Double Shift Press Presents Margaret Klein Salamon

We’re thrilled to introduce one of our inaugural Double Shift Press authors: Margaret Klein Salamon.

 
Margaret is the founder and director of The Climate Mobilization, a New York-based nonprofit that’s shifting the conversation about climate change, activism, and ultimately, the future of humanity.
 
The Climate Mobilization lays out a policy platform that approaches climate change as a global emergency that can—and must—be met head on with honest, reality-based solutions.
 
Margaret holds a PhD in clinical psychology as well as a degree in social anthropology, and this perspective informs The Climate Mobilization’s approach. In a recent article, she argues that we must respond to a changing climate by acknowledging and experiencing the dark feelings that this reality provokes. Only when we allow ourselves to feel fear, anxiety, and even despair will we be able to look at the cataclysmic specter of climate change honestly, and start grappling toward real solutions. And when we begin to enact these real solutions, we’ll begin to feel real and encompassing hope for our shared future.
 
Why is Margaret writing her book now? She wants to gather her existing work, currently published in disparate places. She wants to expound and intensify her ideas through examination and evidence. And she wants to use her book to launch a series of high-profile discussions that will spread The Climate Mobilization’s work.
 
Margaret is writing the future, and we feel lucky to be a part of it. Check back for more about her forthcoming book.
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Beta Readers: Recruiting the Right Feedback

While a beta release refers to the rollout of an early, mostly untested version of software, the beta phase (and the iterative form of software development in general) is an excellent way to pretest communications projects, too.
 
Software development usually proceeds from a pre-alpha phase (where R&D is completed), to an alpha phase, (where core functionality is built), to a beta phase, and finally to release.
 
That beta phase is so crucial because it puts the software—usually ugly and incomplete—out into the world. Chosen users can then play with it and provide the targeted feedback so necessary to completing and releasing the work.
 
Communications projects (reports, technical manuals, strategic plans) follow a somewhat similar route. First, there is the research and development; then, the outlining, drafting, and collating; finally, execution and testing.
 
But a beta release is rarely figured into this execution—and it definitely should be.
 
While most of us pay close attention to after-the-fact metrics, a beta release tests whether content is functional in a way that meets readers’ needs before delivery. Communicators can use the release to gain on-the-ground feedback and integrate it into a project ahead of publication.
 
To make the most of this opportunity, make recruiting beta readers (using a generic application like Google Forms to help identify members of your target audience) a part of R&D. Later, when the project is almost complete (but still malleable!) push it to beta readers with another form soliciting the feedback required. Common questions include responses to SME material or to calls to action.
 
For any client-facing project with a long development phase, a beta release creates a space in which meaningful info can be gathering and used. It’s a bit of a time investment, but the payoff makes it absolutely worthwhile.
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The Blog as Bricolage: How to Write the Best Blogs

Blog writing is an art. Stay with me for a minute—it’s true! In its best iterations, blog writing balances a bit of the personal with a bit of the public, a bit of the closed with a bit of the open, a bit of the crosslinkedly referential with a bit of (or better, a lot of) originality. 
 
Even though blogging always seems just about to go completely out of style, blogs have been around for a couple of decades. And they’re still going strong.
 
That’s partly because the best blogs share analogue ancestry with universally familiar forms of writing, especially old-timey diaries and commonplace books (those scrapbook ledgers The Atlantic once called “Tumblrs of an Earlier Era”).
 
It’s also because blogs that are both artfully personal and usefully public, referentially aware and inventively original will always find eager readers. 

Creating this kind of balanced blog is hard, though. And today’s guides spend a whole lot of time advocating a content-rich, social-media-driven, imminently scale-able approach.
 
That works for some, but to do more than saturate, to be a blog-writing artist and eventual influencer, we advocate approaching blogging as an art, specifically the art of bricolage. 
 
Bricolage means creating something new with whatever is at hand. The bricoleur (described by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind) is someone who “shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life.”
 
The blog-writing bricoleur uses the tools from the collective online dump heap—the rich content, the labyrinthine links, the trending tweets—to create a story that both imitates and initiates.
 
Jason Kottke is a bricoleur, and so is Tina Roth Eisenberg, and so is Austin Kleon.
 
And—lest the lineage feel too scant—so, too, is William Shakespeare.
 
According to a February report in the New York Times, the plagiarism software WCopyfind helped scholars discover new sources—especially George Noth’s unpublished manuscript—for many of Shakespeare’s plays.
 
He would have received an F for plagiarism, but by building out his “mental landscape” with the relevant content all around him, Shakespeare “stole like an artist,” helping to substantiate the bricoleur tradition that reaches its (potential) apotheosis in the internet age.
 
Shakespeare, the forefather of so much in the English writing, was also, in creating something newly brilliant from derivation, a bricoleur.
 
So if you’re starting a new blog, dusting off an old one, or looking for fresh inspiration for a blog already well-run, consider the strong (and Shakespearean) tradition of bricolage. Look at what’s already-out-there old and make it new.

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Nonprofit Communications in Uncertain Times

As anyone in the third sector knows, the 2016 election dramatically altered the landscape in which nonprofits operate. For some, these changes may even pose an existential danger.
 
So, what’s a nonprofit to do? How does an organization strategize in the face of an uncertain future?
 
This isn’t a hypothetical question for some of our clients, who are faced with the necessity of significantly expanding their pool of potential donors and partners. And for faith-based organizations (which face both shrinking government funding and shrinking congregations), connecting with a larger (secular) audience poses unique challenges.
 
Those challenges (and their solutions) provide useful insight for any mission-driven organization.
 
We talked about the challenges of communicating in an uncertain environment with one of our recent clients, Cheryl Behrent, director of Sarah’s… an Oasis for Women. Sarah’s is a Saint Paul-based nonprofit program that provides housing and crucial services for women who have experienced severe violence and trauma. Because it offers a safety net for women who don’t have access to any other resources, Sarah’s works primarily with immigrants, whose position in the United States is increasingly tenuous. And like many other nonprofits, Sarah’s faces an ever-increasing demand for the services.
 
What does the uncertainty of the current landscape mean for Sarah’s message?
 
Cheryl says that flexibility is key. Sarah’s was founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, St Paul Province (CSJ). The CSJs and their ministries foundation provide approximately 50% of Sarah’s funding. The other 50% comes from individual donors and grants from private foundations.
 
“When I’m in a church setting or faith-based community, the emphasis is that we’re a ministry—people are naturally interested to hear about the history of the Sisters, and our connection to the Province,” she notes.
 
But as Cheryl points out, it’s important to be able to adopt other frames of reference, depending on the audience. She says, “The CSJs value interfaith connections,” so Sarah’s has always given priority to reaching beyond its primary stakeholders and creating broad connections.
 
That means being adept at considering a wide range of ways that people might find to connect with an organization. For example, Cheryl often prefers to start talks with a Q and A, to understand what her audience’s interests are.
 
This kind of flexibility is predicated on having a solid foundation of clearly defined values and a clearly articulated mission. That foundation gives an organization the ability to adapt its mission statement into an audience-focused positioning statement—that is, a statement that describes why an organization is uniquely qualified to accomplish a goal that a specific audience cares about.
 
That sort of attention to audience is something that’s easy to overlook for nonprofit organizations that are (rightly) focused on accomplishing their core mission. But, as Cheryl recognizes, it’s a key example of the kind of nimble thinking that’s required of nonprofits now more than ever.
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Naming Our New Baby

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​Between us, Jess and I have named four cats, five children, two dissertations, assorted books, and a business. What have we learned? Sometimes a name is instantly, exactly right…and sometimes it takes a little time to grow into.
 
Double Shift Press…it took a little time.
 
Actually, we researched, registered, and sketched a whole webpage around a totally different name. But that name wasn’t perfect, so we decided to let it go. When we went back to our list of possibilities, Double Shift Press had already started feeling exactly right.
 
Double Shift is our second shift, after all. But it’s not a side hustle—it’s a concentration and an expansion of what we already do at Modern Writing Services.

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Double Shift is our clients’ second shift, too. Developing, writing, designing, and publishing a book is a lot of (very worthwhile) work. Perhaps even more so for women, who are already—as Arlie Hochschild wrote way back in 1989 in The Second Shift—uniquely accustomed to this reality.
 
But Double Shift is about way more than work, even very worthwhile work. It’s about the—quite literal—expansion of possibilities.
 
Did you know that in the late 1800s, a “double shift key machine” described a category of typewriter with two shift keys? Adding a second shift key to the keyboard enabled each key to denote three characters instead of just one or even two.

​​So Double Shift Press also speaks to the value of collaboration, and to the way that collaboration can make a good book exponentially better (for authors and readers).
 
We’re excited to share news about our inaugural titles—stay tuned!

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Present Better!

Are you a human? Then you are probably sometimes in the position of presenting your ideas to other humans in a manner that you hope is convincing. Maybe you regularly give presentations at work. Maybe it’s the occasional board or PTO meeting. Maybe you’re in charge of the family reunion slideshow. Or maybe you just need ammunition to convince your spouse to watch the show you want to watch.
 
Whatever the case, you want your presentation to be good. Because as we all know from bitter experience, little compares to an awful presentation.
 
Luckily, you don’t have to be a designer to create a truly engaging presentation. If your budget doesn’t allow you to hire a professional, you can find free tools that make your presentation a pleasure to behold. One tool we like is Prezi. Here’s why:


​We like Prezi, but we like Zoho Show and Visme and Oomfo, too. How do you overthrow slide deck standards? And what tools do you use?

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All the Good Books (Lately)

In this time of tech-induced attention-deficit-disorder, in which distraction is censorship, reading books for pleasure is both a powerful antidote and a tiny commitment to the coming revolution.
 
Maybe I go too far?
 
And yet, a few books over the last few weeks have given me so much…well, if not deep and democratic thoughtfulness, then an opportunity for the kind of far-ranging meditative rumination that makes life meaningful. If you also require an unTwitter, consider taking a tour of the following titles.
 
First, head west to L.A., where IQ (Joe Ide) is set. It’s a detective story featuring the kind of Sherlockian genius who is erratic and cold but also earnest and redeemable. It hits some familiar urban-mystery beats, but its South-Central-L.A. backdrop is so playful and poignant, and the idiosyncratic detective is so over the top and understated, that it exceeds the category.
 
Next up, travel to rainy Dublin, where Conversations with Friends (Sally Rooney) unfurls. It was a critical darling of late 2017, and though I almost hated the emo-reanimating, aggressively first-person narrator, I felt like I got her (which…?). The book’s inability to conceive of a woman in her late-30s as anything but completely irrelevant (sorry, ladies) is (mostly) offset by an interestingly indirect, unresolved depiction of marriage.
 
Now go back (way back) to the 1970s Midwest of Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng). Everyone loves Little Fires Everywhere, but Ng’s first book about a disconnected interracial family is affecting. I spent the first half arching my brows at the pat characters and adherence to the plot’s pattern. I spent the last half crying my eyes out. And it wasn’t just because I was sad. It was because—what’s the cliché?—the world is so beautiful and life is so short.
 
End your tour in France with How to Behave in a Crowd (Camille Bordas). Isadore, the protagonist-narrator, is an empathetic 11-year-old kid brother of five genius older siblings. His anthropological view of his family, and his tendency to engage rather than alienate make him a delightful narrative companion. Also delightful: This is Bordas’s first book in English, and the slight disruption in the English-language rendering of the French family is very charming.
 
These books took me places, but mostly by offering a respite from the hot takes and Twitter feed that regularly ignite the flames on the side of my face. I wouldn’t call them escapist, though—or I would, but what they allowed me to escape was my own tiny sphere of tech-abetted interiority. My new problem is that the only book left on my bedside table is Behave. Help! Which books have helped you log off, mute all, and carry on?
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Why You Need Communications Templates

Kudos if your practical streak compelled you to continue reading past that headline. The fact is, when you think of a template, you’re probably not moved to soaring flights of spiritual inspiration.
 
But maybe you should be. After all, the word template has its etymological roots in temple, a consecrated place of worship. The closer relative templet came into usage in the 17th century, to refer specifically to part of the support structure of a building (holy or otherwise). And by the 19th century, that architectural usage had developed into the word template as we use it today: a pattern or gauge that provides a guide for the creation of something new.
 
If you ask us, it’s not crazy to think of a template as a sort of holy architecture for communications.
 
Every organization has routine communications to create, whether a simple blog post or complex client-facing correspondence. And too often, we waste time reinventing the wheel (and risk introducing errors or inconsistencies) when it’s time to get those communications out the door.
 
Not only are templates enormous time and money savers, they also ensure that your communications are visually and formally consistent, and anchored in your house style.
A template that provides the structure for visuals and content makes simple communications almost effortless. And even with more complex communications, such as strategic plans or project reports, working with a template frees up your brain—and your budget—to focus on your message.
 
Building a temple of templates: it’s often one of the first things we discuss when consulting with clients about how to streamline and improve their communications. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. When creating a blog post, a slide deck, or a project report, set your document design, determine your formatting styles, and block out space for visuals and captions. Then your save your work as a template.
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Piecing It Together

An appropriately few number of people know it, but I (Molly Gage, here) once completed a dissertation about the ways that bits and pieces, scraps and fragments are collected and saved and put back together.
 
It’s called Feverish Fragments and Dis-eased Desire: The Archive as Literature. (Roll your eyes if you must, but hey, it’s a product of context.)
 
In it, I use 225 sources to write 300 pages with 400 footnotes about archives—those places (real or virtual) where all our stuff is saved.
 
I say that it’s about archives, but it’s really about the desire to save stuff, and sometimes to save all the stuff, to keep it forever in the hopes of informing an indeterminate future about the importance of The Past.
 
Because of this personal fragment, I am always particularly drawn to stories about making meaning from scraps. Case in point: The New York Times article Scanning an Ancient Biblical Text that Humans Fear to Open about a severely damaged book (dubbed M.910), written between 400 – 600 A.D., that contains a heretofore illegible Coptic version of the Acts of the Apostles.
 
The codex, too delicate to be opened, is being deciphered through x-ray technology that can both identify the book’s letters and assign those letters to appropriate positions on scanned and software-modeled pages.
 
The result? A story from a book that is so damaged and so fragile that it can’t even be opened to be read.
 
I love the tale emerging from this technology (and not just because the tech suggests a way to access a few of the other fragmentary texts I discuss in my diss). I love it because it offers an accessible example of the vital link between technology and reading, bytes and bits.
 
Technology used to be feared as a tool that would close the books and kill the stories. But M.910 contributes to the argument that technology is as imperative to modern storytelling as it was to The Past. It’s just that now, instead of bound books and printing presses, we look to x-rays and algorithms (and blogs [and Twitter]) to help us create new, whole narratives from old bits and pieces.
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Writing a New Chapter: Double Shift Press

Thanks to the good folks at VIDA, we now have nine years of hard data to demonstrate what’s been anecdotally obvious since the invention of the printing press: fewer women are published than men.
 
Women writers are underrepresented in virtually every segment of the publishing world, from magazines to newspapers to books. And their books get reviewed far less frequently and garner fewer accolades than men’s.
 
Of course, the causes—and implications—of these disparities are complex. They run as deep as any of our cultural wounds; and like it or not, we’re in an age when those wounds are laid bare in a new way.
 
There’s no easy path to parity, but there is increasing (if contentious) discussion about how to get there.
 
We started our publishing imprint, Double Shift Press, to join that dialogue.
 
At Double Shift Press, we aim to advance women’s voices in critical conversations about business and leadership, education and art, and politics and activism. This means that we not only publish the work of women authors, but we also help women conceive, write, design, and produce smart, thought-provoking work.
 
We still create and perfect business and nonprofit communications through Modern Writing Services. But now, through Double Shift Press, we partner with thought leaders, entrepreneurs, activists, and artists to turn their ideas, mind maps, and (sometimes endlessly worked-over) drafts into gripping narratives.
  
We can’t wait to share our authors’ stories with you!
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