gilest.org

The agile comms handbook
- revised edition!

(21 September 2023)

The new book (right) next to the old one

Some news: in collaboration with my friends at Content Design London, I’ve just published The agile comms handbook - revised edition.

→ You can buy a copy right now.

The revised edition updates a few things that were out-of-date, adds a few new examples of good practice, and removes a couple that no longer worked.

It’s a revision, not an entirely new book. If you already own a copy of the original edition, you don’t need to buy this as well. But if you’re buying it for the first time now, you’re getting a better and more up-to-date book.

It’s a slightly different shape, layout and texture from the previous edition. We deliberately picked a smaller, pocket-size option, because it’s good to carry around books the same way people carry around phones.

The revised edition was (re-)designed once again by Sonia Turcotte and much of the behind-the-scenes wrangling was done by Rich Prowse at CDL. Thank you Sonia, thank you Rich.

The CDL team have established a very good system for independent publishing, using print-on-demand via Lulu.

That means:

• we don’t have to print and store huge batches of books
• we only print books that people want, so there’s less waste
• books are printed and distributed globally, reducing postage miles
• it’s easier to send books to non-UK countries, even countries in the EU! (gasp!)
• it’s easier to make changes and updates in future

There are two downsides, but I think they’re outweighed by the upsides:

• because books are printed to order, it takes a few days to process, print, and post each one - buyers have to wait a week or so (to be fair, this used to happen under my lo-fi indie postage system anyway)
• the price has gone up a bit, from £15 to £18.99 - mostly because the price of printing and posting things has increased; inflation gonna inflate, unfortunately. I blame Liz Truss.

I’m really happy to be getting this out into the world. My own stocks of the book dried up at the start of the summer, and I thought getting this new edition would take just a few weeks. Here we are, three months later… such are the pitfalls of independent publishing.

giles (at) gilest.org

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