I thought I’d share with you a little bit more about the process of this whole Kickstarter thing and how it came into being so I’ll start at the beginning with where the ideas came from.
As you may know, back in 2014 I had an idea for a diary planner, brought about by the fact that I couldn’t find one that was just right for me, so I designed one and asked around to see if anyone else wanted one. Turned out that 115 people did and so the Ultimate Diary Planner was born.
For the 2016 Ultimate Diary Planner things moved on a pace and by the end of March 2016 I’d sold around 850 more and things are set to increase again for the 2017 books (which pre-orders are launching for next week).
I was happily using my diary planner for my daily/weekly to dos and happy as a clam… but I needed a space which wasn’t constrained by year and that I could use as a brain dumping book. Somewhere I could get my cray ideas out of my head and somewhere safe that I can dip into as and when I want to. Somewhere I can map out now products, marketing ideas etc.
I was using a plain notebook and loved having everything in one place. Then I realised that many of the things I was putting in there was following a set structure and it got me thinking about maybe doing my own, afterall I had done it with the diary planners, why not for a notebook?
Not needing anything else to distract me from my core business (branding, design and print) I popped all the ideas for it in my trusty notebook and left it for a while.
But it kept on niggling at me.
So, I began to explore design and pricing possibles.
Did I want it to be A5 or A4? Was I going to go for a coil binding, like the diary planner, or try out something else, like leather? How many pages? What sort of paper? How many ribbons? And so much more.
Eventually I had a really clear idea, down on paper, of how it could look and it was time to really dig in and get some solid pricing in place. I explored sites in the far east and in the UK too – It was a new media for me so I had to do my research. I eventually chose a company that specialise in leather books and is based in the UK – I prefer to deal with UK companies so that was a bonus.
Between us we workout costings and then it was down to me to get the actual layouts done, so I got to work. I knew what I wanted in my head so it was simply a matter of making it come to life on paper. I spend many hours working on the designs in InDesign until I was finally pretty happy with them.
Time to order some proofing copies!
If the years of experience in deisgn and print have taught me anything it’s that when you’re doing something like this, it’s really important to get a printed copy to proof – it’s amazing what you miss when you’re proofing on a screen.
I ordered 5 hard copy books; for me and so I could send to others to check it over too. They arrived 9 days or so later and it was super exciting seeing them in the flesh for the first time.
Needless to say there were loads of tweaks to be made; a combination of typos and layout edits that, when I saw it in print, I knew I wanted slightly different. This round of edits went smoothly and very quickly I had the finished file ready to send off to the printers to get the ‘official’ sample copy produced at a cost of £150 for the one notebook (most expensive notebook I’ve ever bought LOL!).
It was a nervous wait for this one – I couldn’t wait to see the actual book in print and around 14 days later I had it in my hot little hands… more on that tomorrow!
Find out more about the Minerva ‘M’ Planning Notebook at www.mnotebook.co.uk