If you’re writing and self-publishing a book, where should you start? And who do you need on your team?
This episode, we’re changing up our usual format with a short, practical answer to a common publishing question. In a whirlwind tour through writing, design, publication and promotion, Arthur explains how a writing coach, editor, proofreader, designer, and distributor can help your book do its job – and what it means to be the centre of your fan community.
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The allure of crowdfunding is that you can sell your book before it costs you any money. But that’s harder than it looks!
To find out what it takes to run a crowdfunding campaign properly, Arthur speaks to Aaron A. Reed, who has successfully crowdfunded several books, including one of the most well-funded non-fiction books on Kickstarter. Aaron is a writer and a game developer, and the author of 50 Years of Text Games. Right now, he’s in the middle of another crowdfunding campaign, for his role-playing-game kit Downcrawl 2e.
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Children's publisher Book Dash makes beautiful books in a single day, then gives them away. And their method is catching on around the world.
Book Dash believes every child should own a hundred books by the age of five. They gather creative professionals who volunteer to create new storybooks that anyone can freely translate, print and distribute. Then they work with partners to get those books to preschool children and their families to own.
In this episode, Arthur wears his Book Dash co-founder hat, and speaks to its outgoing Executive Director Julia Norrish about how and why their ambitious approach to book-making actually works.
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At the heart of everything book-like is a printer, standing at a hand-powered press, turning paper into pages.
When you hold a book that’s been typeset in metal, printed by hand on fine paper, bound and sewn with board and cloth, you realise with a visceral whoosh just how much a book can be a work of art.
In this episode, Arthur speaks with Graham Moss, the founder of Incline Press in Oldham, near Manchester in England. Incline Press works with poets and artists to make limited-edition books with hand-set, metal type on vintage machines. This year, Graham was awarded the prestigious Cobden Sanderson Award from the Society of Bookbinders for his work in hand printing and publishing.
Graham’s deep knowledge and rich story-telling is a joy to learn from, and reminds us that, no matter the technology we use, book-making has always been about people, love, and dedication.
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Everything we read is coloured by its typeface. And humans read a lot, so font choices probably affect more people than any other field of design.
In our daily lives, we rarely appreciate how much work goes into good type decisions, and how much energy we spend accommodating bad ones.
Every day, by choice or otherwise, we read messages, posters, menus, documents, web pages, and, of course, books. Not only did someone design their layout, but someone designed the fonts in that layout. Every single letter was painstakingly designed. And every letterform has a personality: it’s trying to make you feel something, just like Comic Sans feels like silliness, and Times New Roman feels like school.
In this episode, Arthur talks to type designer Thomas Jockin. Thomas is the founder of TypeThursday, a worldwide community of type designers, and a lecturer in design and philosophy. They discuss how type decisions are made, how type designers work on new and existing typefaces, how fonts can make it easier for people to understand what they read, and what technological advances mean for type design, for reading, and for society.
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There is no place more universally loved than a good bookstore. For its owner, achieving that is not as simple as it seems.
The best book shops are much more than books on shelves and a coffee bar. Behind the tranquillity, its tiny team is buzzing for twelve hours a day, liaising with publishers, distributors, authors, literacy projects, landlords, even local government, trying to build a community of people who’ll buy books and help others to buy books.
No one exemplifies this energy and broad-mindedness better than Griffin Shea, our guest in this episode. Born in Louisiana, USA, and once a journalist with AFP, Griffin now runs Bridge Books in Johannesburg, and the incredible African Book Trust, a non-profit that gives African books to libraries and schools across South Africa. He and Arthur talk about sourcing and pricing books, working across languages, connecting booksellers, the highs and lows of running a business in the inner city, and judging South Africa’s most prestigious non-fiction award.
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Behind every great author is a host of unsung editors. By convention, they don’t get their names on books. What are they doing behind the scenes?
A good book needs hundreds of decisions made and pieces organised. For this there are commissioning editors, development editors, production editors, copy editors, permissions editors, assistant editors, and proofreaders. Many books have ghostwriters, too. They’re all focused on making books better.
Arthur speaks to editor and writer Tim Phillips about what editors do, and how they work with authors and publishers. We also get an insider’s view on the world of ghostwriting, and Tim’s advice for making your own writing clear and effective.
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Creative communities can be a powerful force for good. Online, they grow around tools that let people be creative together. What comes first, the tools or the community?
Two acclaimed book-making platforms with vibrant communities are LibriVox and Pressbooks, both created by Hugh McGuire. On LibriVox, thousands of people have helped to create audiobooks that anyone can download. On Pressbooks, teachers around the world are producing open textbooks for colleges and universities. In this episode, Arthur finds out how they came to be, and what we can learn from Hugh’s experience. What does it take to build tools that creative people will gather around?
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We take for granted that books contain no mistakes, but the absence of mistakes is no small achievement. It takes care, commitment, and very, very good processes.
In publishing, even a small mistake can spell disaster. Luckily, there are people who spend careers helping us avoid those disasters, by giving us the words and the tools to care about the details. Their work is not glamorous, but it is fascinating. Much of that work is about metadata: the information about books that makes up the circulatory system of the book industry.
In this episode, Arthur talks to one of the smartest people in the field: Emma Barnes, the founder of the publishing-management system Consonance, and the managing director of indie publisher Snowbooks. She’s also a university lecturer, and the creator of the online platform Make Our Book, which schools use for their kids to make beautiful books from their own stories.
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Would you believe that the entire ebook marketplace – including Kindle, iBooks, and thousands of ebook stores – depends on the volunteer work of about a dozen people?
There are millions of ebooks for sale online, and thousands more every day. How could any human bookseller check that they even work, and that they don’t contain malicious code? The ebook marketplace can only exist because there are rules for how an ebook is made, and an official, automatic way to check that it follows them.
The people who create those rules, called standards, are volunteers. Dave Cramer is one of them. He’s been contributing to web and ebook standards, making books, and designing software that makes books, for over thirty years, mostly at Hachette USA. He talks to Arthur about creating standards, how ebooks are made, using CSS for print layout, and the ongoing push and pull between digital-first and InDesign-based publishing.
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Why are book clubs so transformative, and can they change the world?
When we read a book we love, no matter how outlandish or challenging it is, we recognise in it the way we believe the world works. And that is profoundly affirming. It reassures you that your life has a place, no matter what mangled shape it’s in. And if you can share that with others, and talk about what that book means for each of you, you step back into the real world a little renewed, a little stronger, and a little more equipped to change it.
Arthur’s guest in this episode has seen this often, first-hand, as bibliotherapy: Dr Anderson P. Smith works with book clubs and writers who are in or have been in prison, and has studied the profound effect that reading circles can have on people who are rebuilding their lives. And his insights on reading, reflection, and action extend to anyone in the business of making books or changing minds.
Good agents are the fairy grandparents of page and screen. They get writers; and they get writers paid.
Most jobs in publishing are done by humans flying solo – writers and freelancers working from home, running their own show. That can be lonely work. Especially as a writer, it's just not possible, on your own, to know everything and everyone you need to know to turn your talent into a viable business. For that, most writers need an agent. What does an agent do? And how do you get one?
Aoife Lennon-Ritchie is the founder of the Lennon-Ritchie Agency, which works in commercial book publishing, and the managing director of Torchwood, which represents writers in film and TV. She joins Arthur to talk about being and getting an agent, negotiating contracts, and writing for TV and film.
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Open-access publishing models are so ubiquitous today that we forget they had to be invented first – by bold, generous publishers.
In this episode, Arthur talks to one of those inventors: Frances Pinter has been pioneering for decades, running her own academic publishing company for over twenty years, and then leading publishing programmes in Eastern Europe for the Open Society Institute. She’s been the founding publisher at Bloomsbury Academic, the CEO of Manchester University Press, a fellow at the LSE and the University of London, and founded the groundbreaking organisation Knowledge Unlatched. Today, she’s the Executive Chair of the Central European University Press.
Frances and Arthur talk about Knowledge Unlatched, her work in Eastern Europe, maintaining quality in publishing, the impact of open-access publishing on COVID research, and what it takes to start a new publishing business today.
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There are so many interesting people in book-making; people who cross boundaries and live for the thrill of making art with other people. People like Andrés Barragán: rock guitarist, engineer, writer, agent, and founder of Colombian publishing company Puntoaparte Editores.
For nearly 20 years, Andrés has been creating beautiful, infographic books for many of the world’s leading brands and organisations, winning multiple awards, and publishing his own books too. Before starting Puntoaparte, he was the lead guitarist for the influential hardcore band Ultrageno, and studied literature and industrial engineering. He has co-founded a literary agency, and is the author of Biblioperrito, a children’s book about a dog who loves books.
In this in-depth conversation, Andrés talks about his journey from musician to publisher, how his team makes infographic books, and what is changing about the way books are written and distributed.
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