Laura Summers runs BookMachine, our fast-growing global community and agency specialising in book publishing. Our mission is to provide publishing professionals with the knowledge, ideas and connections to help them to progress in their careers.

As publishers in the UK head into a second lockdown, it’s now more important than ever to find new and more effective ways of working virtually.

Not only do we need to continue to deliver great work, and keep up levels of creativity even without our usual means of inspiration; but we also need to pull together as a team and work hard on connecting and making sure that our colleagues feel part of our teams.

With all of this in mind today we are proud to be officially launching virtual Sprints for book publishers. The goal of each workshop is to help our agency clients to save time and money whilst making their decisions faster. 

We have been tweaking the virtual process since the start of the pandemic, and although each session is unique, the results tend to be quite similar. After a day of working with us, our clients have all contributed their most brilliant ideas, and we can sense increased camaraderie amongst teams. It’s our favourite way to work!

For those of you who have no idea what a Sprint is, it is essentially a time-constrained process which allows teams to collaborate ahead of launching something new. We have based this on a book called Sprint, published by Transworld Publishing.  

Each Sprint is designed as a bespoke process for each company we work with, depending on the scope and scale of the problem to be solved. The process can range from a day to a week, depending on the project and budgets.

If this sounds interesting to you, we have designed a free template so that you can test the process yourself. You can download it via this link, in exchange for your email address. 

As I touched on before, we are huge fans of working like this, and have been quite blown away by the impact it has had on the clients we have worked with. We have seen it really help clients to make great decisions faster than usual, whilst building stronger connections between team members taking part.

Do get in touch if you would like to know more, and visit our new Sprints page to start the conversation.