Much of my summer was spent editing 50 Ways to Fly Better by Bruce Goldsmith. This is a collection of some of the best learning and How-To articles published in Cross Country magazine in the last 25 years.
It was a big, involved job. My colleague Hugh arrived about a year ago with a suitcase full of back issues, which found residence on my shelves in my flat. I spent several long nights going through them, pulling out features and creating Excel sheets. This was followed by spending a whole heap of money at a photocopy shop – you can't shuffle paper without physical hardcopies.
From there we had about 60-70 articles. Shuffle a bit more and lose a few. We got a typist in Brighton to type up a dozen of the ones that we'd lost all but the magazine copy for – the pdf digital workflow only kicked off in about 1999 – and then shuffled some more.
This is really where the editing process happens, in rejecting the literally hundreds of articles that could have but didn't make the final book.
We also spent a long time discussing how to present them, how to shape the flow of the book. Should it be chapters? Headings? What about meteorology? Competition? The sport - discipline - is vast and both those subjects fill textbooks themselves.
The key question we asked of each article was: "How does this help me fly better?" If it was interesting theory but no practical advice, then it didn't go in.
I remember well my early days of paragliding and learning about the weather. I read the words "adiabatic lapse rate" dozens if not hundreds of times, and still didn't get it.
Most textbooks are simply too heavy. The beauty of the sport is its simplicity. "Warm air rises" is usually enough. Do we really need to know the why? Well yes of course it's good to know, but not knowing won't stop you taking off and going flying.
So I took that as a mantra really: practical, helpful advice. A sort of cookbook for the skies. Follow the recipe; with recipes by Jamie Oliver, not Michel Roux.
Bruce Goldsmith's Icaristics column, which has run in the magazine for 20 years or more, works on that principle too. If "Pull left" is the advice from this former paragliding world champion then you just do it, you don't need to worry too much about the why, you just feel it, and then work it out later. It's how most of us really learnt how to fly.
Several thousand of the books arrived on a ship from the printers in China at the end of October. We've sold several hundred already as pre-orders, with very little promotion – word of mouth really. So that's a good sign. Hopefully it will be well received by those pilots who will be getting it through the mail extremely soon.
As a first for us it's great to be involved in and to have lead the project – a lot of hard work but very satisfying. Being involved in the whole process is great and is the beauty of working in a small team. Instead of a cover designer, you just all chip in until it works. Instead of agonising over proofs, paper choice and format it's done by email, often very quickly.
One techy piece of info is the weight. The cut-off for package costs in the Royal Mail is 750g - it's much cheaper to mail something that weighs less than that - so we wanted the book to come in at about 700g, to allow for packaging and flyers etc.
In the end it weighs about 650g, and is slightly smaller than iPad size. The printed result is great – it has a trendy flexi-bound cover and is tough enough, and light enough, to be stuffed into a paraglider bag and carried up the hill. Exactly what we set out to create.
Get it online here.
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