How I Made My Book ADHD-Friendly 🧠📘

hello brains I just found out that my publisher is going to be doing another printing of this book because there is something wrong with the cover it doesn't say New York Times bestseller we did it we made the New York Times bestseller list with a book about ADHD that is written for people with ADHD by someone with [Music] ADHD in celebration of the fact that this book is doing so well I kind of wanted to talk about the collaborative effort between my myself and the publisher that happened in terms of how to make this book ADHD friendly and I wanted to share that for a couple reasons one I hope that those of you who are still on the fence about whether or not to get it or want to see how it's ADHD friendly like it's one thing for me to say it but a lot of you have asked can I see it can I see the aspects of it that make it ADHD friendly but I also wanted to share it because I'm hoping that more people make their books ADHD friendly I did not realize how much I struggle with reading not because I don't have time to read but because when I go to pick up a book the layout is just not my brain friendly it's not ADHD friendly for me and my editor Alicia was really wonderful in terms of encouraging me to send her what I liked and what I didn't like it was a really collaborative process there was a lot of thought that went into everything the font the spacing the titling you know the way that the the chapters are laid out what I called the chapters everything was just very simple like how to sleep how to hyperfocus how to motivate your brain so that you can easily find whatever chapter is relevant to you and flip right to that I'm so excited that it turned out this way that like I got to make it so ADHD friendly CU a lot of what I was asking for especially with the extra white space was not typical the publisher to their credit probably spent more money for every copy of this that they had to print because they had to print like an extra 50 pages because of how much white space I wanted to be on the page when I write in in Google Docs which is where I wrote most of this book I quite naturally leave spaces between the sentences I do the same when I'm writing my scripts so there's like a sentence and then a line of space and then a sentence and then a line of space when it came time to figure out the layout for the book my editor was like well yeah we can't do that because the book would be like a thousand pages long but here's what we can do and we had a bit of a back and forth of like would it be enough for the lines just to be spaced a little bit farther apart and I was like well you know let's try that let's see if we can adjust the spacing so that we don't need a full line in between every sentence that would be excessive I guess it's what I'm used to seeing online it's what I'm used to doing with my own writing but it wouldn't have worked as well for the book so a lot of the collaboration was what's going to be practical and doable for the publisher that's still going to be ADHD friendly for our community to read we also made sure that every single page had something breaking up the text so even though we had more spacing between each line so that it was easier to read and we tried to keep the paragraph short it still could seem like one long block of text if there wasn't anything visual breaking up the paragraphs so we would have a definition and that would be set apart we'd have a sidebar we'd have a quote from the community there's a pull quote there are bullet points there's pictures occasionally it's very rare that there's a set of pages where there's not something breaking up the text there's the idea was that we would never open to a set of pages that was just blocks of text more white space on the page breaking up the text with visual elements those two things I think were probably the most important to me I'm really happy with how this layout turned out and one of the reasons I think it works so well for people with ADHD is it's difficult for us to direct our Focus right attention regulation is the challenge that people with ADHD face or one of the major challenges that we face it's not that we can't pay attention it's that we have a hard time directing that attention to what it is that we're trying to focus on and so one of the things that I really wanted to do was make it so that you didn't have to intentionally focus on reading there were things that just pulled you in so if you flip to a page that has a pull quote your brain almost automatically reads that you don't have to choose to read it so much as it kind of grabs your attention you you can accidentally read it if you flip to a page most of these Pages there's something that you will read without even having to direct your attention because it just kind of pulls you in so if I flip to page 168 a lack of resources it's bolded it's bulleted it's really easy for my brain's attention to go there without me having to direct it and that makes it a little less intimidating to read I also made sure that I wrote in a way that was conversational so it would be easy to read and I would read things over over and over and over again I would read things to other people I'd read things to myself and if I tripped over words if it was awkward if it was hard for somebody to follow I would rewrite it so that it was smoother and so that it had this kind of musical Rhythm to it and there were times during the editing process that my editor would suggest something and we were going to use a different word to mean the same thing just to like make it more interesting it kind of broke the song of it to me if you use one word to mean something and then you use a different word later in the same sentence but you're talking about the same thing that requires more cognitive effort and so I was like I don't care about being literary as much as I care about this being accessible and easy to read easy to understand another thing that I did was I organized it so that you don't have to read it even as ADHD friendly as I'm trying to make this there's still people with ADHD struggle with time management having time to read is something that's difficult for a lot of us and reading a book at all like it's still a challenge for a lot of us especially if you also have dyslexia which a lot of people with ADHD do so one of the things that I did was I set it up so that you could flip to whatever chapter is something that you're personally struggling with flip to the toolbox section and see what tools are available it's a reference or a resource that's available that you can just kind of have nearby and if you're struggling with motivation you can flip to the chapter on motivation and flip right to the toolbox or go to the what I learned section to figure out why it is that you're struggling with this thing without reading any of the rest of the book it was really important to me that people be able to pick it up and go right to whatever they need without having to feel like they have to read a whole book part of what makes that possible and part of what makes this more ADHD friendly as well is the format is the same for every chapter every chapter has four sections and they're clearly labeled the the first section is my personal experience with struggling with this thing and then there's the what I learned section and then that divided into subsections you can almost even skip the Reading part and just read the headers all of these things are set up so that even if you don't read that whole section you can kind of get the gist of what I'm talking about and then there's the toolbox section and the toolbox section is labeled the tools are like you know 1 2 3 4 whatever and then there's the ending anecdote which also has a label in terms of the font they let me take a look at the fonts that they were considering and ultimately decide on the font that we used we talked about Sarah versus sand Sera fonts there's some research on Sand serap fonts that they can be a little bit easier for people with adhc to read so I asked about that and they said that might be true but for paragraphs sarap fonts actually work better and so they showed me and let me pick and I looked at it and it was actually interesting because yeah Sans SF works great for the titles which is why the titles are in San serif but when the whole the whole book the whole page was in San sarif it did end up looking like one long block of text whereas with sarif fonts there's a shape to the paragraph that makes it feel a little bit more contained and it made it actually easier to read another thing I tried to do was trying to make it engaging and visual for the really heavy science communication videos I write out my scripts and then we add visuals we add the brain animations or diagram Graphics to to make it more visual this was an interesting challenge because we couldn't do that couldn't add animations to the book so I had my writing buddy Teresa help me punch up parts of the book and make them more visual I'm not used to writing in a visual way because I'm used to the animators and and editors adding graphics and animation and stuff like that but Teresa was really really good at writing in a way that is visual so a lot of the images that are conjured up by some of the some of this writing was her idea and eventually I kind of got the hang of it too and I would write about something that was a little bit more visual but that was important to write in a way that was colorful we also added jokes to break it up and make make it more engaging and also feelings there were times when I was a little bit distant and I was talking about my experience from a distance that didn't really work because it wasn't engaging enough and so I had to go back and rewrite that section remembering what it was like for me at the time and feeling the feelings that I had at the time so that I could be a little bit more connected and engaging and less like distance and intellectual I think that's one of the things that makes it hard to read some books about ADHD is if they're experts talking about it factually but they're not connected to the experience at the time they're just talking about it abstractly it's a little bit harder than if somebody's writing from the heart essentially I tried to do that with the book I tried to actually sit in the feelings that I was talking about which was sometimes really hard sometimes really painful talking about things like how I used to think about myself and the internal ableism and how to fail everything all the things that I thought about myself or thought I should do or should be it was hard to sit in that but it was important to me because I wanted people to be able to read this I wanted it to be ADHD friendly and part of making something ADHD friendly is making sure it's not boring making sure that it is engaging so I tried to connect I tried to to engage with you through these Pages oh and one more thing I did to make it ADHD friendly was to put everything in one book in one place where we could actually find it again there were a lot of people who suggested you have so much to say break it up break it up into two books that was hard it was really hard to put everything that I've learned over the last seven eight years about edhd into one book because most of these chapters could have been an entire book on their own I didn't want people to have to remember like oh wait which book was this tip in where was the thing or like wait it's not the most ADC friendly thing in the world to be like yeah wait a couple years until I'm ready to write another book and then another year after that for me to finish it and then another year after that for it to be published before you get these strategies right like or I talk about this topic I just put everything in one place put everything into one book and did it take me longer yeah yeah it did because it was really tough to figure out how to get all of this in one book but I did that so that people could have everything that I've learned about ADHD that I found helpful or that the community has said that they found helpful in one book and have it be easily accessible I'm really proud of how it turned out and I'm really really glad that the reviews are saying that it's ADHD friendly because that was my biggest goal like yes it's amazing to be a New York Times bestseller but if that came at the expense of when people bought the book they couldn't read it it wouldn't have been worth it to me I wouldn't have felt like I earned it I wouldn't have felt like I deserved that title but knowing that I put out a book about ADHD for the ADHD community that is actually ADHD friendly and people are saying so in the comments they're able to read it it's a great feeling I put a ton of thought into making this ADC friendly I had a ton of conversations with my editor I'm sure she had a ton of conversations with the people who were doing the layout but I I think it was worth it I think it was worth the time that we put in there's so many things that we blame ourselves for struggling with that really just aren't accessible to the way that our brains work but they could be you know there were some limitations like I would have loved to have more pictures and images diagrams things like that I would have loved to have color I did I could with the limitations I had and again the publisher was wonderful in terms of working with me they definitely push the bounds on what is typical for for publishing especially for a first-time author to make this book as ADHD friendly as possible if there are things that you think would have made it even more ADHD friendly I'd love to hear about it and I'd love for any other authors who might be watching this video or Publishers who are watching this video to see too like what really matters to you in terms of making something accessible to your brain because it shouldn't all fall fall on us I end this book with a chapter called how to change the world and I think this is part of it I think part of changing the world is saying hey it's not just for people with ADHD to use tools and strategies to help them read it's also on Publishers and authors to make the the words possible to read to make these books more ADHD friendly and the cool thing is making them more ADHD friendly making them accessible to people with ADHD also makes them easier to read for everybody else I'm not saying making a book ADHD friendly is all you have to do to to write a bestseller but it certainly doesn't hurt thank you so much to my brain Advocates and all my patreon brains for helping me make the world a more ADHD friendly Place one ADHD friendly book at a time oh yeah and if you want the book you can get the book it's going to be in the description below there's a UK version too coming soon in March the audio book is already available in the UK and you can also pre-order the UK copy which is uh not hard cover it's a paperback don't you have a copy in the studio original flavor UK Edition it's the same book like subscribe click all the things and I will see you next video bye [Music] bin

Channel: How to ADHD

Views: 34,175

Keywords: add, adhd, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, jessica mccabe, how to, attention deficit disorder, mental health, neurodiversity, adult adhd, how to adhd, mental health awareness, how to book, ADHD friendly, ADHD friendly writing, ADHD friendly book, make adhd friendly, write adhd friendly, book writing, writing, book

Id: MZJWG240Fgg

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2024