Divide and conquer
How one project five years ago informed a key strategy for the agency & three fact-checked books to put on your radar
About five years ago, just as the world was closing in, my fact-checking colleague Emily Krieger asked me if I could help on a project. Two authors were putting together a collection of essays about truth, hope, and solutions for the climate collection, and needed each essay fact-checked. But they were running out of time. Lots of essays needed to get checked, and Emily herself didn’t singlehandedly have the capacity.
I was just coming back from a reporting trip and was eager to use a more analytical part of my brain. But I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to check the rest of the essays. So, I recommended someone else. Together, the three of us were able to get it done and right—on time.
People have been asking me a lot recently about what inspired the agency, how I built it up, and how an agency is uniquely set up to help nonfiction creators who need a lot of facts checked on a tight turnaround. Checking All We Can Save was one of those pivotal moments. (Which, of course, I didn’t recognize it then.)
I’m talking about it today because one book that the agency worked on just published this week. Four of our checkers were able to check Arianna Rebolini’s Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die in a week and some change. I got to read some sections as I managed that project and I’m eager to dive deeper into Arianna’s beautiful writing.
I know that some authors I’ve worked with prefer to work with a single fact-checker— which makes sense for continuity. But that’s largely predicated on the assumption that the author has enough time to get a book fact-checked. Sometimes authors come to me saying: hey, can you help check this 70-80k word book in a MONTH? Sometimes less? (Melinda Wenner Moyer, who has an essential parenting book coming out next month that I helped fact-check—pre-order it here— went into the process of what it was like to have her book checked in a month.)
No human has the capacity to process, scrutinize, and re-write facts at that speed, and I think it’s rad that Factual has that capacity to spread out the work to multiple folks when time is of the essence.