Reasons to use Trello as a publisher

1. Freedom of placement. We have people in different locations and countries and some working from home some days etc. and therefore the paper archive had it’s limitations.
2. It’s free. We choose Trello for our online system, since it’s free part was important in the beginning, so we could test without costs.
3. Easy-to-use has proven to be more important than first anticipated, since we constantly need to involve new people (and even though they are ‘new’, doesn’t mean they are young and easy adapters).
4. Easy-on-the-eyes sounds like a superficial thing, but it turns out that many archive/update tasks will not be carried out, since we are busy and will rather prioritize something more rewarding. So when the system is easy-on-the-eyes (or fun) it dramatically helps people to do it. Just placing a check mark in a box is fun — more fun than writing ‘ok’ somewhere in an Excel spread sheet field no one else sees. There’s a whole science on motivational incentives / behavior called gamification.

How Trello works

Trello consists of boards. A board is a project – or a department. The basis layout is 3 lists (columns): ToDo, Doing and Done. Then a task is created as a card in the ToDo list and when started, it’s moved to the ‘doing-list’ and then to the ‘done-list’. Easy to understand. Each member will have a profile picture that can be placed on a card, to indicate that they have something to do here.  Besides the involved members, under each card you can have descriptions, check lists, attached files and much more.

How we use Trello at Scandinavia

To begin with, we just choose an area – product development – and created a board for that. When we started listing all the projects we had going on – and ideas in our heads/notepads, we were quite surprised. There was a lot. Even though we can’t go into all projects at once, it’s still nice to get the ideas out of your head and into a system where they can be tested and either grow or be properly terminated.

Here is the current board “Product development” where card are moved through different stages from idea to printing.

Hope you will also find Trello helpful.

The post How to get your publishing organized with Trello appeared first on Sph.as.

We have been using this service for some years now and have gathered some experience, that we are now sharing with you. So, here is a few suggestions / advice when using 99designs.com

1. Get the brief right from the start

When creating a contest on 99designs, you create a brief (that’s the name they have given the job description). Here you describe what you want and upload pictures for inspiration or use in the design.

I usually count on using 2 hours to do the brief, since the time spend here is saved many times later on. The first few times I ran contests on 99designs, I did the description somewhat fast and with a lot of internal terms and in general the explanation was too flawed. A few hours after I started the contest, the designers started asking questions and I had to explain what I actually meant. So i learned that I could probably set up a contest for a new cover design in 10 minutes, but that would mean that I needed to spend a lot of time later on post-developing the brief / explaining and furthermore. Furthermore, the designers might not even participate if they didn’t get the idea from the first look at the contest.

2. Feedback trumps price

This is quite a claim, but in my experience, you can get quite good results with a low priced contest, if you just give fast and constructive feedback to the designers that submit designs or ask questions. If the contest is made open (opposed to a closed contest), designers can see each others designs + feedback and learn from them / get inspired. This is good for the contest holder (CH) since you can then guide all designers with feedback to one.

3. Don’t ask for too much

After a few successful contests, I started to add elements to include in the final package, for the winning design. I demanded that the winner would deliver several different files and so on. But that backfired! The result was that only the desperate amateur designers with lots of time on their hands participated and I ended up cancelling 2 contests in a row, before returning to a more realistic expectation of the outcome. So, what I learned from this is that 99designs is about getting the right design (almost on the idea basis) – and first after that is in place, you can ask the designer to do different versions, 3D cover images etc.

The post 3 tips to get cheaper and better cover designs with 99designs appeared first on Sph.as.

To get more bang for the buck (‘buck’ is time in this case), we can outsource. One easy-to-use online service is Fiverr.com. Here you can hire people to do something within their expertise – prices starting at $5.

Tasks we have successfully outsource to Fiverr:

1. Webdesign. Landing page or poster. For example this Power Point / Key note poster to fit into a marketing slide show. I send the text and some guidelines and got this back within a day.

2. Webprogramming. Wordpress or other common platforms are well represented here. I have fixed a ton of website errors this way.

A free online tool here is the Awesome Screenshot extension to the Chrome browser. This little tool let’s you choose an area of your screen to make a screen shot of and then you can make arrows etc. to explain something. When you’re ready, you click and get a link to that picture that is now accessible online. With most other screen shot tools you need first to save the image on your harddisk and from there upload to your Fiverr message. With the Awesome Screenshot you just send a link along your text and voila, visual explanation made easy!

An example could look like this:

3. Vector graphics and image recreation. We did some biblical maps this way. Send the scanning / photo to a graphic designer on Fiverr, who then vectorizes the whole thing and make all text editable (and sharp).

Auditions – testing to find the right people

Not all people on Fiverr will deliver top quality as promised. But don’t be discouraged if your first encounter is not fantastic.

You need to find those who really lifts you up to a higher level in your work and you are on the same page with. And like any other hiring, we need to set aside some time for it to work out. But once we have good people, it’s such a blessing – and a time saving one as well. So, like with the Pareto principle, the time used in preparing is given back many times in the outcome.

One efficient way to find the good people is to make an audition – send the same task to 5-10 people and see who’s best. This is possible since the cost is only $5 per nose. And once the task is prepared and described for one possible supplier at Fiverr, it’s easily copied to others. Then you spend some time back and forth afterwards and most likely end up with one or more long term contacts that will be able to proform a certain task for you for many years ahead.

The downside to fiverr

1. Upfront investment of time. As mentioned earlier, it takes time to find the right people – and this often make us postpone these kind of platforms for too long – we just don’t feel like we have the time.
2. You can only communicate via Fiverr. When using Fiverr, it becomes clear that the admin is extremely focused at keeting all trafic (and payments) betweek the parties on the Fiverr platform. It’s not allowed to exchange e-mail addresses or Skype accounts, which would actually be very helpful at times.
3. High admin fee. Furthermore, the gig-owner (the one who offers the service) actually only gets $4 of the $5 – so that’s a 20% fee and a quite high one. From a buyer standpoint that’s irrelevant though – if people want to offer, that’s their issue.

The post 3 tasks to outsource to Fiverr.com appeared first on Sph.as.

At Scandinavia Publishing House we have especially used 3 online tools to improve our product development and made it cheaper.

99designs.com

At www.99designs.com you can create a contest and have graphic designers from all over the world bring their proposal to the table. This means that you are no longer dependent on a single internal or external designer to hit the perfect cover design within a reasonable time frame. Now you can describe what you want, post it and have multiple people submit their entry that you can then evaluate and give feedback on. Within 7 days you’ll have a great design for sure. The price for one project (a cover design for instance) starts at US $299.

Before we had outsourcing to scale our business – we now have crowdsourcing. Let the crowd do the work. They learn from the debate or each other, they are cheap and you only have to pay the one you like the best – and none if you don’t like any.

See an example of how we used 99designs.com at Scandinavia: Link

Fiverr.com

At fiverr.com more than 3 million people are offering their expertise for the simple price of $5. Well, that’s where the services starts – often you pay more when you want additional services made, but it’s still in the cheap end. We use this service quite a lot. In fact I like to have one fiverr job going on every day – gives me the feeling that I get something done, without doing it myself. Also, i need to wrap my head around an idea and send it off – all the time – and that’s a great exercise. The fact that I don’t need to do the actual writing, programming or design myself makes it manageable. Then I can focus on planning and giving feedback.

See an example of how we used fiverr.com at Scandinavia: Link

Trello.com

This is also a great online tool, although completely different from the two above. Trello is really just an online todo list – with the possibility to become an easy-to-learn project management program. When you first create a profile, your first ‘board’ is created. On this board you have 3 lists: ToDo, Doing and Done. You can then create tasks (called cards) in the ToDo list and move them to Doing and Done once you complete the cards task. See a short introduction video here: Link.

We now use Trello to manage our product development, production, order flow, employee goal setting and a lot of other projects. It has given us a better control of the details and the big picture at the same time.

See an example of how we used trello.com at Scandinavia: Link

The post 3 online tools to do better, cheaper and faster product development in publishing appeared first on Sph.as.