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By Jack Macaulay

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LIGHT SWITCH PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com

Copyright © 2015 by Jack Macaulay Photographs courtesy of the author Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not re-producing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permis-sion. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Macaulay, Jack, 2000– Words: Stories, tips, photography / Jack Macaulay. pages cm ISBN 978-0-648-17902-7 PN2287.H27A3 2015 791.4302'8092—dc23 2015004927

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experi-ences, and the words are the author’s alone.

Cover design: Jack Macaulay & Bob Lockhart Cover photograph: Flickr

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To all the people who have taken me on this amazing journey (so far), thank you.

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SAMPLE

Ok. How to start a book. To be completely honest, I have no idea. Obviously I

am not a professional writer in any capacity and don’t worry, I’m not writing the

next Game of Thrones novel here. As you’ll see on the cover I decided to sum-

marise this book as “Stories, Tips and Photography”.

Now as I’m not super famous (or past the age of 60) I don’t have too many sto-

ries to tell you all. What my aim of this ‘journey’, shall we say, is to introduce you

to how I do things. There will be one of those ‘chapter things’ (is it called a con-

tents page?) at the beginning so don’t worry, if you are not that interested in my

editing and photography tips skip them out.

This book is made for great displays and all I can hope is that you have been

sucked into the apple wormhole and are using one of their (many) devices to

read this book. My intentions for you as a reader are to see the detail and colour

of “words” and what they can do (hence the title). I’m not talking about chang-

ing the font colour, no. I’m talking about attempting to bring you into the para-

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Chapter 1 writing a book

graphs that I type, write (but mostly scribble down whilst bored somewhere

away from my mac). The reason I hope you're reading this on the fancy new 4k,

retina enhanced iPhone 12 is so I can show you the true richness and quality of

these pictures (and possibly even videos. Thanks, Apple).

Also the title. Your probably thinking “what the actual f**k?” So am I. As a de-

signer I’m always looking for logos and names that scream modern design. Yes,

the age old saying ‘Don’t judge a book by it’s cover’ but then hang on, what’s

the point in the cover then? I was desperately trying conjure up a better title

than “I’m not really a writer” (cause that’s what it was gonna be) and I google

“words”. I just simply needed inspiration and sadly it took a few page clicks for

me to realise that I had created the title without even knowing it. I’m just that

much of a genius.

Another question you’ll probably be asking is “Why are you actually writing a

book?” The answer is an influence. Just about every other ‘YouTuber’ has/is writ-

ing a book. Zoella* is in the process of finishing her second book, Joe Sugg is

about to release his graphic novel. Things are getting pretty exciting for us all.

Actually looking at that sentence I just wrote it sounds as if I’m best buds with

the gleam team. As I have no deadline for this book I have no idea when it will

be complete.

See that’s the problem when you're publisher doesn’t give you a deadline.

You’ve got nothing to push you to complete your project. I guess I’m just going

to have to rely on myself and self-motivation (I don’t have a lot of it). I mean my

evident problem is that I love to do the fun things first. You understand what I

mean surely.

I’m not so sure if you’ve been in this exact situation (unless you’ve written a

book, then good on you) but the minute I’d finalised the idea and finished writ-

ing up the plans I went straight to designing the cover. By the way, make sure

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you tweet me to tell me what you think of this whole conundrum as I really

would like to get some feedback (even if it’s not positive), but back to the cover.

I had this really cool idea where I would fill in the text with some of my favourite

photos, the only problem was, well it essentially looked s**t. The colours didn’t

match up and it wasn’t contrasted to the background enough. Shame. However

as you should have seen I did manage to find the right photos and my idea was

complete. I think I must have just been procrastinating writing. Trust me, try writ-

ing a book. So far I’m not exactly entertained. “Charlie bit my finger autotune re-

mix” entertains me more. Like seriously, I’m listening to it on a loop to help me

write this chapter.

Now as I need to think of ways to promote this book, I need to reach out to a

number of different audiences. Here’s something I have never told anyone (I

think). My male to the female percentage for my subscribers is 42% female and

58% male. This means that whenever I create content I have to incorporate such

a large demographic into my filming and editing. Unsurprisingly my age groups

are most popular in the 13-17 & 18-24. This does make it easier to cater for

these age groups as most of their brains are melted and they are just interested

in the new episode of Geordie shore or what the best dance song is at the mo-

ment (right now pop is going through a tough time). Anyway, what I was trying

to prove was that there is a high possibility that every person who reads this

book will be different from each other (actually that probably 100% going to hap-

pen). They will like different foods, love different people and read different

books. But something has brought them to this book and I need to try my abso-

lute best to keep them interested in me, myself and everything that I do (trust

me, it’s going to be hard).

I really need to put out the good promotional material for this book. Well, firstly

it’s free. Isn’t that just great. I love free things. But when you put it into perspec-

tive this isn’t really free is it. I mean let’s start in china, right, cause that’s where

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Apple make all their products. It’s cheap labour and easy to source parts. These

people in the factories are treated terribly, and paid only $1.50 (£0.96) an hour.

Your iPad is then shipped to your nearest apple store, and you buy it for around

£300 (Yet it only costs under £175 to make) right? So not entirely free is it.

I am quickly getting distracted so I will go on to what I want to do with this

book. I haven’t had a chance to look as of yet, on the possibility of printing it.

Obviously you aren’t going to be strolling past WHSmith and see my face smil-

ing at you. No, if you ever caught me in a bookshop I would be putting on my

best ‘kill me now, and make it asap’ face. Joking aside I really would like a few

printed copies to maybe have myself and give out a few to some of the people

who have helped me get where I am right now.

As this whole book is so varied I can’t put it in a category, decide which section

of Waterstones it will go in (I’m just dreaming) or define it in two words. All I can

do is try and write the best, funniest and most informative book I can possibly

write. It’s a journey I was willing to start and hopefully I reach the end sometime

before Christmas (I’m being serious. I have important stuff like GSCEs).

I’m starting to ramble on a bit and this really was just an introduction chapter. A

quick “Hello” then a “Go read my book now or I will find you, and I will…”.

Things really are taking a turn for the worse. Let’s get on with the book shall we.

Here goes…

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