We are celebrating the release of this: the Musicality book! Woohoo! This book has been in the works for two years or 15 years, depending on how you measure it, and it’s so exciting that it’s out.
It’s taken me a while to do this announcement because, as we unpack in this episode, it’s been a difficult process. So the book is out. Sort of, mostly. And it’s brutal that it’s not just a clear-cut “It’s out! We’re done! Hooray!”
In this episode, we’ll share a bit about why it’s still slightly fuzzy as to whether it’s out or not, and a bit of behind the scenes of everything that’s been going on…
Watch the episode:
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
Links and Resources
Enjoying Musicality Now? Please support the show by rating and reviewing it!
We are celebrating the release of this: the Musicality book! Woohoo! This book has been in the works for two years or 15 years, depending on how you measure it, and it’s so exciting that it’s out.
It’s taken me a while to do this announcement because, as we unpack in this episode, it’s been a difficult process. So the book is out. Sort of, mostly. And it’s brutal that it’s not just a clear-cut “It’s out! We’re done! Hooray!”
In this episode, we’ll share a bit about why it’s still slightly fuzzy as to whether it’s out or not, and a bit of behind the scenes of everything that’s been going on…
Watch the episode:
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
Links and Resources
Enjoying Musicality Now? Please support the show by rating and reviewing it!
Transcript
Hey, hey! We are back with another episode of Musicality Now, and celebrating the release of this: the Musicality book! Woohoo!
So this is a slightly belated celebration of the release of the Musicality book, which has been in the works for two years, 15 years, however you measure it, and it’s so exciting.
But it’s taken me a while to do this episode because, as I’m going to unpack today, it’s been a difficult process. So the book is out. Sort of, mostly. And it kills me that it’s not just a clear-cut “It’s out! We’re done! Hooray!”
But in this episode, I want to share a bit about why it’s still slightly fuzzy as to whether it’s out or not, and a bit of behind the scenes of everything that’s been going on.
So the writing is done, the book exists. And it is epic. It is huge.
It is 844 pages long. I think the page numbers go up to 830, but from a printing perspective, 844 pages. And it is just jam-packed with everything, all the best material and ideas and frameworks and methods that we’ve developed over 15 years.
And I am so happy with how it turned out. It was a huge project. This thing weighs like a kilogram and a half, like three and a half pounds.
And I’m just really happy that we’ve managed to make a clear, coherent, cohesive tome, like an encyclopedia, almost, of musicality. And it’s definitely not perfect, I don’t think any book is ever perfect. But I’m relieved that it became something that I can look at and be like “yeah, that’s how it was meant to be.”
So it exists, which is super cool. And the digital PDF version, the digital edition is out. And I know tons of you have already been diving in and reading that digital version, which is really fun to see.
And such lovely feedback so far. Thank you to everyone who’s been saying nice things about it, including, you know, from my peers in music education, people like David Reed and Tim Topham and Glory St Germaine have just said really, really lovely things about it. And so that reassures me somewhat that it is, it is up to scratch and it is everything it was meant to be.
And it’s just been a blitz of a few weeks. It’s why it’s taken me a while to do this episode, because I had been doing the Inside The Book episodes, and then the show took a little break and I expected to do, like a big release day episode, sharing that it was out now.
But it’s just been a blitz. Not least, we’ve had the Bootcamp going on. The Musicality Bootcamp. We’re halfway through now with this incredible Bootcamp, the team have just been doing such a phenomenal job bringing everything in the book to life in like, an interactive week-by-week training experience for beginners and experienced musicality folk alike. And the Bootcamp has just been going amazing. It’s fantastic.
But all of this excitement and activity and delight has been, honestly, a bit dampened by just a painful delay in fulfilling all of the physical copies that were ordered.
So the good news is we had over 1700 people pre-order the book, which was like four or five times what I had hoped we would have in terms of interest in the book.
So that’s awesome. But I was expecting to ship them all out on release day, and it’s just, it has not worked out that way. And I know some of you have been eagerly, anxiously waiting for your copy.
And that’s why I wanted to do this episode, not just to celebrate “hooray, it’s out” but also to explain why it’s not necessarily in your hands yet.
It’s funny, Andrew asked me on our team call yesterday, he was like “have you been able to take a rest yet?” And I was like “No. No, not yet”.
Like, after a blitz of writing the thing, I thought I would be able to breathe a sigh of relief and rest and recuperate. But honestly, until every copy is in every person’s hands, I haven’t been able to stop.
So just to explain a little bit what’s been going on…
We had originally expected to fulfil this, to print it and ship it out with Amazon. So Amazon offer a print-on-demand service. It’s all very easy, it’s automated, it’s quick, and that was our plan, which would have let us have copies in people’s hands release week, right away.
But the book turned out, like I said, epic. Like, more epic than I expected. I thought it was going to be 500 pages and then it was looking like 550.
550 is Amazon’s limit for hardcover printing. And right up until the last few weeks, it was looking like we’d be fine, we’d be in that 550. But then, long story short, between diagrams and aside boxes and formatting and layout, it went beyond that.
And rather than do, like a brutal, heavy edit just for the sake of fitting Amazon’s guidelines, I was like, if this thing needs to be 800 pages, it should be 800 pages. So that was a kind of last-minute discovery and meant we needed another supplier.
And we looked into so many suppliers, I can’t tell you. I had conversations one to one with the people from various suppliers, and we got the ball rolling with a few in parallel to try and minimize the delay as much as possible.
But there were a bunch of factors I didn’t see coming, to be quite honest.
And I didn’t want to compromise quality. Like, there were options, like printing it in paperback instead or doing, like, a really quick-and-dirty print run. And, I wanted to make… Like, this is a book that deserves to sit on your shelf in a high quality way. And I know a lot of you who’ve pre-ordered a copy feel like that, you’re like, “yeah, this is a thing worth owning”.
So I wasn’t going to compromise on the quality of it. So just to give an example, I don’t know if I have one here, let me see. Yeah, so one of these.
So this is a seven by ten version. I don’t know if you can see, like, what we’re going with is the normal hardcover size. For a while leading up to the release date, I thought we would publish in seven by ten, seven inches by ten inches instead, which would allow for better page count.
And it looked like that would be a route forwards, but the readability was just rubbish. I was like “this is harder work to read lines this long”. And that’s one example of where it seemed like there was a route forward, but then there wasn’t.
And then one supplier was looking good, but then they sent us the sample and the layout was, like, completely skewiff. Another one provided it, but then the cover was gloss instead of matte. And it’s a small thing, but it kind of matters for the feel of the book.
And so there were all of these issues that were unexpected. On top of having, like, four or five times as many pre-orders meant some suppliers were like “oh, yeah, we can definitely help you with that”. And then three conversations in it turned out their timeline was like “we can ship them in December”. And I was like “we can’t keep people waiting three months for this book!”
And so, long story short, there was no option that would maintain quality, handle that scale and do it in a very quick fashion and just, you know, for what it’s worth. Like, this is not a high profit book for us. It’s not like we could have, you know, made a smaller margin and got it into your hands sooner. Even barely breaking even, it just wasn’t an option.
And what killed me was that often the public info about what was possible was just completely wrong. Like, people would say “we can print and ship in two days”. And actually, when you get into it with them and you get the process started, it’s like, well, it takes a week to approve the manuscript, and then it’ll be four business days to print it, and then we’ll ship that out to you. Rush shipping, which should be two days, but actually it’s four, and then there’s a weekend in the middle. So you’re talking about, like, two or three weeks just to get to the point of being able to do the actual printing.
And for someone who comes from the digital world where, you know, my team and I can be like “let’s do something!” and we do it today or tomorrow, it’s just, it’s utterly insane. Like, it has been driving me insane. And it’s unfathomable to me how this is still the reality of the print industry, when in 2024, you figure, you know, you should be able to print the thing and ship the thing.
But anyway, all of that, just to say there’s a lot of, you don’t know what you don’t know in this. And obviously, in an ideal world, you’re figuring out all of this stuff in the months leading up to the release, and I totally take responsibility that we weren’t able to do that.
If you don’t know, we’re still a relatively small company. We’re a team of, like, ten people, and we were really relying on the speed of Amazon, which was our expected plan. We did have a backup supplier lined up, I had a plan B in mind in case that didn’t work out. But I, like I just said, the promise doesn’t always match up with the reality once you get into it.
So the upshot is it’s just been like, an incredibly frustrating process of trying to find a workable plan and move it as quickly as humanly possible.
And I don’t share all of this to make excuses or to gripe, but just because I know a lot of people have been wondering when their copy will arrive, and obviously, we’ve been replying when people ask, but I know a lot of people don’t ask, they just kind of sit there wondering.
And I know it’s probably also hard to imagine why there could be such delays. Like, if the book is written, why can’t you just print and ship me a copy? Totally get it. And again, in 2024, it should be so simple to print and ship a book!
But this combination of factors between the length and wanting it high quality and the number of copies to be printed, it’s just not something you can turn around super fast.
So, anyway, the upshot is we’re still working through shipping out all 1700 (woo!) orders, and I hate leaving people waiting. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to me on a personal level to not have it in people’s hands yet.
And I also know from personal experience how annoying it can be when you order something and it’s meant to arrive soon and then it doesn’t. For what little it’s worth, I’ve been going through that times ten trying to work with these suppliers.
So, anyway, yeah, just thinking about all of the lessons and modules and courses and live calls we’ve done at Musical U over the last 15 years, I think, like, literally 99.9% of them have happened on time, as planned. But of course, that 0.1% of times is still super annoying to the people affected.
And hopefully you can gather it’s also intensely frustrating to me and the team, not least because so much of it in this case, is out of our hands. Like, as much effort and energy and willpower as we throw at it, as much money as we throw at it, like, there’s just limits to what we can do to accelerate things.
And, you know, overall, everyone’s been super patient and understanding, and I so appreciate that. I know that the small number who have been feeling impatient or angsty about it, it’s only because they really want this book and they’re excited to receive it. And that’s awesome.
And the good news is we’re coming out of that painful slog now, and that’s why I had a little bit of bandwidth to jump on and share some of this behind-the-scenes.
We’re nearly there and I’m really happy with the suppliers we’ve settled on now. It turns out we need two, one for US, one for international, the way things are working.
But it means we should now be able to ship out orders promptly going forwards, so we won’t have this big delay. It’s just this initial batch that we got behind the curve on, and all I can say is, this will be worth the wait.
When it’s in your hands, I am confident you’ll feel like, okay, you know, it’s annoying it wasn’t here on day one, but now I have this thing.
So I’m so excited. I’m so excited it’s out, and I’m happy to be finally getting it into the hands of so many musicians.
If you didn’t already and you want to, you can order a copy at musicalitybook.com. and we have the option there to get the full digital edition immediately. We’ve also released the first several chapters of the audiobook edition if you’re more of a listener, so you can dig into it right away.
And the physical copies will be arriving with everyone in the next week or two now, like, we’re really, really nearly there. So that’s it for this one.
I just want to say thank you again for your patience if you’re one of our 1700 plus who’ve ordered a copy. Thank you so much for putting your faith in us. Thank you so much for your patience and for all of the buzz and enthusiasm from the people who’ve been digging into the digital edition.
That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
Transcript
Hey, hey! We are back with another episode of Musicality Now, and celebrating the release of this: the Musicality book! Woohoo!
So this is a slightly belated celebration of the release of the Musicality book, which has been in the works for two years, 15 years, however you measure it, and it’s so exciting.
But it’s taken me a while to do this episode because, as I’m going to unpack today, it’s been a difficult process. So the book is out. Sort of, mostly. And it kills me that it’s not just a clear-cut “It’s out! We’re done! Hooray!”
But in this episode, I want to share a bit about why it’s still slightly fuzzy as to whether it’s out or not, and a bit of behind the scenes of everything that’s been going on.
So the writing is done, the book exists. And it is epic. It is huge.
It is 844 pages long. I think the page numbers go up to 830, but from a printing perspective, 844 pages. And it is just jam-packed with everything, all the best material and ideas and frameworks and methods that we’ve developed over 15 years.
And I am so happy with how it turned out. It was a huge project. This thing weighs like a kilogram and a half, like three and a half pounds.
And I’m just really happy that we’ve managed to make a clear, coherent, cohesive tome, like an encyclopedia, almost, of musicality. And it’s definitely not perfect, I don’t think any book is ever perfect. But I’m relieved that it became something that I can look at and be like “yeah, that’s how it was meant to be.”
So it exists, which is super cool. And the digital PDF version, the digital edition is out. And I know tons of you have already been diving in and reading that digital version, which is really fun to see.
And such lovely feedback so far. Thank you to everyone who’s been saying nice things about it, including, you know, from my peers in music education, people like David Reed and Tim Topham and Glory St Germaine have just said really, really lovely things about it. And so that reassures me somewhat that it is, it is up to scratch and it is everything it was meant to be.
And it’s just been a blitz of a few weeks. It’s why it’s taken me a while to do this episode, because I had been doing the Inside The Book episodes, and then the show took a little break and I expected to do, like a big release day episode, sharing that it was out now.
But it’s just been a blitz. Not least, we’ve had the Bootcamp going on. The Musicality Bootcamp. We’re halfway through now with this incredible Bootcamp, the team have just been doing such a phenomenal job bringing everything in the book to life in like, an interactive week-by-week training experience for beginners and experienced musicality folk alike. And the Bootcamp has just been going amazing. It’s fantastic.
But all of this excitement and activity and delight has been, honestly, a bit dampened by just a painful delay in fulfilling all of the physical copies that were ordered.
So the good news is we had over 1700 people pre-order the book, which was like four or five times what I had hoped we would have in terms of interest in the book.
So that’s awesome. But I was expecting to ship them all out on release day, and it’s just, it has not worked out that way. And I know some of you have been eagerly, anxiously waiting for your copy.
And that’s why I wanted to do this episode, not just to celebrate “hooray, it’s out” but also to explain why it’s not necessarily in your hands yet.
It’s funny, Andrew asked me on our team call yesterday, he was like “have you been able to take a rest yet?” And I was like “No. No, not yet”.
Like, after a blitz of writing the thing, I thought I would be able to breathe a sigh of relief and rest and recuperate. But honestly, until every copy is in every person’s hands, I haven’t been able to stop.
So just to explain a little bit what’s been going on…
We had originally expected to fulfil this, to print it and ship it out with Amazon. So Amazon offer a print-on-demand service. It’s all very easy, it’s automated, it’s quick, and that was our plan, which would have let us have copies in people’s hands release week, right away.
But the book turned out, like I said, epic. Like, more epic than I expected. I thought it was going to be 500 pages and then it was looking like 550.
550 is Amazon’s limit for hardcover printing. And right up until the last few weeks, it was looking like we’d be fine, we’d be in that 550. But then, long story short, between diagrams and aside boxes and formatting and layout, it went beyond that.
And rather than do, like a brutal, heavy edit just for the sake of fitting Amazon’s guidelines, I was like, if this thing needs to be 800 pages, it should be 800 pages. So that was a kind of last-minute discovery and meant we needed another supplier.
And we looked into so many suppliers, I can’t tell you. I had conversations one to one with the people from various suppliers, and we got the ball rolling with a few in parallel to try and minimize the delay as much as possible.
But there were a bunch of factors I didn’t see coming, to be quite honest.
And I didn’t want to compromise quality. Like, there were options, like printing it in paperback instead or doing, like, a really quick-and-dirty print run. And, I wanted to make… Like, this is a book that deserves to sit on your shelf in a high quality way. And I know a lot of you who’ve pre-ordered a copy feel like that, you’re like, “yeah, this is a thing worth owning”.
So I wasn’t going to compromise on the quality of it. So just to give an example, I don’t know if I have one here, let me see. Yeah, so one of these.
So this is a seven by ten version. I don’t know if you can see, like, what we’re going with is the normal hardcover size. For a while leading up to the release date, I thought we would publish in seven by ten, seven inches by ten inches instead, which would allow for better page count.
And it looked like that would be a route forwards, but the readability was just rubbish. I was like “this is harder work to read lines this long”. And that’s one example of where it seemed like there was a route forward, but then there wasn’t.
And then one supplier was looking good, but then they sent us the sample and the layout was, like, completely skewiff. Another one provided it, but then the cover was gloss instead of matte. And it’s a small thing, but it kind of matters for the feel of the book.
And so there were all of these issues that were unexpected. On top of having, like, four or five times as many pre-orders meant some suppliers were like “oh, yeah, we can definitely help you with that”. And then three conversations in it turned out their timeline was like “we can ship them in December”. And I was like “we can’t keep people waiting three months for this book!”
And so, long story short, there was no option that would maintain quality, handle that scale and do it in a very quick fashion and just, you know, for what it’s worth. Like, this is not a high profit book for us. It’s not like we could have, you know, made a smaller margin and got it into your hands sooner. Even barely breaking even, it just wasn’t an option.
And what killed me was that often the public info about what was possible was just completely wrong. Like, people would say “we can print and ship in two days”. And actually, when you get into it with them and you get the process started, it’s like, well, it takes a week to approve the manuscript, and then it’ll be four business days to print it, and then we’ll ship that out to you. Rush shipping, which should be two days, but actually it’s four, and then there’s a weekend in the middle. So you’re talking about, like, two or three weeks just to get to the point of being able to do the actual printing.
And for someone who comes from the digital world where, you know, my team and I can be like “let’s do something!” and we do it today or tomorrow, it’s just, it’s utterly insane. Like, it has been driving me insane. And it’s unfathomable to me how this is still the reality of the print industry, when in 2024, you figure, you know, you should be able to print the thing and ship the thing.
But anyway, all of that, just to say there’s a lot of, you don’t know what you don’t know in this. And obviously, in an ideal world, you’re figuring out all of this stuff in the months leading up to the release, and I totally take responsibility that we weren’t able to do that.
If you don’t know, we’re still a relatively small company. We’re a team of, like, ten people, and we were really relying on the speed of Amazon, which was our expected plan. We did have a backup supplier lined up, I had a plan B in mind in case that didn’t work out. But I, like I just said, the promise doesn’t always match up with the reality once you get into it.
So the upshot is it’s just been like, an incredibly frustrating process of trying to find a workable plan and move it as quickly as humanly possible.
And I don’t share all of this to make excuses or to gripe, but just because I know a lot of people have been wondering when their copy will arrive, and obviously, we’ve been replying when people ask, but I know a lot of people don’t ask, they just kind of sit there wondering.
And I know it’s probably also hard to imagine why there could be such delays. Like, if the book is written, why can’t you just print and ship me a copy? Totally get it. And again, in 2024, it should be so simple to print and ship a book!
But this combination of factors between the length and wanting it high quality and the number of copies to be printed, it’s just not something you can turn around super fast.
So, anyway, the upshot is we’re still working through shipping out all 1700 (woo!) orders, and I hate leaving people waiting. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to me on a personal level to not have it in people’s hands yet.
And I also know from personal experience how annoying it can be when you order something and it’s meant to arrive soon and then it doesn’t. For what little it’s worth, I’ve been going through that times ten trying to work with these suppliers.
So, anyway, yeah, just thinking about all of the lessons and modules and courses and live calls we’ve done at Musical U over the last 15 years, I think, like, literally 99.9% of them have happened on time, as planned. But of course, that 0.1% of times is still super annoying to the people affected.
And hopefully you can gather it’s also intensely frustrating to me and the team, not least because so much of it in this case, is out of our hands. Like, as much effort and energy and willpower as we throw at it, as much money as we throw at it, like, there’s just limits to what we can do to accelerate things.
And, you know, overall, everyone’s been super patient and understanding, and I so appreciate that. I know that the small number who have been feeling impatient or angsty about it, it’s only because they really want this book and they’re excited to receive it. And that’s awesome.
And the good news is we’re coming out of that painful slog now, and that’s why I had a little bit of bandwidth to jump on and share some of this behind-the-scenes.
We’re nearly there and I’m really happy with the suppliers we’ve settled on now. It turns out we need two, one for US, one for international, the way things are working.
But it means we should now be able to ship out orders promptly going forwards, so we won’t have this big delay. It’s just this initial batch that we got behind the curve on, and all I can say is, this will be worth the wait.
When it’s in your hands, I am confident you’ll feel like, okay, you know, it’s annoying it wasn’t here on day one, but now I have this thing.
So I’m so excited. I’m so excited it’s out, and I’m happy to be finally getting it into the hands of so many musicians.
If you didn’t already and you want to, you can order a copy at musicalitybook.com. and we have the option there to get the full digital edition immediately. We’ve also released the first several chapters of the audiobook edition if you’re more of a listener, so you can dig into it right away.
And the physical copies will be arriving with everyone in the next week or two now, like, we’re really, really nearly there. So that’s it for this one.
I just want to say thank you again for your patience if you’re one of our 1700 plus who’ve ordered a copy. Thank you so much for putting your faith in us. Thank you so much for your patience and for all of the buzz and enthusiasm from the people who’ve been digging into the digital edition.
That’s it for this one. Cheers! And go make some music!
Subscribe For Future Episodes!
Enjoying the show? Please consider rating and reviewing it!
