‘I didn’t just want to do a sort of ‘me-too’ series just for the sake of it. I wanted to have a series concept that I could really get excited about and which would stand out in quite a crowded marketplace as offering something different.’
This week, we’re flipping the script a bit. Normally, I’d be bringing you an engaging conversation with a business book author, but this week we’re exploring an origin story—one that gives you an insight into the inner workings of publishing as an industry and an individual publisher’s mind.
A successful book series is the closest thing we have to magic in publishing magic. But how do you go about finding the right concept in a crowded marketplace? Here’s how our new 6-Minute Smarts series came about, from a series of conversations at Frankfurt to a 30,000-foot exploratory writing sprint to launch.
Whether you’re a reader, an aspiring author, or simply curious about the publishing world, this episode offers insights and inspiration that you won’t want to miss.
6-Minute Smarts series page: https://practicalinspiration.com/6-minute-smarts
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
This week it’s a rough different episode than the usual conversation with a business book author. This is an origin story, of a sort, and an insight into a publisher’s mind if you’re here for that; this week, I’m going to tell you a story about a series.
So. All books, of course, have stories behind them. That is one of the most wonderful things about this podcast: you get to listen in to the author telling you about how the book came about and their own journey of inspiration, dejection, overwhelm, breakthrough, unexpectedness, and ultimately the satisfaction of getting a new book out there into the world and, and seeing what it does.
But it’s not often that you hear about a series rather than an individual book. The only episode that I can think of is my conversation with Miranda West years ago now. Miranda commissioned the DO book series. If you haven’t heard that one, it’s really worth a listen. So this week I’m doing two things: I’m putting together a really short podcast as a Mother’s Day treat to myself because I am off to do lovely things with my family shortly, and I’m also giving you a peek into how publishers go about planning and launching a series of books and what that looks like for the editors, the authors, the marketers involved in the runup to the launch of the second batch of titles in our new 6-Minute Smarts series.
So what even is a series? you might be asking. We’re not talking Netflix here and we’re not talking fiction either. This is not about a series of books featuring the same detective or main character, or if you’re thinking about Children’s Books, the Beast Quest or the Rainbow Magic books that my kids could not get enough of when they were little.
When it comes to scholarly or professional series, we are talking about books that share a common topic or approach or target audience or all three, which are branded in a similar way and which are released sequentially. They usually have an editor or a group of editors who make sure that the, the series style is coherent and consistent. So, for example, the way that they’re structured or the editorial approach.
And each book in the series shares the series title as well as having its own unique title. And why do publishers like a series? Launching a title from scratch each time is, is risky and expensive and involves a lot of heavy lifting. But if you can launch a new title from an established base, it’s less risky and less expensive.
It’s less risky because you have an established institutional customer base. Often academic libraries, for example, will have an adoption plan. They’ll sign up to buy each title in a series, or booksellers will place an order because they know the series sells and they know that it’ll sit nicely, this new book, alongside the existing books in the series.
Or maybe they’ve even got a fancy point of sale display like a spinner. And it’s less risky too because consumers learn to recognize and trust the series branding. Think of the Dummies series for from Wiley or the old Teach Yourself books if you go back that far.
And it’s less expensive because the series branding and the page design and so on are already in place and you can usually get a ready to publish manuscript more quickly, saving on development editor time, because you can give the author a model to follow. And plus, of course, you can do series marketing rather than a single book campaign, and you can promote previous titles in each new book.
So yeah, it, it’s sort of the closest thing to publishing magic that there is.
When I was working at Oxford University Press, I was a development editor on the Oxford Companions, so like the Oxford Companion to English Literature, The Oxford Author Companion to Dickens. And the brand recognition of that series and entity was huge when it came to commissioning authors and editors. They knew what they were signing up to. They wanted to be a part of it. And also when it came to marketing the books, of course. But Oxford Companions take several years and multiple authors, and there’s only so many topics substantial enough to warrant them.
While I was there, Angus Phillips came up with the brilliant idea of a new series of very short books, a very small format, literally called Very Short Introductions. They had a very strong series identity, this gorgeous Rothko esque color bleed on the cover. And the first one was quintessentially OUP: Mary Beard and John Henderson’s ‘Classics, A very short introduction’.
There are now over 750 titles covering pretty much every topic that you can imagine. The VSIs have become a publishing phenomenon. If you haven’t yet discovered them seriously, they are uniformly brilliant.
So right from the earliest days of setting up Practical Inspiration over 10 years ago now, I think I knew that one day I wanted to create a series. I remember talking about this as a goal at a mastermind day in 2015.
But the problem is that there are already quite a lot of really good series out there in the business space or covering the business space. There are the Very Short Introductions for one, and the Dummies Guides and the DO books that I mentioned earlier, and then others that are even more specifically businessy, like the Concise Advice series from LID and the Authority Guides from Sue Richardson as well as a whole host of subject specific series from publishers like Kogan Page, Edward Elgar, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge and so on. So I didn’t just want to to do a sort of me too series just for the sake of it. I wanted to have a series concept that I could really get excited about and which would stand out in quite a crowded marketplace as offering something different.
And it took me some time to work that out. This is how it happened.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023, in October, I was talking to our international reps and lots of foreign language publishers about securing translation rights for our books. Nothing unusual there. That is what you go to Frankfurt to do.
But that year I noticed a common theme, which I’d heard before, but I’d never heard it so consistently. I kept hearing people say that they loved our books, they loved how practical they were, but they were just a bit too substantial for the new cohort of readers. What they wanted were was shorter, more accessible books for readers whose attention span had been shrunk to the extent of a TikTok video. Not quite, but, I’m exaggerating, but not much. And of course shorter books are much easier, much cheaper for foreign language publishers to translate, so they’re more willing to take a risk on them.
So a little bit of me, I’m not going to lie, was sort of crying inside and shouting, I am not going to apologize for publishing books with substance. You know, we, our books are typically 50,000 words. That’s about about 240, 250 pages. They are super practical, highly readable, well structured, beautifully designed on the page. Are you seriously telling me that human beings are no longer capable of engaging with a book like that?
And don’t worry, I have no plans to stop publishing books like that because I believe in them, and I believe that that depth of thinking is important both for authors and for readers. And… you kind of can’t ignore that kind of feedback if you’re in business. So the small book series idea came back to the forefront of my mind, but I still had that missing piece.
How can we, at Practical Inspiration, create a series of small books that is aligned with our brand values and is distinctive in the marketplace? And so literally on the flight home I did what I always do when I have a question that’s bothering me. I wrote that question at the top of a sheet of paper, actually it was my reMarkable in this case, and I started an exploratory writing sprint, and by the end of six minutes, the end of the sprint, I had finally put the pieces of the jigsaw together.
I could see exactly the space that we could create and own, and I’d even landed on the name for the series 6-Minute Smarts. Because what I realized in that sprint was that the real power of the ideas that we are publishing isn’t just reading them, it isn’t even understanding them. The real power is in the way that you work out for yourself, how they apply to the situation in which you find yourself.
And I realized that that was what was lacking in most business book series. They’re really good at communicating ideas concisely, but they don’t invite you as the reader in to co-create the application of those ideas.
So the idea that I landed on in that 30,000 foot writing sprint was very simple, but it’s turned out to be incredibly powerful. So what we do is we take one of those substantial, practical books that we’ve already published, and we work with the author to identify 10 key concepts. Then a development editor uses the text of the original book as the starting point to create a short book which you can read as a 10 day course if you like, which introduces the readers to the ideas in a really accessible way.
But that’s only half the story, ’cause at the end of each chapter or each day, there are three ‘so what?’ questions, self-coaching questions designed as prompts for a six minute exploratory writing sprint so that you can think through how you could use that idea in your work and your life, because that changes everything.
So each book in the series is super short, around 10 to 12,000 words, which is around a hundred, 110 pages, and the format is diddy, very friendly. They’re just four by six inches, which is 102 by 152 millimeters if you think in metric, which I still don’t. Properly pocket sized. It’s not really until you see them on the shelf you’re like, oh, okay. Really small.
And honestly, even talking about it now, I can feel the excitement and that sense of fit and, and rightness. Practical topics, self-coaching, not talking at readers but helping to build this self-coaching capability so that they can interrogate any idea in the future and use it as a jumping off point for their own resourcefulness and agency.
- So we published the first batch of six in November, 2024, just in time to have copies on the stand for the Frankfurt book fair that year. And the next batch of six comes out next week on the 8th of April, just in time for us to have had advanced copies on the stand at London Book Fair earlier this month.
And it was, it was lovely to watch the reps and the rights agents handle them, get it, and ask for sample copies so that they could show their customers and clients just how gorgeous and different they are. And we are currently working on the manuscripts for the November 2025 batch, and we’re finalizing the titles and briefing covers for the April 2026 batch.
And so it will go on.
And it’s funny, one, one thing I hadn’t quite banked on was how much the authors would love them. So we promote the original book in the back of each 6-Minute Smarts title, so if a reader wants to find out more about the topic, they know where to go. And I’d seen that as the sort of real selling point, the real benefit for authors.
But actually, interestingly, the authors are buying them in huge quantities to sell at talks because they can see how popular they are. You know, a reader looks at one of these little books and they’re like, oh, I can read that that, that isn’t going to sit on my shelf making me feel guilty because I haven’t finished it. It’s friendly, it’s doable. It’s going to help me. So that’s nice.
And interestingly, myself, when I was speaking recently, we had both Write to Think, which is my 6-Minute Smarts title, and Exploratory Writing, which is the, the bigger book on which Write to Think is based, for sale. And I was sort of expecting people to decide on one or the other.
At least half the people bought both and I, and I’m sort of explaining to them, you know, you realize this…? No, no, it’s fine. But I, I know I’ll read this one and I want this one on my shelf. Really fascinating.
So there you go. The origin story of a series. I hope you enjoyed that behind the scenes glimpse into the inner workings of a publisher’s mind, and I hope that you’ll try out one of these delicious little books for yourself.
The print editions are lovely because they are, as I say, so diddy, so pocketable, but the Kindle editions of all 12 titles are just 99 pence, or 99 cents on Amazon for the next week in the run up to the launch of the second batch. So you can try out all 12 for about the price of a cinema ticket. And just so you know.
These are the first 12 titles in the series. The first batch, which we published in November was:
How To Be Happy At Work by Michael Brown,
No-Nonsense PR by Lucy Werner
Do Change Better by Lucinda Carney
Write to Think by Alison Jones, hello
Present Like A Pro by Jacqui Harper and
Mastering People Management by Marianne Page.
And the April 25 titles are
The Speed Storytelling Toolkit by Felicity Cowie
Building Great Teams by Alison Coward
Sales Made Simple by Sarah Dalrymple
The Listening Leader by Janie Van Hool
How to Get to Know Your Customer by Katie Tucker and
Reimagine Your career by Ollie Henderson.
So our new series is growing up and it’s very exciting to watch, and I would love to hear what you think if you read any of them.
And that’s it for me for this week. I’m off to get spoiled rotten, at least I hope I am. So in the meantime, I’m going to leave you with a brief word from Practical Inspiration Publishing, the home of books that mean business, the birthplace of the 6-Minute Smarts series, and the proud sponsor of the Extraordinary Business Book Club.
