🤔 What Comes Next?
What's coming next week and if you're new here why you should stay.
👋 Welcome to the 90 new subscribers!
You might wonder what you’re doing here?
So first a bit of transparency, I’ve imported my lists from Medium and Microcosm to kick-start this design/writing community.
In the past, you’ve opted in before to get emails from me, but not strictly speaking this newsletter. Don’t hate me I did for your own good, maybe, see below.👇
Should you stay?
Every month, I’ll use design thinking to help you improve your Reader Experience.
I’ll share:
How to be more reader-centric for deeper stories
Which tools and templates I use to produce more fiction daily
Experiments I’ve done on the future-tech fringes to see what’s worth it
Interviews with “normie” writers like us to learn from people with similar challenges and novel solutions.
If that’s not exciting, please hit the unsubscribe button at the bottom.
No harm done, it was good to have you, however, briefly. 😊
Now, if you are excited (even just a little), let’s continue with a slightly longer introduction.
🥁 Introducing:
The Reader Experience
The reader experience is a variation on user experience.
It focuses on how the written word and the stories we tell are discovered, consumed and ideally enjoyed by our readers. And most importantly how we can influence that experience for our benefit.
I’ll show you how to apply design methods used by the biggest and most successful design-led organisations in the world.
Companies like:
Why should I be your guide in this writer’s journey?
I'm an award-winning service designer and creative technologist with nearly 20 years of broad design experience, from graphic to visual to user and service design.
I’ve worked for massive global consultancies like Accenture and for non-profits solving massive problems in resource constrained African hospitals.
And everything in between, including freelancing and running my own tiny agency while being a digital nomad before it was cool (or wise).
I’ve also spent over a decade learning the art of writing and trying to succeed online making plenty of mistakes most of them process, focus and mindset.
You know, fixable things.
That’s the last time I’ll talk CV.
I hate doing it, but psychology says we need to hear up front.
How might a designer help a writer?
Visual Design / Making things pretty
DIY Book cover design with AI and other free tools, including all the shortcuts, recipes and prompts so you don’t have to bang your head like I did.
Author branding for a consistent image across channels, you might notice all my online properties changing to Black, White and Purple soon. I’ll share exactly what, how and why.
UX Design / Making things work
Deeper more focused understanding of your readers and their journey to your stories. To find those points of friction that are hurting your numbers.
I’ll keep this light, because it can get very in-depth. Just enough to see how it matches things you already know like creating characters and the old classic the Hero’s Journey.
Creative Technology / Playing with digital Legos
Writer-centric productivity tools and templates based in Notion, I’m on the road to becoming certified here and will share what I’m building to speed up my own writing.
In a nutshell
The Reader Experience is about helping us shift our thinking to how the reader experiences our work. Discovery, consumption, enjoyment and sharing.
What gets in their way, and how we can remove it.
How we can make our stories more relevant, resonant and discoverable by seeing from their perspective, and walking a couple miles in their shoes.
Also how we can differentiate ourselves from the noisy ocean of other writers swimming with the current.
The Reader Experience is also unavoidably meta
You’re all writers and readers too. Readers of fiction, non-fiction and this newsletter. (You’re still here right?)
My examples and explanations will use this audience.
I’ll share my reader persona of you and how I made it, continue to enhance it and most importantly use it to focus limited resources on delivering the highest value.
What to keep and what to cut. And why.
Making it a lot clearer as you’re on the inside with me.
And your participation is very much encouraged.
Every comment and question will be fed back into this persona improve its focus, like the lens of a DLSR. Focusing in on what you need most to thrive and enjoy your writing more. Both from trying new things and from getting new results.
Because doing the same thing and getting no results is no fun and it’s exhausting.
Next week
August starts with a design intro:
What’s User Experience Design and how will we use it to redesign our fiction?
👋 Participation Time
What’s your biggest frustration as a time-pressed modern writer in an overly digital and increasingly connected but isolated world?
Let me know in the comments.
I’ll go first.
One more thing, if you’re a Microcosm writer heres tomorrow’s prompt today.
"What’s your biggest frustration as a time-pressed modern writer in an overly digital and increasingly connected but isolated world?"
I said I'll go first 🙂
For me it’s distraction, I pinball around the internet at the slightest invitation from something shiny.
The very tool I use to get my work done is also the source of 99% of my distraction. I’ve tried working analogue, on paper, but it often adds more mess and noise rather helping much.
I’ve tried blockers, lock out apps, and timers. Nearly everything. But I’m finding the only way to actual focus is to build the muscle slowly.