When we start on a new quiz book, one of the first things we often do is to make a list of rounds. These are sections that we want to include, and the balance of this part is vital to the whole look and feel of the book. If we have too many straight sets of 12 questions and answers, the book might feel too restrictive or similar to other quiz books. If there are too many fun rounds like the ‘who, what, where’ (where we give you 12 or so clues to guess a person, place or thing), or anagrams then it could feel too unlike a quiz book. For us variety is everything, but it still needs to have a sensible balance.
We do ask for feedback on our quiz books and we are happy to hear what people want to tell us. A lot of people have told us they like the variety we offer in terms of different quiz types and the variety of questions. In The Ultimate Film Quiz Book for example, we were keen to include over 500 different film titles. Within that we wanted at least 100 to be the ‘top films of all time’ which is rather subjective, so we trawled three respected lists and pulled out most of their top 100 films. So that became a top nearly 200 in the end.
It is very important to us that we do not just include things that we both like. With films, we wanted to ensure we included say a horror film round even though we are both scaredy cats and neither of us particularly like them. In The Ultimate Reader’s Quiz Book (the book quiz) there is a round on autobiographies and although Steve has read a few, neither of us are super keen on them. However, with a bit of digging and asking people who love them, we narrowed down what to include.
In the end, we want to make quiz books that we would enjoy ourselves and we think would be good value. We love quiz books but have so very often been disappointed, even with quiz books that have a lot of positive reviews. Hopefully we offer a good product to everyone that buys a quiz book. That is our main aim. We do not promise you’ll love every quiz – after all we have to try to appeal to everyone. Though we do intend that with the quizzes you do not know much about, you’ll still be able to get a couple right. Then, that if it is your specialist area you might still find a couple of questions challenging.
Comments