Tag Archives: Philippa Dewey

Content

Updates to Content Master and Helpsite (and launch of Now What?)

now-what_together-we-pass-paperight_cover_low-res_20130228Once we’d received student feedback on Now What?, Nick began the process of editing and typesetting the book. We paid Paul Carter for his writing work, and made some last minute updates of our own. By the end of the month, we’d finalised the design of the book, uploaded it to Paperight, and launched it on the Together We Pass network.

Throughout this process we continued to work with Mampoer to get high-res covers for their titles, as well as with publishers, like PUO, P-Ridge Press, College Campus, and Hesperian, following their registration. I created a mock-up for Future Managers to show them what their books would look like in Paperight’s format. We met with Dylan Wray of Shikaya about finding a way to work together (we greatly admire the work that they’re doing, but couldn’t find a shared purpose in our current contexts) with Nelleke of NB Publishers to catch her up on progress with Paperight, and signed a contract with New Africa Books.

Plans for London Book Fair were well under way. We continued to work alongside PASA to get sponsorship for Oscar to join me at the fair, and I began researching attendees and sending out meeting requests.

We had previously been working with offline spreadsheets, but found the updating and version control to have become difficult to manage with a growing team. A Google Spreadsheet provided more piece of mind that the sheet was current, and there was less opportunity for confusion.

Philippa began working on the first draft of the new helpsite pages, and then we later went on to edit, upload and add screenshots to these posts. In the meantime, I revised the Content Master spreadsheet (metadata repository), and loaded this as a shared resource on Google Docs. We had previously been working with offline spreadsheets, but found the updating and version control to have become difficult to manage with a growing team. A Google Spreadsheet provided more piece of mind that the sheet was current, and there was less opportunity for confusion.

Publisher registrations

  • Hesperian (12/2/2013)
  • Bright Girl Books (19/2/2013)
  • AOTA Press (20/2/2013)
Tech

Lessons learned from updating the help site

I began updating the help site early in 2013. In order to make using the site easier for our copy shops, I created a few videos demonstrating how to sign up; how to top-up their credits; how to download a document etc. I then updated the written help posts to reflect some changes that had been made to the user interface. This was a great way for me to learn about how the site works and to understand some of the difficulties copy shops might have with it.

Going through this process definitely helped me handle customer queries more adeptly. I began to realise that most of the copy shops who were using our site had only a basic understanding of how to use websites. We may have thought we were making everything as straightforward as possible, but still we would get calls asking us the most basic things. It made me think how important it is to understand who is going to be using your website, and what their technological understanding is.

Relying on copy shops to be our bookstores and expecting them to be able to work the site was perhaps one of our biggest mistakes/learning curves. In my mind, one of the best things about being a small start up is the kind of customer service and attention to detail you can afford to give. However, on this model, we were not able to give that kind of service because we relied on copy shops to do this. This resulted in a few distressing phone calls from customers that had been turned away from a registered copy shop who said they “didn’t print books” even though we had been through the process with the shops on the phone. We expected that copyshops would be excited about Paperight as it offers them a way of increasing their printing load, which is how they make their money. However, the relative difficulty of using the site (i.e. they had to learn something new) combined with bad customer service meant that we lost quite a few potential customers.

Content

Creating more of our own content

One of the great results of the book fair was insight into how other South African publishing-related startups operate behind the scenes. I spent much of my time at the fair with the Snapplify crew, and discovered that they use Base as a CRM tool.  On my return from the fair, I started using Base to track publisher follow-ups. There was some initial set-up work required: I had to migrate my contacts database and conversation histories from the wiki and email, but it made tracking follow ups much easier. On going follow-ups with very long lead times on actions (especially when waiting on a publisher’s in house legal team, for example) could be put on the backburner, without the risk of having these fall through the cracks.

I spent most of the month following up on new and existing relationships, particularly with Random House Struik, and Nali’Bali/Praesa. In ongoing content work, I briefed Nick on covers for GetSmarter and e-Classroom material, and continued to work on the processing of those files. Philippa started at Paperight on the 19th of November, so I also managed her training and induction.

The idea was that an anthology would be a great way to raise awareness about Paperight among learners, and would help us build useful relationships with teachers which we could build off of to increase sales of supplementary study material.

November 2013 was also the month we decided to run with the idea of the Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology. We came up with the concept while we were deciding that it might be good for us to start creating our own content for Paperight. The matric exam packs, our other main project of content creation was selling well, and publishers were signing agreements slower than we needed for a fast growth in sales. The idea was that an anthology would be a great way to raise awareness about Paperight among learners, and would help us build useful relationships with teachers which we could build off of to increase sales of supplementary study material. I had a meeting with Biblionef, about their database of schools. We were hoping that we could make use of this to inform schools about the Paperight Young Writers’ Anthology. As it turned out, their database was completely offline, and would have proved complicated and time consuming to sift through. Instead, Oscar drew together a database from scratch, using online resources.

Publisher registrations

  • Osiame Molefe (19/11/2012)
  • Fiona Ingram (22/11/2012)
  • Random House Struik (22/11/2012)