My Author-it Elevator Pitch

When you choose Author-it you are choosing

• Single Sourcing,
• Reusable content,
• Modular Writing,
• Assembled Documents
• and Content Management.

Why does Single Sourcing make sense?

Well, Author-it publishes to Print, Web, and Help formats and, given time and budget, you can customize anything and everything you want about those outputs. But what it means on the ground is that you are not writing in any one of those outputs using specific tools and creating independent formatting. In the old world order you’d use Framemaker for print, Robohelp for help, and Dreamweaver for online. You’d spend time formatting and carefully laying out the content in each of those tools. Estimates vary but authors can burn between 40% and 70% of their time making changes to the pagination and formatting of their documents. With single-sourcing that effort is made once up-front. The authors simply need to apply the styles to their content and the formatting looks after itself when you publish - BANG - you’ve now got half the work to do.

Why reuse content?

Look at it like a translation job. You might think that translation at 7 pence per word is expensive. How often do you stop to think what it costs to write the content in the first place. Can you put a value on that, per word? When you include all the research, reviews, editing, and updating, all the emails and coffee breaks, my back of an envelope calculation gives (100 page manual = £7000, Average 200 words per page, 7000p/200 =) about 35p per word. I’ll leave you to join the dots on this one... let’s just say that reusing chunks of text makes sound economic sense and with Author-it it is SO easy, particularly if you invest in Author-it Xtend which brings reuse to the paragraph level and creates consistency on a whole new level.

Why write in a modular style?

A friend of mine, John (@jashw0rth), hit the nail on the head for this one. From being tiny, we’ve been raised with books. The thing about a book is that it reveals information bit by bit. When, as an adult, you start reading manuals in order to do your job, if the information you need isn’t on the page you’re reading, you’ll trust it to be somewhere in the manual. You might keep reading or use the index or table of contents to locate it (or for online manuals, search the PDF). You don’t notice the extra effort because you’re conditioned to it. Now, if you practice chunking information into topic based modular documents you’ll quickly get into the habit of making sure all of the appropriate context is present in the topic or chunk and of providing links to the information that isn’t immediately available. When you then publish those topics to a print format it just makes a noticeably better document. The information you need is there when you need it. You no longer need to trust it will be there somewhere. The message is that we need modular writing for online help and hyperlinked formats but it even makes better printed documents.

What are assembled documents?

Once you have your information in topics you can quickly and easily, drag and drop topics to rearrange them into books for help systems, books for manuals, books aimed at different audiences or products. Assembled documents are another great way of reuse. You can reuse the same content across products or product versions without doing additional writing.. remember that figure of 35p per word?

What about content management?

I’m not going to pretend that all of this comes without a cost. You’ve got to learn a tool. You need to move your existing content into the new tool. You have processes; what will become of them? Author-it is a content management solution. It does help you manage your content. You can search for any text, title, release state. You can search by folder or by book. You can search and replace text in the results (I’m not sure if that’s a new feature but it is very cool). You can use the release states to mirror your processes and formally lock topics that are being reviewed or have been approved. You have that level of control. You can turn on history and store every change that’s ever made to an object, and revert them when you need to.

All of the management, security, and tracking tools that you get with a CMS like Author-it just aren’t available if you’re using file store or code control. And don’t worry, if you’re a small team or excessively paranoid, you can turn them all off... Or on as you prefer.

You already manage your content, why not use a modern tool that is designed for the job to help you?

Did I mention collaboration? 

No, but I’ll end there, thanks for giving me your eyes.

So that’s it, just to recap, Author-it offers;

• Single Sourcing,
• Reusable content,
• Modular Writing,
• Assembled Documents,
• Content Management,
• And collaboration.