Written by Larry Shapiro

This book started as a way for Grant Thompson to bring his channel to a whole new medium.  However completing the book became a labor of love and a tribute to Grant Thompson.   

It does take a team to create something great and this book is a testament to that.  It all started when I first signed Grant Thompson as a client.  Grant's channel recently had explosive growth and at that point was just over 4 Million subscribers. 

When working with online creators one of the goals should be to extend your reach and your brand into other mediums to grow your audience but also to solidify what your brand is all about.  While there are many avenues for self published books these days, we really wanted to be in bookstores to validate the brand.   The book world was also a medium that we didn't know much about.  When you are in doubt of a process, reach out to the best people in their fields.   I reached out to Byrd Leavell who was considered one of the top book agents in New York.  

Byrd not only looked at the sheer size of our audience but also watched our videos and saw great potential for a book.   But what kind of book do we do?  This is where having an agent is so valuable.  Byrd gave us insights into the market as well as which publishers we should bring the opportunity to.  First of course we had to create a book proposal.  Grant has no clue on what that process was but that was the beautiful thing about Grant.  If he didn’t know about something, he would ask questions, ask what makes it a success and then go on to figure it out and build it.

  Our first proposal was called The Awesome Arsenal by Grant Thompson.  We made it feel like a fun comic book and it was based on a lot of the projectile projects Grant did on the channel.   However, Byrd wanted to make sure the proposal and book project had sizzle to it that would make a publisher really excited over the book.  So Byrd attached Ted Slampyak who would do all the illustrations.  Ted had illustrated many hit books including 100 Deadly Skills.  The proposal got the attention of a few buyers and our agent Byrd Leavell helped us to close a deal with St. Martin's press.

Once we started the process of making a "how to book,"  it began to take a shape of its own.  The process started to move away from an "arsenal" of projects as we needed to fill a number of chapters to complete the specs of the book itself.  We had to add more projects which were not always some kind of fun weapon.  Grant started to meander in the writing of the book.  It lost its vision.  We were grinding to a halt and coming up against deadlines we could not hit due to other aspects of the channel and its success.

At this point in his life, the pressures of Grant's YouTube business were beginning to take its toll.  Grant found himself shackled to the production schedule of the channel and realized he was missing out on spending time with his family.  He had a spiritual moment one night and he decided to pull back from being on camera and spend more time with his wife Janae and his four boys.  

This was when Grant brought Nate in to start being in the videos.  It took awhile to train Nate and for him to find his voice but Grant kept working with him till he got on his feet.  During this time, I was getting calls from our publisher as we began to miss deadlines.  With the help of our agent Byrd, he was able to smooth over the issues the publisher had on the production.  However, we were straying from the proposal and did not have a rudder to this project.

Grant took a weekend retreat by himself to re-focus.  There were so many balls up in the air and he wanted to simplify and focus what he was all about.  During that weekend, I remember Grant calling me up letting me know he figured it out.  

He said to me, "I stepped away from the channel so I could spend more time with my family.  The book shouldn't be about an arsenal.  It should have a sustainability element about it.   If someone is hungry, you just don’t give him a piece of fish to eat for one day, you teach them how to fish.  Then they'll never go hungry."  When Grant got excited about an idea, his eyes lit up and his energy radiated to all around him.  "This book should be a gift for parents to do with their kids for a whole year.  If we have 52 chapter projects in the book, a parent would be able to do something with their kids every weekend."

This was the inspiration behind the book and why Grant wanted this to be published.  Sadly one fateful evening, Grant Thompson was killed in a para-motor accident.  As the team and Grant’s family mourned, I did not want this book to go unfinished.  This was his last project and Grant never left anything unfinished.  There were folders of chapters some unfinished and others needing illustrations.  It took weeks to organize and sort through the 400 illustrations in order to assemble the manuscript with the help of many on the team.  His book was published six months later.  52 Random Weekend Projects is a book that will give you a full year of projects but inside you will learn the skills on how to be sustainable within oneself and you will never grow hungry.