2 years, 200 pages, 200 subscribers, $200 in presales, but some big names like Harvard, MIT, Oxford signed up.
This book started as a side project almost 2 years ago. My and my co-author Bart, would organise writing sprints where we'd meet in an AirBnB for 3-4 days and write, write, write.
Our first version was a bunch of workshop formats and facilitation techniques we'd used ourselves. Things like:
The feedback was good from the people who knew what we did, but everyone else wanted to know, "what is peer learning? why peer learning?"
So we completely rewrote it, instead using the project to reach out to our role models and heroes to interview them. We built up a small mailing list to 200 people, but that has some serious educators on it, from Harvard, MIT, UCL, Oxford. (To be fair, some are our old clients.)
We then got feedback that people wanted more practical stuff! Kind of ironic, but shows that we did a decent job of answering the "why peer learning" questions and helping people see how it helps them. What we missed in version 1 was how we think about designing or improving other programs, not just what kinds of formats we design or how we work a room.
Now it's 200 pages of stories from all over the world . They're all connected by a few frameworks that we used ourselves, but then improved based on learning from our own heroes.
Our list email growth has tapered off, which isn't a good sign. But I'm also writing this for me, to feel I can share some discoveries that help education programs keep up to a world that changes faster and faster. Then I might move on from education, or at least the grueling and CO2-consuming business of running these international programs.
Instead of sprints, now I'm putting in around a day per week, and hope to have another (hopefully final!) version out within months.