Working on Madeleine Shaw’s The Greater Good Workbook

This is the first of my case study blog posts—whoop!

Let’s talk about workbooks. James Clear just launched The Atomic Habits Workbook, the companion to the #1 worldwide bestselling book, Atomic Habits (Avery, 2018), which was one of my fav reads of 2024. Interestingly, it’s also available in Kindle format. (Check out my post on James Clear’s bestselling marketing strategy here.)

Workbooks—or other forms of low-content books—can be great companion products for authors. You’re likely not going to reach bestseller status with them (although I’d argue Clear has a good case for it), but they’re great ways to make additional revenue, sell in bulk, and/or help your reader take action on the ideas you’ve presented in a previously published book.

When I published my first book, a workbook, there were already tons of books about public relations, and I didn’t feel I had much more to add. Rather, I injected my ideas into a how-to guide, leaving a lot of blank space for readers to create their own strategy.

My client, Madeleine Shaw, published The Greater Good: Social Entrepreneurship for Everyday People Who Want to Change the World, in 2021. We’d done some work together prior to that, so it was really cool to see my name in print and also indexed! I had just learned how to do an index, so I nerded out over that.

Madeleine produced an online course to supplement the ideas in the book and garnered interest from a post-secondary institution professor who wanted to teach the social entrepreneurship concepts in her book. I believe the idea for a workbook arose from that in 2023.

Someone else designed the interior of the workbook using the same design elements as the original The Greater Good cover. Madeleine had me spend a couple of hours copyediting the text and fact-checking to make sure links worked.

Then she asked for my help in loading to IngramSpark. I had only managed IngramSpark for one other client then, Dr. Eli Grey. Madeleine created her account and filled out her payment/tax information, which is the most important part for the author to do. I can manage everything else.

As you know if you’ve managed this platform, it’s super glitchy, old school in its layout, and things you thought you’d saved take about 5 minutes to actually save. It’s clunky.

The biggest barrier here was that IngramSpark did not accept the designed cover. I forwarded IngramSpark’s template to the designer, who formatted the file to those specifications. It’s weird because once you know a book’s trim size, designing a cover should be a breeze. IngramSpark likes to make it harder than any other platform.

I know Amazon asks whether your file has bleed, and it adjusts as needed. I can’t remember now if IngramSpark has those options.

I also had to correspond with the workbook designer several times because odd pages were not lining up on the right side of the page. The way they had formatted the PDF was not in single-page view, but double-page view. I couldn’t explain this as I didn’t have the language for it back then, but third time around, it was finally fixed.

When I loaded the interior file to IngramSpark everything was approved. I arranged for a proof copy to be sent to Madeleine.

She reported back that everything had looked good in the proof, but the paper was very thin and you could almost see the coloured ink on the other side of the page. So we bumped up the paper weight, and that solved the issue. If your book is in colour you need heavier paper!

Working with Madeleine is always a treat. She’s a visionary, brilliant, and knows when to delegate tasks she’s weak at. The Greater Good Workbook is a great companion guide to The Greater Good or is a great guide on its own for those who want to dive in, create a plan, and take action on their goal of making the world a better place.

Even though this project only took less than 10 hours, it taught me a lot about IngramSpark and the importance of communication and patience.

Need a ghostwriter, editor, or formatter to help you publish your book so you can get it in the hands of readers? Read more about my services here and contact me if you’re ready to begin!

Note: This post contains Amazon affiliate links.