By Jack Macaulay
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LIGHT SWITCH PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2015 by Jack Macaulay Photographs courtesy of the author Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Macaulay, Jack, 2000– Words: Stories, tips, photography / Jack Macaulay. pages cm ISBN 978-0-648-17902-7 PN2287.H27A3 2015 791.4302'8092—dc23 2015004927 Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. Cover design: Jack Macaulay & Bob Lockhart Cover photograph: Flickr
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To all the people who have taken me on this amazing journey (so far), thank you.
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SAMPLE
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Chapter 1 writing a book
Ok. How to start a book. To be completely honest, I have no idea. Obviously I am not a professional writer in any capacity and don’t worry, I’m not writing the next Game of Thrones novel here. As you’ll see on the cover I decided to summarise this book as “Stories, Tips and Photography”. Now as I’m not super famous (or past the age of 60) I don’t have too many stories to tell you all. What my aim of this ‘journey’, shall we say, is to introduce you to how I do things. There will be one of those ‘chapter things’ (is it called a contents page?) at the beginning so don’t worry, if you are not that interested in my editing and photography tips skip them out. This book is made for great displays and all I can hope is that you have been sucked into the apple wormhole and are using one of their (many) devices to read this book. My intentions for you as a reader are to see the detail and colour of “words” and what they can do (hence the title). I’m not talking about changing the font colour, no. I’m talking about attempting to bring you into the para6
graphs that I type, write (but mostly scribble down whilst bored somewhere away from my mac). The reason I hope you're reading this on the fancy new 4k, retina enhanced iPhone 12 is so I can show you the true richness and quality of these pictures (and possibly even videos. Thanks, Apple). Also the title. Your probably thinking “what the actual f**k?” So am I. As a designer I’m always looking for logos and names that scream modern design. Yes, the age old saying ‘Don’t judge a book by it’s cover’ but then hang on, what’s the point in the cover then? I was desperately trying conjure up a better title than “I’m not really a writer” (cause that’s what it was gonna be) and I google “words”. I just simply needed inspiration and sadly it took a few page clicks for me to realise that I had created the title without even knowing it. I’m just that much of a genius. Another question you’ll probably be asking is “Why are you actually writing a book?” The answer is an influence. Just about every other ‘YouTuber’ has/is writing a book. Zoella* is in the process of finishing her second book, Joe Sugg is about to release his graphic novel. Things are getting pretty exciting for us all. Actually looking at that sentence I just wrote it sounds as if I’m best buds with the gleam team. As I have no deadline for this book I have no idea when it will be complete. See that’s the problem when you're publisher doesn’t give you a deadline. You’ve got nothing to push you to complete your project. I guess I’m just going to have to rely on myself and self-motivation (I don’t have a lot of it). I mean my evident problem is that I love to do the fun things first. You understand what I mean surely. I’m not so sure if you’ve been in this exact situation (unless you’ve written a book, then good on you) but the minute I’d finalised the idea and finished writing up the plans I went straight to designing the cover. By the way, make sure
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you tweet me to tell me what you think of this whole conundrum as I really would like to get some feedback (even if it’s not positive), but back to the cover. I had this really cool idea where I would fill in the text with some of my favourite photos, the only problem was, well it essentially looked s**t. The colours didn’t match up and it wasn’t contrasted to the background enough. Shame. However as you should have seen I did manage to find the right photos and my idea was complete. I think I must have just been procrastinating writing. Trust me, try writing a book. So far I’m not exactly entertained. “Charlie bit my finger autotune remix” entertains me more. Like seriously, I’m listening to it on a loop to help me write this chapter. Now as I need to think of ways to promote this book, I need to reach out to a number of different audiences. Here’s something I have never told anyone (I think). My male to the female percentage for my subscribers is 42% female and 58% male. This means that whenever I create content I have to incorporate such a large demographic into my filming and editing. Unsurprisingly my age groups are most popular in the 13-17 & 18-24. This does make it easier to cater for these age groups as most of their brains are melted and they are just interested in the new episode of Geordie shore or what the best dance song is at the moment (right now pop is going through a tough time). Anyway, what I was trying to prove was that there is a high possibility that every person who reads this book will be different from each other (actually that probably 100% going to happen). They will like different foods, love different people and read different books. But something has brought them to this book and I need to try my absolute best to keep them interested in me, myself and everything that I do (trust me, it’s going to be hard). I really need to put out the good promotional material for this book. Well, firstly it’s free. Isn’t that just great. I love free things. But when you put it into perspective this isn’t really free is it. I mean let’s start in china, right, cause that’s where
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Apple make all their products. It’s cheap labour and easy to source parts. These people in the factories are treated terribly, and paid only $1.50 (£0.96) an hour. Your iPad is then shipped to your nearest apple store, and you buy it for around £300 (Yet it only costs under £175 to make) right? So not entirely free is it. I am quickly getting distracted so I will go on to what I want to do with this book. I haven’t had a chance to look as of yet, on the possibility of printing it. Obviously you aren’t going to be strolling past WHSmith and see my face smiling at you. No, if you ever caught me in a bookshop I would be putting on my best ‘kill me now, and make it asap’ face. Joking aside I really would like a few printed copies to maybe have myself and give out a few to some of the people who have helped me get where I am right now. As this whole book is so varied I can’t put it in a category, decide which section of Waterstones it will go in (I’m just dreaming) or define it in two words. All I can do is try and write the best, funniest and most informative book I can possibly write. It’s a journey I was willing to start and hopefully I reach the end sometime before Christmas (I’m being serious. I have important stuff like GSCEs). I’m starting to ramble on a bit and this really was just an introduction chapter. A quick “Hello” then a “Go read my book now or I will find you, and I will…”. Things really are taking a turn for the worse. Let’s get on with the book shall we. Here goes…
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