If you blinked, you just missed #ipedcon2013. It’s all over. I hope you enjoyed it. This morning’s wrap is, sadly, the last post I’ll be writing in my role as conference blogger. It’s been so much fun to bring you the news from the conference, even if I slurped my coffee cold a little too often while I was writing it.

Of course, without the conference organisers, the keynote speakers, and the presenters, none of the 3 days’ worth of editorial discussion would have been possible. And I’ll add another group to that: you, the attendees. I’ve been so delighted with the intensity of people’s engagement in the content of the presentations here, and maybe that’s normal for more experienced IPEd conference-goers, but on my first time here I’ve been blown away by the passion and eloquence I’ve witnessed. Armed with the information and inspiration we’ve gathered in lovely Fremantle, I’m sure we’ll all go back to work enthused about our task and prepared (or at least ready to get prepared!) for wherever our editing lives take us next. Here’s the final breakfast wrap.

Friday 12 April

Friday’s program was packed with so many excellent presentations, I wouldn’t know where to start, from the constructive discussion of IPEd’s future structure first thing in the morning, to the slightly experimental hypothetical panel just before the close. All I can say is that I recommend you catch up with all the blog posts, tweets, and news below, or at the social network of your choice.

I have just a few key statistics that I feel illustrate the success of the conference. Some statistics are real; others, well, I’ll leave you to figure out which is which.

• Attendees: 220.
• Plenaries/keynote sessions: 5.
• Presenters: 53.
• Beverages drunk by ravenous hordes of editors during each break: 122.
• Tweets sent in the 10 seconds after Don Watson said he didn’t like Track Changes: 5.
• Most tweets sent per hour in the last 24 hours of the conference: 125.
• Times unearthly music erupted from a sound system mid-presentation, causing everyone to jump out of their skins: 1.
• Student enrolments in the open AI program Roly Sussex mentioned in his plenary: 160, 000.
• Times the phrase ‘future of editing’ was used in a paper or Q&A: 2760.
• Tickets pulled from button bag to reveal the winner of a writing holiday in Fiji, leading to much jealous gnashing of teeth among fellow dinner guests: 1.
• Number of years until Canberra 2015: 2. [No pressure, Canberra!]
• Number of hours’ sleep debt accrued by Marisa and co.: ???

As we know, numbers can prove anything you like, but for me, these ones add up to an enlightening and hugely fun few days spent in the best of company. It’s been a privilege to be your conference blogger for Perth 2013, and I’m grateful to the organising committee for giving me the opportunity to write. I hope you’ve enjoyed the coverage of the event and your time in Fremantle. Safe travels home, and see you at IPEd 2015!

Katy, conference blogger

Jasmine Leong is the Editor of CSIRO’s Double Helix publications. She oversees the production of ’The Helix’ magazine, ‘Scientriffic’ magazine, ‘Science by Email’ and ‘Maths and Stats by Email’. She has been contributing to these publications for more than five years. Prior to working on the Double Helix publications, Jasmine was an Education Officer. This involved delivering hands-on science programs for CSIRO Education, speaking to school students across the Northern Territory.  Jasmine has a Bachelor of Science with a major in genetics and a Bachelor of Arts with honours in history and philosophy of science. She also has postgraduate certificates in writing and marketing communications.

As an editor at CSIRO, Jasmine works on magazines The Helix and Scientriffic, as well as the newsletters Science by Email and Maths and Stats by Email. These publications aim to be entertaining, informative and accessible. (I can vouch for this personally, as my living-room coffee table is piled high with back copies of Scientriffic brought from school by my self-proclaimed ‘kid scientist’ daughter.)

Jasmine talked about how she goes about ensuring these publications are right for the broad range of readers they are intended for: among them teachers, parents and the general public. Contributors to the publications have to work across the borders that define each publication, because they’re aiming to reach such a diverse readership.

CSIRO understands its various readerships well, backed up with audience surveys and additional evaluation. These range from students aged 10–15 years reading The Helix, to younger primary school kids picking up copies of Scientriffic, mostly sourced through parents or relatives. It’s important to note that, in both cases, the buying decisions are not generally made by the target readers (not at all for the younger age group, as you’d expect). So, CSIRO’s publishing has to work for both the people who will make that decision, and for the people who will actually receive the material.

CSIRO has published in print and email for a long time, and email is now an established digital medium by which to provide content to readers. Science by Email and Maths and Stats by Email are shorter than their print equivalents; are published more frequently; and are provided free to their audiences with the support of sponsors. The readership is wider than the previous titles Jasmine talked about, but still the appeal has to be to the adults who make the decision to share material with young people. CSIRO’s survey results suggest that the true audience for these publications is broader in age than the target audience.

Jasmine described the influence of parents as essentially setting up a ‘gateway audience’, made up of those who decide whether to disseminate the material to young people. I can only imagine that this is a pretty demanding task, given that each of the ‘gateway’ groups must be enormously varied in terms of the education, reading skills, interest, and so on, of its adult members. Complexity upon complexity.

As you might expect, things are a bit simpler when you just consider the big question: What Kids Want. The two most popular topics for young people are animals and space, and it has been that way for years. CSIRO’s strategy goes beyond this, though, to tackle science and maths topics, plus skills and values that include critical thinking and curiosity, in line both with what teachers and parents value, and with the Australian Curriculum: Science. The publishing program doesn’t just deliver what students are asking for; understandably, they can’t just stick with wildlife and astronauts.

Print is enduring for CSIRO in this area, driven by the appeal to parents of giving their kids something that isn’t ‘screen time’; and reflecting the results of research into the effects of TV watching on young people (Jasmine’s paper will be released online if you want those survey results). But technology is also important, because apart from its other benefits, it is seen as a way to make CSIRO content accessible to a more diverse audience. As digital materials become more widely available, this presents an organisation like this with a dilemma: although CSIRO was not yet operating in the digital space, it found that third parties were using its content, sometimes without appropriate credit. Taking control of the situation, and looking to increase its profile in digital publishing, CSIRO has now embraced a range of multimedia content and the Helix @ CSIRO blog was launched in November 2012. Publishing for other formats, including tablets and other mobile devices, is under consideration, reflecting parents’ priorities and the advances made possible by CSIRO’s openness to digital publishing.

Jasmine’s insight into the changing world of CSIRO publishing was also really interesting from the point of view of publishing for young people, especially school-age children. When your content ‘customer’ isn’t really a customer at all, how do you manage to cater to their needs and interests, while also meeting the perhaps more sophisticated requirements of those who hold the wallet? After several years in the job, Jasmine has clearly become expert in handling these issues, and her clear and well-substantiated development of the publishing issues will be worth revisiting when it is published in full on the website later on.

Dr Agata Mrva-Montoya has worked at Sydney University Press since 2008, in a role combining editing, project management and social media. She is interested in the impact of new technologies on scholarly publishing, editing and books in general. In pre-publishing life, she completed a PhD in archaeology. She is also a member of Human Animal Research Network at the University of Sydney and can be found on twitter as @agatamontoya.

Agata Mrva-Montoya took a few minutes out to talk to me about her presentation earlier today, which as you may have noticed created a highly enthusiastic response among the twitterati attending the conference.

Many editors want to work on more ebooks and digital formats, but get a sense of mild discomfort when they contemplate the scale of change involved in the enterprise. If the future is ebooks, don’t we need to upscale our technical skills dramatically? According to Agata, the digital (r)evolution is not that scary. In fact, it’s not even all that new: Agata has been able to trace the advent of digital publishing from Project Gutenberg in the early 1970s through the onset of the Amazon age (when will that end, by the way?) to today’s dominant reading devices from Kindle and Nook to the tablet to iPhone. This is as much about long-term evolution as it is right-here-and-now revolution.

In her paper, Agata set out three clear-as-day areas where editors should be looking to develop their expertise: formats; workflows; and knowledge and skills. We know that digital publishing does – or will – demand change in all of them. Yet in some ways, digital workflows fit into what editors already know about scheduling and electronic working — yes, including or even especially Microsoft Word – and Agata is coming from the position that we should be thinking about ways for the publishing team to extend and build on what they already know. For example, we already know how to work with web specialists if that isn’t our area of expertise; we deal with vendors who build websites, platforms, and anything else we want to commission. Ebooks can be handled the same way. To be effective, we need to understand the possibilities of the format and know the language those vendors are speaking about ebooks, so that we can scope, edit, and produce in appropriate ways.

I must admit that I sometimes wonder what the word ‘interactive’ really means now — with so many formats now available and publishers plumping for a dizzying number of workflows and methodologies. Agatha’s view is that ‘all ebooks are interactive’; it’s not a particularly rich term to describe the multiple possibilities of the ebook. So, what are the more meaningful definitions? Agata describes three types of ebook:

1. A plain ebook: ePub, MOBI, or HTML, with footnotes, plain text, and linked index. It’s plain, yes, but still interactive in some ways. You can flip a page, click on a note, and so on.

2. An enhanced ebook: ePub3 and Apple iBook, with multimedia and deeper interactive features like video, audio, animations, web interactivity. This is still basically a linear format.

3. An ebook application: native iOS or Android software, with the most dynamic options for video, audio, animations, web interactivity, GPS, links, Flash, and so on. As this is conceived and developed to be a non-linear product, it offers readers the chance to interact with both content and storyline.

So, formats in the bag, let’s move on to workflows. The critical issue Agata underlines, whichever of these formats is chosen, is that editors know MS Word absolutely inside-out. We’re moving from a print-first workflow (in which ebook conversion was late-stage and largely outsourced, with risk of error in conversion either from Word or InDesign) through XML workflow (requiring substantial technical intervention and programming to produce a high-quality and repurposable digital, but lower quality print, product). Now, as Agata showed us, we don’t have to go with XML because there is a XHTML- and Cloud-based (CMS) workflow in which Word moves into XHTML and from there into … well, where does your imagination end?

Although XHTML enables very flexible multiformat publishing (ideal for all those platform-agnostics in the publishing industry), this workflow demands absolute rigour in manuscript styling. No problem, you might think: that’s our stock in trade as editors. But challenge yourself: what more can you do, what more might you need to do, if you’re preparing material for XHTML workflow? Agata’s message is very much ‘automate as much as possible’; editors should be aiming to use things like macros and other tools so that we can free ourselves to focus on style and structure. Of course, style and structure have always been critical, but for enhanced e-formats, they are basically the bones of the material – everything else forms around them.

When it comes to technical skills, the critical question for many editors is ‘how much do I need to know about XML and XHTML to continue with – or extend into – editing ebooks?’ Reassuringly, not as much as you might think. Your ability to front-load your workflow with as much editorial work and QA as you can cram into your budget and schedule is key. Publishing schedules may need to start significantly earlier to accommodate this work, so that damaging errors are eliminated before the XHTML part of the process begins.

For anyone involved in scoping or commissioning this kind of material, there’s one word of warning from Agata: beware of moving towards ‘interactivity for the sake of interactivity’. As we’ve already seen, ‘interactivity’ is at risk of becoming a baggy kind of word; it would be worse to push out products that don’t provide what readers want. Agata’s advice? Don’t ask what can we add? but rather, what is this for? And copy editors can ask, what are the reader’s expectations from this text? – just as we do now, figuring out the reader benefits from material, and using that knowledge to hone the product.

It can be hard to visualise ebook workflows if this is an area you’re thinking of expanding into; Agata’s talk will really have helped to clarify what we do and don’t need to concern ourselves with. And, critically, how to see continuity in the editing role.

Here’s a little taste of what the audience were thinking while Agata presented her paper:

Thank you @agatamontoya – terrific overview! Now everyone who came to #edbox has concrete context for my brain-bending content #ipedcon2013

— SelenaHanet-Hutchins (@texturetide) April 12, 2013

Gorgeous presentation by @agatamontoya with stunning illustrations. #ipedcon2013

— Jasmine Leong (@jasmineleong) April 12, 2013

XML great for digital workflow but not great for print products – XML good for chunkable content not for novels & monographs #ipedcon2013

— Jacqui Smith (@gigglyfriday) April 12, 2013

Highly chunkable, frequent reuse content best with XML workflows. Includes education and cookbooks. #ipedcon2013

— Jasmine Leong (@jasmineleong) April 12, 2013

“Correct structure and styling [in MS Word] more important than ever,” @agatamontoya #ipedcon2013

— Jasmine Leong (@jasmineleong) April 12, 2013

[Special thanks to the people whose tweets I’ve shamelessly borrowed!]

Jan Knight has been editing non-fiction publications for fifteen years.

Louise Burch brings over 30 years of experience as a graphic designer to the panel.

Roger Underwood is a forester, writer and historian.

Roger, said Jan, is a gentlemanly type of writer. Jan has been his editor for quite a long time and knows how to work with his particular style. Ditto Louise, who has been the designer for his books for years (they used to work together in the same department). Jane is Roger’s defender against cliché, and Louise is the person who moves text around and makes it look superb on the page until Roger stops requesting changes.

This was an interesting insider view of a three-way professional relationship that has worked well for everybody involved. The three demonstrated what a collegial, but not unrealistically uncritical, collaboration can look like, where the editorial and design pros are able to advise an author and where everybody knows their own strengths and limitations.

Testament to the benefits that accrue from a longstanding working relationship, this panel may have made some audience members hanker after the days when an author settled in to working with a particular editor and relied on their advice book after book, simply because they trusted their opinion. Roger admitted happily that he more easily concedes to Louise with her specialist skill set as a designer, while he gives Jan a harder time since her wordy skills are more closely related to his. Jan saw her role in the relationship as more of a mediating one, with the editor in the middle of the to-ing and fro-ing, spotting errors from all sides (though thankfully not from Louise, she protested!). I’ll leave you with what, for me, is one of the quotes of the conference, wise authorial words from Roger: ‘It was only once I had an editor that I realised the value of editing.’ Good to know! Here are some quick tweets from the audience:

“writing is a process of self-editing” #ipedcon2013

— Agata Mrva-Montoya (@agatamontoya) April 12, 2013

As a writer/editor/layout person, I’ve always found publishing annoyingly siloed. How can we work towards a holistic workflow? #ipedcon2013

— Ali Lemer (@remelila) April 12, 2013

“I didn’t think I needed an editor b/c I was a good writer. It was only after being edited that I realised its value.” #ipedcon2013

— Ali Lemer (@remelila) April 12, 2013

Presenter: Katy McDevitt

Dr Katy McDevitt AE is a freelance editor and publishing consultant. Katy has enjoyed in-house editorial roles at several prestigious and innovative publishers, including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, and Pearson Education, and until recently worked as an editor at the SACE Board of South Australia. Katy has commissioned and developed many educational and academic books and learning solutions, and now focuses on developmental and copy editing. Katy also has a passion for writing about and demystifying editing, and started her own blog, PublishEd Adelaide, in 2011. The blog was a finalist in the Best Australian Blogs Competition 2012 (Sydney Writers’ Centre).

Should editors blog?

If so, how? Why?

RT @bothersomewords: Editors usually blog because we care, want to help and share info. #ipedcon2013 #blog

— Melanie Thompson (@EditorSpice) April 11, 2013

Where does one start? And really, does anyone else out there really want to read about what an editor does?

But they do. And even the gods seemed to approve for a moment while there was a heavenly chorus (though not of hallelujahs) that briefly interrupted the session. We can only assume this was an endorsement – or perhaps they were putting their hands up to guest post.

And suddenly @katymcdevitt‘s presentation is interrupted by mysterious music! The blogging gods descending, perhaps? #ipedcon2013

— Ali Lemer (@remelila) April 11, 2013

Katy McDevitt from PublishEd Adelaide took us through her experience with blogging, giving everyone a crash course in what we should and shouldn’t do.

We were told not to bother blogging for money, to keep a regular schedule that worked for us whether it was weekly or monthly and to find something to do with editing or publishing that we really wanted to talk about and maintain that focus.

Want to start a blog? Choose your niche, decide on your audience (write for someone), define and use your voice & style. #ipedcon2013

— Ali Lemer (@remelila) April 11, 2013

She gave us tips and tricks for doing this:

• Editorial calendars and schedules

Tip: start a simple editorial calendar for your blog (Excel; or WordPress plug-in) to help you map out stories in advance. #ipedcon2013

— Ali Lemer (@remelila) April 11, 2013

Katy showing different blog calendar options. Maybe if I had one I’d get round to blogging regularly. Or I’d get stressed… #ipedcon2013

— Bothersome Words(@BothersomeWords) April 11, 2013

Yeah, I started out with a blog schedule … then life got in the way … *sigh* #ipedcon2013

— Jasmine Leong (@jasmineleong) April 11, 2013

• Creating connections with others through guest posts and comments

Encourage critical comments and share guest posts. Prewrite posts in quiet time and keep things low-tech. #ipedcon2013 #blog

— Bothersome Words(@BothersomeWords) April 11, 2013

Client blog: build a relationship among authors, publishers, people who hire editors. #ipedcon2013 #blog

— Bothersome Words(@BothersomeWords) April 11, 2013

• Picking the right software and then using it for the best effect

Yup. I use WordPress for home and work blogs. #ipedcon2013

— Jasmine Leong (@jasmineleong) April 11, 2013

And she gave us a long list of editorial blogs to browse and follow, ensuring that everyone had some light browsing/reading to do during the rest of the evening.

But the most important thing blogging can do for editors? According to Katy it ensures that people know that “We are not all cardigan-wearing, tea-sipping, introverted pedants.”

‘We’re not all cardigan-wearing, tea-sipping, introverted pedants’ … #GPOY #ipedcon2013

— Sarah JH Fletcher (@sjhfletcher) April 11, 2013

I am all but not introverted… #cardyon MT @sjhfletcher: ‘We’re not all cardigan-wearing, tea-sipping, introverted pedants’… #ipedcon2013

— Jacqui Smith (@gigglyfriday) April 11, 2013

.@jasmineleong I’m a hoodie-wearing, coffee-guzzling, extroverted pedant! (With a high ‘tooth-to-tatt’ ratio, though.) #ipedcon2013

— Ali Lemer (@remelila) April 11, 2013

Mine is ccl too – can remix if they let me know. And I’m a geek goddess rockstar – no cardigans! #ipedcon2013

— Marisa Wikramanayake (@mwikramanayake) April 11, 2013

How are your energy levels? Day 2 of conference was, as expected, busy from the off. There were so many papers, it was hard to choose where to start (not to mention where to go next, and after that, and after that…). Here’s the wrap for yesterday.

Thursday 11 April

The conference started buzzing around 8.00, as attendees arrived and got their bearings. The conference opening ceremony was a mixture of the heartfelt — with a welcome to country that moved many — and the light-hearted — finishing up with Nury Vittachi’s whistlestop tour of the signage and slippages of Globalese. In between, we met the erudite Professor Roly Sussex, the new Patron of IPEd, and witnessed the launch of the new edition of the Australian standards for editing practice, hearing from the team that has been working away at the material since 2011. I think everybody appreciates the immense effort that went into the preparation of the standards and if, like me, you use them all the time in your work, you’ll be looking forward to getting to know the new edition.

The papers during the day kept us all busy; I hope you got to see all the speakers on your own list. I particularly enjoyed Carmen Lawrence’s rich, convincing discussion of defending culture and heritage in an era of massive development of areas of great natural beauty and significance. I also made it to Jane Morrow’s insightful talk about US publishing, Jasmine Leong’s account of publishing for young people at CSIRO, and Selena Hanet-Hutchins’ mind-stretching exploration of editing at the edge of new technologies, while Marisa dropped in to hear John Linnegar talk about editing in South Africa. There were so many fabulous papers, it was hard to know where to go next. Like these:

• Pam Peters on editing across state, national, and disciplinary boundaries
• Elizabeth Spiegel on creating an accessible web
• Small publishers forum on how to publish a great book
• Angelo Loukakis on editing in the digital age
• Becky Schmidt on editorial workflows across physical and scientific boundaries
• Maryam Ahmad on language variations in natural resource management
• Glenys Collard, Patricia Konigsberg, Sandra Phillips, and Margaret Whiskin on working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in writing, editing, and publishing
• Ross Blackwood on Chinglish
• Amanda Curtin on editor/author relationships
• Ilsa Sharp on Southeast Asia
• Kevin Price on children’s authorship.

Most importantly, thank you to all the Day 2 speakers for making the day so exciting. My only regret from the first day is that I couldn’t be everywhere, and I’m betting that others are thinking the same. With that in mind, if you want to get a copy of a paper you’ve enjoyed or one that you missed out on, the organisers are publishing them all online at the end of the event. If you are just too keen and can’t wait that long, speakers may be able to share materials with you — worth an ask.

A quick personal note: thanks to everyone who made it to my paper about editorial blogs. I admire your conference-going spirit hugely, hanging on until right at the end of the day!

So, after the papers, the dinner … which I hope you enjoyed. Here are a few choice tweets from those who Just Couldn’t Help Themselves (including me):

Eds gettin’ loose tonight holler (or don’t, for professional reasons cough) #ipedcon2013 #crunkineds

— Carmen Reilly (@carmenaramena) April 11, 2013

The entertainment is playing Bon Jovi, slowly, at our editors conference. I am well impressed, as is @roch_town #ipedcon2013

— Jacqui Smith (@gigglyfriday) April 11, 2013

Becky Schmidt has successfully (theoretically) located Bon Scott. It took two waiters. #conferenceachievementunlocked #ipedcon2013

— Bothersome Words(@BothersomeWords) April 11, 2013

Fun fact: Jade Diary was profiled as a crowdfunding success story in a book I edited for @editia. #ipedcon2013

— Sarah JH Fletcher (@sjhfletcher) April 11, 2013

Rosemary Luke just won tickets to Fiji! I am sitting next to her and she shall be my new best friend. #ipedcon2013

— PublishEd Adelaide (@KatyMcDevitt) April 11, 2013

And the inevitable aftermath:

#ipedcon2013 Good night all. Another busy day tomorrow starting at 8.30. IPEd needs your participation in the plenary session.

— Desolie Page (@DesoliePage) April 11, 2013

Really feel like kareoke now. Where does one kareoke in fremantle? @gigglyfriday @bothersomewords @sjhfletcher @remelila

— Rochelle Fernandez (@roch_town) April 11, 2013

Finally, just a couple of questions for you as we head into the second and final day.  Did that brave band of editors actually find any karaoke? Did anyone cross the road and kiss the statue of Bon Scott (and if so, why)? Find out at the Esplanade Hotel in, oh, a touch less than an hour from now.

Have a great day! Don’t forget, it’s IPEd Council at 8.30, followed by keynote by Don Watson at 10.00.

Selena Hanet-Hutchins runs texture, a broad-scope freelance editing business servicing a range of clients in publishing and other industries. She has worked in trade publishing for the past ten years, both freelance and in positions at Allen & Unwin and (sometimes concurrently) at Selwa Anthony Author Management Agency. Script editing experience and a longstanding and active interest in digital and interactive storytelling, combined with a degree in Creative Writing and a Diploma of Book Editing and Publishing, have allowed her to develop the unique skillset she brings to working with agents, publishers, authors, small businesses, community groups and digital producers. Selena has read for the ABC Fiction Award and was Associate Director of the Popular Australian Readers’ & Writers’ Festival. Her passion for structural and developmental editing has seen several unpublished authors get their work into print. She is a founding presenter at Editing in Paradise editing masterclass retreats for writers and teaches editing at the University of Wollongong, overseeing publication of the anthology Tide. She regularly delivers guest lectures and workshops on writing, editing and digital publishing to colleges and universities, arts and writing groups and to corporates. You can find her online: Twitter @texturetide | Facebook at facebook.com/texture.words

Selena talked to us from the perspective that all editors are — or will be — required to edit ‘outside the box’. In her words, ‘We are all outside the box or will be soon’.

Using two key concepts, GOD (Good Orderly Direction) and BOOK (Beneficial Organised Operational Knowledge), she stepped through the progress of text from codex into book, and from there to the ‘information highway’, identifying challenges of conceptualising the form of writing along the way.

The book has never seemed so alien as now, as writers and editors are squeezed to complete their work on a ‘shrunken workflow’. Influenced by Sean Cubitt, Selena told us about the ‘space and time within the book’ and discussed ‘the way we travel around inside it’. With the onset of digital and online methods of publishing, workflows have become more agile and shorter schedules are possible — for example, working on chunks of text with authors and turning them around on extremely quick timings. Transmedia is what is happening now and publishers such as Xoum and Selena’s own Texture are working with authors on digital formats (probably unsurprisingly, this involves a lot of briefing and rebriefing work as authors adjust to new ways of working).

Yet there are some areas of consistency. Despite new formats, an editor still manages ‘a process of reading between the lines to find the relationships between characters’. Our focus must still be on audience and purpose. Selena believes that ‘this is the age we are preparing for, and we are in the best shape to do it’, so the challenge is to edit what she calls BOOKⁿ, that is, the book to the power of networking (things like social media, contact with a fan base, working via Skype, and so on).

We can use this model to understand and use our new workflows — except nothing is really new. What do people want to do with BOOKⁿ, which may be the blog or another format? They want to interact with the material. This is possible through reader-oriented projects like The people’s e-book (although this raises issues around reproducing copyright content), through which authors and editors can collaborate. Some methods for this are similar to what we already know as editors — such as working with a style sheet — but you will need to think about the reader’s involvement in the book overall, while you’re working on just the text. Selena exhorts editors not to be afraid of these ways of working because we can learn to network and collaborate in new ways, and become attuned to story rather than only text. Selena ended with a single word on the big screen: ‘hope’. Hang on to it, and embrace what we know of communication and language to play at the edges of what’s possible!