Reader input.. the story of Bill Sawyer's gift

Bill Sawyer, Director, Global Learning Services at Seal Software, is the kind of person you want helping you evaluate your instructional writing. He’s picky. And when it comes to writing, picky is good. 

As Bill read my first book, he sent me lists of things that were either problematic or things he thought I could do better. For example, he called out a figure and said he didn’t understand it. I looked at it and realized that the editor and I had missed that half of the figure made it into the book. No wonder it didn’t make sense.

I went through each of his lists and updated the manuscript. Sometimes we simply disagreed stylistically. And there were a few things I simply couldn’t figure out how to do. For example, the Kindle translation of my manuscript wasn’t nearly as attractive as the print book. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t make the tables work as well as I liked. Of course, getting tables to reflow and look terrific on anything from a phone to a 10” tablet was obviously a challenge.

When I wrote the second book, Practice and Feedback for Deeper Learning, I found his stylistic suggestions influencing me. And I simply had to back and update the first book so they matched. I told Bill I didn’t like the covers and was going to change the first one to match the second. He said, “I hated the cover but was afraid to tell you!” So, I changed the cover on the first book to match the second.

People think of writing as a solo activity. Nope… anything but. The first step is understanding your audience, just like when building instruction. 

Thank you, Bill Sawyer. I consider you a critical part of my writing team. And cannot wait to meet you in person someday.

I’ll tell you how I fixed my Kindle problem in my next post. So much to learn (and I kind of love that).