The problem

Chief Climate Change Advisor at Shell International, David Hone, had been writing articles for his blog for over three years when Shell approached whitefox with the idea of compiling David’s writings into three ebooks, and donating all profits to the Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions. David wanted to explore the use of fossil fuels and climate change while considering potential solutions. Inspired by a 2014 speech by Barack Obama, he titled the book series Putting the Genie Back. whitefox set to work, and what was initially planned as a digital series quickly developed into a much larger, complex project.

The solution

With dozens of blog articles spanning a number of years, the challenge for the whitefox team would be to condense David’s writings into three engaging ebooks. whitefox took to this challenge happily and their expert editorial team got started, working with Shell to reformat the articles, fill any gaps with fresh content, establish a consistent tone and style and outline the structure of the three-book series.

whitefox’s in-house sales and distribution experts made Putting the Genie Back available across multiple platforms, crafting metadata to ensure complete digital discoverability and assigning a unique ISBN to each ebook.

The result

Putting the Genie Back received a great response, inspiring the team at Shell to reformat the books and create three paperbacks. The beautifully produced, bespoke books quickly caught the attention of traditional publisher Emerald Publishing Limited, who bought the series and republished Putting the Genie Back: Solving the Climate and Energy Dilema as a compendium.

After such a smooth publishing process and fantastic results, Shell were inspired to repurpose more of their existing content into a bespoke book. They connected whitefox to their team in Rotterdam to create a unique ebook using the content from a previous research project on the iBooks platform, titled The Colours of Energy.

‘whitefox are a unique resource. They helped me to identify a new audience for the blog content I had created, managed the process to bring that content to the audience in a new digital format, and graciously helped to identify a traditional print publishing partner for the project when the opportunity presented itself’ – David Hone