Introduction

A Book Sprint enables you to write a Book in 2-5 days.

Book Sprint is the name given to collaborative authoring in a short time with the express goal of producing a book. The Book Sprint concept was devised by Tomas Krag. Tomas conceived of book production as a collaborative activity involving substantial donations of volunteer time.

Tomas pioneered the development of the Book Sprint as a 3-4 month production cycle, while Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals, was keen to continue with the idea of an "extreme book sprint," which compressed the authoring and production of a print-ready book into a 5 day process.

During the first year of the Book Sprint concept, Adam and FLOSS Manuals experimented with several models of sprint - from entirely remote (online) Sprints, to casual 'walk-in' events, and intensive Book Sprints. Each Sprint has produced comprehensive high quality material in amazingly short time frames.

So far these sprints have used the FLOSS Manuals platform for producing the material. Over time we have experimented with this platform and extended and optimised it for use in Book Sprints. We used this experience to design and build a software dedicated to this purpose - Booki - for Book Sprints on any topic.

The Book Sprint process has three important components :

1. the technology - there is currently only one Book Sprint platform available - Booki
2. the facilitator - an experienced Book Sprint facilitator is an asset, however at the time of writing there is only one! Which is one of the reasons documentation of the process is important - to spread the methodology.
3. the contributors - the people that you want to create the book

There are a lot of variables in the Book Sprint process - where will you have the Sprint? How do you choose your contributors? How do you work out the scope of the book you wish to produce? How do you achieve fluid and consistent narrative? These and many more are questions that will arise. It is true that if you know which questions to ask, and have some experience in answering them, then you will optimise the Sprint and get better results. However you should also keep in mind that you can get surprisingly good results by just getting a group of passionate people together, appoint a facilitor, use Booki and start writing!