the biggest way to guarantee success is like being able to be referred by someone. And even then it's really hard.

Ryan Burgess
That was gonna be one of my questions was, as you were talking, I'm like, is it just that easy to go find a publisher? i It sounds like that's a good way to start, though. Why write the book and then hope that you're going to get published? Because then that's a lot of work and effort. But yeah, it sounds like you should somehow figure out how you're connected to go talk to these publishers. It's not like you can just submit a proposal that easily.

Shirley Wu
Yeah, and I think the bigger publishers actually have a portal where you could submit a proposal. And I think there's, we actually at one point, got our hands on like a guideline for like, a proposal of like, I think we didn't have to provide any chapters, but we had to provide like, you know, summary and who we are, who our intended audiences are. You know, how we would mark it,

Nadieh Bremer
the competitors, like, what posts are out there, they're comparable.

Shirley Wu
Yeah, you're right. And then And also, what our audience reach was, we had to write down like our Twitter follower numbers and stuff.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, social media famous, you know, it's cool.

Shirley Wu
I thought that was really weird. But I mean, it makes sense, because we'll probably cover this further down the line. But um, we have to do a lot of our own promotions, we'll cover that further down the line, you don't have to have a chapter ready. But definitely, like one of those proposals, ready to send to the publishers is probably very helpful. And we just wrote one, and we just like sent it to all of the publishers

Ryan Burgess
for sure. Like, right, why reinvent the wheel is I'm sure they're looking for this similar information. It reminded me of a conference, right, like when you're submitting the talk, I mean, sometimes you may have the talk, ready and done. But oftentimes, it's more like, here's the idea. Here's the intended audience. And that kind of resonated with me, where it seemed like very similar, except I don't think I've ever had to explain how I'm going to market it, or my followers on Twitter

Nadieh Bremer
do sometimes have to say like, what is the audience going to learn? And then I sent some of my talks and like, I just hope they get inspired.

Ryan Burgess
When I say about talks, I'm like you because you're, you're putting your own spin on it, right? Like you're, you're telling a story, or you're like, there's probably someone else who's talked about that subject. It's not a brand new subject, but you're putting your spin on it. And I always just want someone to walk away, like inspired or walk away with one little piece of information, or expect the whole 30 minutes or an hour talk to be like, Whoa, I learned so many things. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like, I mean, maybe there's speakers out there that can do that. But I'm like, yeah, it's it's hard. This topic has been covered many times. So yeah, you've got the publisher, which sounds awesome. I mean, only talking to three, you said that was it.

Shirley Wu
So we actually I think talking after talking to three or four, we were like, Okay, I guess this is not in our cards, like I guess like, you know, earlier, I was like Noddy. Let's give it a try. And if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. So we actually were like, nearing giving up. And then what happened was like, I just happened to have dinner with Tamara Munster, who is a professor in Vancouver, and data visualization. And she, she is now the editor of a series of it's called the aka Peters data visualization series, I think. And so we were having dinner. And at the end of the dinner, she was like, she got ready to, like, pitch me about having like writing a book. And then like, little does she know, we have been trying to, like find a publisher. And so it was kind of like that, like fortuitous moment where everything really aligned and and then she like pitched, she likes sold. It's hard. She championed this hard, or her publisher. And she like champion this exactly the way with exactly the book we had in mind of like, half half coffee table have textbook. And that's actually how I think in like late August, and we started talking to her publisher, and that all worked smoothly because she was championing like, because her as the editor of the series champion is so hard, we were able to successfully sign the contract the book, deal contract in, I think, April 2018. Yeah. So it took about a year of searching to, like finalize the contract with a publisher.

Ryan Burgess
Wow. I mean, I love that approach. So to that you both were like, I mean, we'll throw the idea out there. If it's meant to be. It's meant to be if it's not, I mean, no one will pick it up. And you know, we just go about like we tried, right? I love that approach. Yeah. So you have the publisher, that's that's exciting. What does what does the process look like? Like I don't even know how you start. Like, I love that you like, framed it? Here's the idea. Now someone's like, yeah, this sounds like a great Good idea. Now go create it. How do you even start?

Nadieh Bremer
Well, in that sense, we were kind of lucky in the fact that we already had these write ups on our website for each of the, for each of the projects that we've done. And at that point, they weren't all long, because it took us a little bit longer than a year to finish all 24 projects. But they were there. So that was really the basis of each of the chapters. So it was more of a, okay, we have our sort of roughly written thing on online, let's take all of that, you know, offline and make it better, because this is just sort of, how do you see that train of thought kind of in the moment typing, nobody cares about quality, blah, blah, blah. I mean, now we really need to make it into something. So that was, it was instead of having to start with a blank slate, it was so nice to start with a hastily written sometimes really long Lee written I'm a scientist by heart by trade, so I write no. But at least have that as a basis to go from. And then also going back through our free to the projects, we have lots of sort of screenshots that we can use and see Oh, right. That's what I did there. Maybe I can elaborate a little bit in for the book right now. So that was, because that's like 90% of our book. And then the intro, we played around with that a little bit more like what do we want to have in the intro, like maybe in about data sketches, how we got started, we are. And then from another book that at least I really like, I'm not quite sure surely has. It's called generative design. They, they have a how to read this book, which really liked because we also have these different elements. We have lessons, technical lessons, and there's general chapters in the final, like the final screenshot section. So we want to have that. And then from another one of our favorite books called in progress by Jessica Hische. Op. Yes, she has a tool section at the Starbucks, which explains exactly which pen see she uses. And we thought, well, we should have a tools and technology section at the start as well, that explains our sort of tools, which are mostly sort of software based things, although there's an iPad in there as well, with a pen. And that's kind of how it grew. And then for the there was at some point, there was an outro, which at the start was called the that it was so that's kind of how it started. Yeah,

Shirley Wu
yeah. So I think it's that our process is probably pretty different from a lot of other people's process. But I think the similarities is probably that we started with, we started with one kind of like, keeping inventory of what all of our content was, so all of our 24 chapters and then like not, he said, then we kind of figure it fleshed out the all of the surrounding things, the intro, and outro. And actually, even before we did all of that, Nadi, we came up with a chapter design. And because for us for because our book was so design oriented, and has so many like large images and things and like we also had, like noni mentioned earlier, all of those different elements have different lessons and different call outs and gutter notes. And we actually started off as soon as we sign a contract, we actually, we actually sat down and sign up for chapter together. And so that's something that's probably kind of unique to like, I don't think as many like technical books will have this, probably both the content and the design was the very first things that we did as soon as we signed the contract.

Ryan Burgess
That's really cool. Basically, blog posts were your first draft. Yeah, cheers. Oh, jeez. Okay, that's really cool. I like that. And you're right, most people would probably go pen to paper, or like starting to throw ideas back and forth. But I love that it kind of was out there already. And you would have been able to see that. But I also love that you're tightening it up. Because yeah, blog posts is great. If you spelt something wrong or said something a little wrong, you can edit that like on the fly. But when it's in a book printed, the bar is so much higher, there's no going back. And it's also the fact that blog posts generally

Nadieh Bremer
at least what we do it was it's all free, you know, free on the web, and you want to make certain that if people want to spend money to get the book, it's really worth it and that you've really put in that effort to make it a plus.

Ryan Burgess
It's really cool. So you both have highlighted clearly there's the two of you writing this book, and then there's publishers, who else is involved there, there must be people editing or looking at those drafts. Cheers.

Shirley Wu
Cheers. Maybe the better question is who is not involved.

Ryan Burgess
That's awesome. You know what, I'll make that easy I was not involved in

Shirley Wu
for which we are very sad about Ryan. But actually, I think if we kind of categorize the bookmaking process into two big phases, the first being kind of like, when we're, it's very interesting because I kind of think of this as when we get paid our advance, like our advances. So like when we signed the contract, we get paid in advance. And then when we turn in the manuscript, we get paid in advance. And I think of it as like, the first part is that like, really, it's like so free that it's problematic of like, where it's that first phase is all about writing and delivering that manuscript. And that's what Nadia described earlier of like, when we went and figure it out all of the layouts, and figured out all of the content. And that is that first phase of figuring out what should be in our manuscripts, like what should be in our deliverable. And in that phase, nobody was involved. It would just be in it just like spinning in circles, trying to figure out what would be the best thing for our, our draft, and ooh, cheers, yes. And then the second phase is when that manuscript gets delivered. And that's when the publisher takes it over. And they turn it into, like, they lay out everything. Like they, they take the Google Docs that we gave them, and the images, the screenshot images that we gave them in a folder, and they lay out the book, and then, and then there's a whole big process there, where the publisher is very involved, but maybe we can just like, talk about this first phase a little bit more, which is one of the things I was very surprised about is I don't know about I think for a lot of publishers, they don't actually do any editing. Other than, like, copy, like, other than this is I don't, I feel like this was a really big surprise for us. 90, right. Like, they only do editing in the sense of like, they checked that, you know, periods are put in the right places that things are like capitalized in the right places. We thought we were gonna get like, an editing support for the content. And we didn't. Um, so yeah,

Ryan Burgess
so we did it ourselves. Wow. Yeah. I honestly, I definitely thought that that was part of it. Like, so you you got full creative control, like that was on on both of you.

Nadieh Bremer
Yeah. In terms of write the writing? Yes, definitely. And when we signed the contract that was definitely discussed what our ideas was, and even also, we also involve a lawyer during the contract phase, because it was so new to us that we wanted to have help in that section. So that was the first person that sort of got involved. That's publisher. Yeah. And then a long time of nothing where we could write. Really, yeah, basically anything, the the only thing where they were kind of hounding us a little bit with image, permission, oh, we made sure that we weren't including any images that had content that can be included, or at least to have a really, they were very strict on what was most was not allowed, and basically, or had to be blurred out or just removed or so that was, that was a part but the writing? I feel like we could have written almost anything would have done with that. But, uh, it was yes, I think I think it's important. I had a gutter note that said something like, damn, I don't want to do this again. And I think she took up the dam. That was about it. I think I put it back in.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, I liked the creative control. I mean, that's like, that's great. But I also think that first process is probably so difficult, because you're managing your time. And yeah, verbal is literally like, just send us the manuscript, which that's a lot of work to get to. So it probably took a lot of, you know, a little bit on both of you holding each other accountable.

Shirley Wu
Definitely, mostly naughty, holding me accountable. Because 90 is like she is very on top of her things. And I think that that might be something that's really surprising for, like, first time authors of, I think, if I were to, like, you know, through this episode, be like, these are the things to, like, keep an eye out for. And one thing is like the deadline, it's a soft deadline, like the publisher, most publishers will be like, yeah, like, as long as you hand it to us someday, like, you know, it's fine. And so you have to be really self motivated. And the second thing is like, um, you have to make sure yourself that it's edited well, because they won't check for, like, surprisingly, it's not just with our publisher, we actually have heard it from, like other authors that have gone with and gotten their book published is They will just publish what you write. So if you have bad grammar, if you have like code that's wrong, like hosts limits that are wrong, I had heard one horror story with where one author was telling me that for his first very first book, he has like such a low rating, because he thought that the publisher will take care of like making sure that the code runs correctly and making sure that like everything was edited correctly, and they didn't they just like printed his manuscript as it was turned in. So then he just his book just has all these bad ratings, so that that'd be the second like, whatever you write is what they'll publish.

Nadieh Bremer
Yes. I mean, if you think you're handing in a draft, it's actually your it's really the final.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, wow. Yeah, that's, that's a lot of pressure just there. I'm like, I had anxiety. I'm like, yeah, like, I mean, we make mistakes on code all the time. And it's like, usually, the beauty of things like on the web, or even software in general, is usually you can patch it. Yeah, that's not really possible. It's just, it's hard to do.

Nadieh Bremer
Yeah, you need to arrange that yourself. So if you want to have technical readers in case you read our highly technical book, I think we saw like, very shortly discuss that with our publisher, it's like, you need to reach out to them yourself. And even in the end, Shirley was, I'm really happy that she did that. But we were very close to the deadline, she was like, we need to have each chapter read by at least two of our friends to make sure that we don't like nothing is weird in there that we really need to fix. So this was something we did in the last three weeks before our, I don't know, like seven, shifted deadline to get to. And we so we did that we we reached out to like 2430 people, friends, people that we knew, and we asked them, can you you please do us a favor, read this one chapter and tell us if anything is we need to fix just as a final like, you don't need to do spelling stuff is just Is this okay? Or do I need to do is change stuff. So that's also something we had to arrange ourselves?

Shirley Wu
Yeah, the stress and anxiety of a one star review was real.

Ryan Burgess
I believe that I mean, as much as it's cool to say I have a book published, you don't want it to be like, you want people to enjoy it. Right? Like that's the whole point is, you want people to actually take away something It's same as what we were talking about. In giving a conference talk. It's like you want someone to take away some inspiration or be excited not to go, Wow, this was a waste of my time reading this, like, that's not fun. Yeah. I'd be curious to is like when I think of, you know, writing a book, I mean, you could likely just go write a book and publish it yourself. But you all went with a publisher? What do you know much of the difference? Or did you all talk about that? Like, what are some of the pros and cons between publishing or or like going with a publisher or self publishing,

Nadieh Bremer
we definitely look into self publishing. But I think she really looked into it much even more than I did. So I think she's, she's much more qualified.

Shirley Wu
So I guess for self publishing. The first part, that first phase of like writing the manuscript, like writing the draft cheers, is pretty much the same between like publisher and self publishing, right. But that second phase is like where it's so important, because with our publisher, what happened was, they provided a vendor that laid out our book that did the cover, we unfortunately weren't a big, the biggest fan of either of those. So then we actually went and hired my studio mate and friend, Alice, for the cover Alice Lee for the cover. And then we actually hired a design firm, called pre lean in UK to do the inside. But traditionally, the publisher will do the cover, and they'll do the design layout of the inside. And then once that's ready, they will like hand it off to the printers and they'll take care of the distribution. At the same time. They also have salespeople going around, depending on the size of your publisher, they'll have like, all of those salespeople will have connections at like, you know, either like major book retailers. So I think the biggest difference between the self publishing and the publisher is there connections as distributors, their their sales connections, because I think as a self publisher, it'd be really hard for us to, for example, get our book on the bookshelves of I don't know Barnes and Nobles, or what is is that the only like, book store chain left?

Ryan Burgess
I think there's a smaller book. Yes. But yeah, I don't know about a big one. I'm one of the biggest

Shirley Wu
yeah, like I I'm a fan of indie bookstores, but I was trying to think of like a big bookstore chain. And but yeah, so though, because it's really hard to get your book into a bookstore and for ours, for our publisher, they're an academic publisher. So then they will have sales people that would try and get our book into the university bookstores etc. And I will say that Probably the biggest difference between self publishing and a publisher. Other than that, I think self publishing, obviously, you have a lot more control, you get to pick like, Who does your editing? Who does your design, who does your layout, who's your printer, who's your distributor, etc. And I've heard that these days, it's really easy to just like distribute your book on Amazon. But for us, we decided to kind of like, keep to our publisher, because we realized we did not know what we did not know about publishing. And so we thought that for our very first book, it'd be better to work with a publisher, learn from them, like what the process is, so that if there's ever a second look, we could consider self publishing, and we will be the wiser for it.

Ryan Burgess
I like that I, you know, I'm always a fan too, is I mean, it's like even why we get hired, right? You hire people who know what they're doing. And even to that point, these people have learned how to do it, they've done it time and time again, and hopefully will prevent you from making mistakes. Like if you did it on your own, you were going to make mistakes, because you're just learning as you go. Versus like, someone who's done it before hopefully can say like, I've learned all these mistakes, and now I'm going to prevent you from making those same mistakes. Well, I love that I think that that's a huge benefit is being able to learn from others.

Shirley Wu
Yeah, definitely. And I think I'm really grateful for the distribution channel, because I think we have like people from all over the world that are like, able to order the book of like, I see people from like, you know, Singapore ordering, I see people from like Brazil, ordering from like India ordering, like places that I don't think if we had self published, I think it would have been a logistical nightmare for us to figure out how to get our book to them. And actually, this exposes the fact that we didn't even know we had people that wanted our book in those places.

Nadieh Bremer
I think it's, it's interesting that we did actually we did a lot ourselves on this book, we mean, the writing, of course, but also hiring the editors, we we hired the person to do the front cover. And eventually, even though first the inside design was done by the publisher, or through through a company from the publisher, when we didn't like them enough, we looked up for our own company. And then we like what we were in direct contact with, with the new design he that we chose and we with with them, we went through our sort of our actual design phase. So we did basically like all of that stuff until handing in that final, the final documents to the printer basically. So the publisher really only did the the printing and the distribution, but that both of those things. I mean, they they helped us a lot. I mean, that's that's to generalizing, but I mean, just that part of the printing, and publishing, I think is, is already valuable enough because we didn't really realize this, but they happen to be a giant publisher, like the mother company is a big, big publisher. And yeah, and suddenly we can be our book can be found in all over the world, even even small, smaller, like National bookstores. Have them and that we yeah, we could have never done that.

Shirley Wu
Yeah, and and I think we're highlighting this because I think up until the distribution part, we were really jaded about the publishing industry. We're like, why are we doing like all of the work like literally the second phase where the publisher is supposed to do it, we were so picky about the design, that we ended up taking it upon ourselves, like, obviously, not everybody has to do this. I think a lot of people are like, they're fine with the way that their publisher lays out their book. But we were so picky about our own design that we were like, we needed to take full control over everything. And so up until the point where we handed in our like, this is in our phase two, when we handed in the final print files to the printer. We were like why? Why do we even go with the publisher. And then as soon as we started getting like tweets from people that like bought from all around the world, we were like, Okay, so this is, this is what makes it worth it. So I think that's like up to everybody and their own journey of figuring out like if they want to go with a publisher or self publish, but know that if you go with a publisher, you're probably doing 90% of the work even now, like our promotions are we're doing like we're doing a lot of self promotion. But that distribution network, um, if you go with a good publisher is really worth the ginormous role. It's royalty cut that they take from you. You're not You're not gonna make much money.

Ryan Burgess
No, and I mean, I think I alluded to that even at the start of the episode that yeah, we know that that's not super lucrative because you are taking you know, people are taking a cut. You know, you also said about when they were evaluating in the pitch part of it needing to promote and how are you going to promote and market this? How much are you held accountable to that now, right, or is it just more like you're gonna do better if you sell more than you get more royalties, like is there a amount that you have to promote?

Nadieh Bremer
No, no, I think, I don't know for sure if they would have a call this on anything because both of us really want this book to be successful, we were definitely driven to give it our all and promote it. So there was not a moment where I felt a publisher felt like we weren't doing enough, but they never called us out on having to do anything, they did come with a lot of tips, like maybe you can do this, or maybe you can have a book event, of course, then the pandemic came and things change. But still, I never felt pressured into or held accountable for things we said in our initial sort of pitch draft. I'm not saying that that would be the case for all publishers, I do have to admit that we had like, there's one editor that came on during the second half, but that that half was really the part where we were in direct lots of contact with our editor. And he has been the most amazing helper ever, even though we might be saying that a publisher isn't as as a whole, like we did a lot and the publisher is less, but he, he asked that one person did so much to help us out even in like in the smaller things.

Shirley Wu
Yes, the editor representing our publisher, sorry, because we did have independent editors also in the first phase. Sorry, yes, definitely. And I think that, I think because our publisher is bigger, if you think about it, from a publisher's perspective, if one of their books like flops, like that's not a big loss to them, right. But like, as an author, if one of our like if our first book flops like that reflects really poorly on that. So it's like, it's very much, I think it's very much like a self motivated, like, we like we are motivated to promote our own book. Because yeah, for a publisher, like most people don't even know who publishes what books. So then, you know, if they, like, I think they're doing a really great job on the sales point, and I'm perspective, but I think the promotion in this day and age with social media, most if not all, publishers expects you to self promote. I think partially they are driven by that when they sign a contract, I think they do consider the potential audience and reach of an author when when they initially sign a contract.

Ryan Burgess
Oh, it's really cool. And I'm curious now that the book is out and going, you're promoting it? When's book number two coming out? Are you are you both excited to do a second book? Or is it like, not right now? Way too early.

Nadieh Bremer
We're not even we're not even like fully out of the gate with this book in terms of having to do the marketing and having doing the social media stuff. So I need like a low I need a break. That's at least as long as it took to get this

Shirley Wu
started. Yeah. Which I think it was really funny. Because we had gotten a question during our launch event of what was your favorite part of making this book, and both of us looked at each other, we were like, none. This was our favorite. And but I think, I think what has been really is, I think getting the book, being able to hold it like in our hands, like being able to see this like physical artifact, it's really awesome. And then I think, then the following is like, getting all of these responses from people, like, I've gotten, like, you know, friends that like, don't even really know what I do, like telling me that this book is really cool. I've had like x clients buy it, which is super cool. And like, and they're like, Oh, I'm reading it and love this chapter or like, and just all of the people online that are buying it and like, like sending us pictures and how they're like incorporating into their morning routines. I think that's what makes it all really worth it. And actual book Making. I think, I think I'm gonna ride the wave of this book for a few years before you're ready to write a second one. Yeah,

Ryan Burgess
that's great. Um, you know, before we jump into pics, I would be curious to, if you were to leave one piece of advice for someone who's listening, being like, you know what I should do? Write a book, what's your one piece of advice,

Shirley Wu
when everybody tells you that it's gonna be really hard, and you're like, Ah, I know, it's gonna be really hard. And when everybody tells you that, it's gonna be really hard, and you're not gonna be making that much money. And you're like, hey, yeah, I understand. However much you think it's going to be hard to depend like, because of what everybody else has told. You. Just multiply that by 100. And that's about how so I think go into it. Not thinking too hard about it. Like don't Don't think too hard about how hard it is, but be prepared for how hard it is. It's a lot of work. It was it was a lot of work. I don't know how I was going to do it by myself. I'm glad nobody was there.

Nadieh Bremer
For me, dude. It was it's just so nice to have that other person. And you can say like, surely this is normal. Unlike or you know, it's like this is not okay. Right? Or this is okay. Or this is what to expect? Or if you think that maybe we should get a different cover, maybe. Yeah, those things

Shirley Wu
person. And I think that I guess, to that point, I think a lot of us are very technical. And maybe we don't have as much of like a business background. But I think throughout this whole process, and I think the business, negotiate the negotiations, and not only the contract, but like fighting for what you want out of the book was really important, just because I think publishers, not all publishers have your books, best interests at heart, we were lucky that our editor was really great, and had our books, best interests at heart. But you really have to fight for your own book. And a lot of that comes with, like, negotiating for what you want. And so I think, if you don't feel comfortable with the negotiations part yourself, I think investing in a lawyer is is a good, yeah, good money spent.

Ryan Burgess
That makes sense. I think it's always good. That goes back to having the experts help you, right? Yeah, it's always good. All right, well, in each episode of the front end, happier podcast, we'd like to choose picks of things that we found interesting. It could be books, TV, shows, music, whatever it is, and we'd like to share it with you all. And hopefully you find it interesting, surely, what do you have share this episode?

Shirley Wu
Ooh, this is very self promoting. But um, I actually chose the data sketches book launch. I promised and promised I don't do too many self promotions in the pics. But this one is from when we launched the book, February 9, it's on YouTube. And it will be linked down below or in the show notes. And it's it was really fun, where Nadia and I just kind of talked about, talked about the book. And we brought on both Alberto and Tamara, who we mentioned earlier that were like very integral to making the book. And then it's just a fun celebration. So if you are interested in our book, I know we covered a lot of the book making process. But if you're interested in actually the content of the book, and please check out our book launch live stream. That's the first one. And the second one is I have this band named Lola tone, like Lullaby and tone together. I am such a fan of their music. It's like very chill, very fun to like, work to it's also the music that I use in my Twitch streams. Because there's such a cool, it's like a husband and wife duo in Japan. They're so chill. And when I like emailed them to like license their music, there was so nice, I'm such a fan, please check out the music.

Ryan Burgess
Awesome. Nadi, what do you have for pics to share? Ah,

Nadieh Bremer
I always say maybe, well, I don't want to do another David sketches thing there. But you should check out the data sketch that he has website. Because you could actually see a sample chapter there. And we also have some of our All right upstairs that he's like the unedited ones, the original ones, they're still there, you can see all of the projects, like in their final state in their interactive versions. But I would say maybe check out the Fab Academy what that actually is, and how it could be a nice thing to just be completely do something totally different and expanding horizons on the things that you know, because I think people listening our viewing are the kind of people that do a lot with computers and design with computers in different ways from programming to graphics. And I like how the Fab Academy takes that basis of still being designing on the computer, but then making it a reality like making it physical and learning how to do that. I think that's at least the reason why I why I was so drawn to it. So maybe other people might want to look into that as well if they want to just you know have have six months of doing something completely different. And my other pick would be the recently I've actually got gotten really into you listening to ambient chill when when working. And I forgot the name but I know that there was this this is a person that I listened to who has sort of made a hand sort of envision over the sounds of space like what it would be like to travel towards a black hole. I think that's a full album of ambient ambient noise that I really dig but I need to look that back up again. Right now I'm just listening to ambient chill on Spotify. But it's it really helps me just instead of having complete silence of my work at home, it's just a sort of, it's not white noise I I like it more than white noise because it's sort of the the kind of sweet melody that's still in there. So

Ryan Burgess
that's really cool. I have two picks, and I made sure to have one that's book related. My first pick, though, is not in a documentary series on Netflix, a biggie documentary, which is called Biggie, I got a story to tell it's it just came out recently, it's really good. Really cool to see some of the behind the scenes like they had old footage that with Biggie and it was really cool to see it's a great in depth of his story, I highly recommend it. And then the book choice is everybody matters, which is a great book for leaders, I guess that's everybody matters, the extraordinary power of caring for your people like family. And it's a really good book to just like make you think about how you how you to operate as a leader and thinking about everyone as humans and you know how to interact. And I think there's some really great insights in that it was a while ago that I read it, but I figured it was a good one to share. Before we end the episode, I want to thank Nadi, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story, the big endeavor that you in surely took on work and people get in touch with you.

Nadieh Bremer
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me and inviting me. Yeah, so people can find me on visual cinnamon calm. Because my first name was kind of hard to spell. I meant for something a little more easy. But then again, on Twitter, I'm at nadie, Bramer and also on Instagram and that's an A D, i e, H Brayman. Whatever, you can find it. there and that's, yeah, that's where that's where I'm found online.

Ryan Burgess
Right on. Well, thank you so much. And you can find us on Twitter at front end. Ah, you can subscribe to front end Happy Hour on whatever you like to listen to podcasts on or go to front end. happier.com. Any last words?

Shirley Wu
Yes.

Ryan Burgess
Cheers. Book number two. So tired