How Books Are Made

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 j...

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 5...

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...

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, nea...

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....

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 communit...

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, to...

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, tea...

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...

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...

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...

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 bus...

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 be...

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 organisa...

The biggest decision in publishing is ‘who gets published?’ Whose ideas, world views, and idioms get added to the great library? Anasuya Sengupta is the Co-founder and Co-Director of Whose Knowledge?, a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities on the Internet. Before that, she was Chief Grantmaking Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and a program director at the Global...

When we create machines to handle the drudgery of book-making, we free up our brains for more creative work.  Fiction publisher Canelo has just been shortlisted for Independent Publisher of the Year at the British Book Awards. They have a small, thriving team and sell millions of copies a year. They have repeatedly shown that sensible innovations in how you commission, make, and market books, and...

Few people have helped to publish as many children’s books, in as many different ways, as Alisha Niehaus Berger. Her career has spanned New York publishing, the Girl Scouts of America, and publishing programmes in over a dozen countries. As we find out in this conversation, she’s seen that there are many, many ways to make a children’s book. And many ways to define ‘quality’. What matters most is...

The pandemic has accelerated digitization in publishing to warp speed, and every book-maker in the world is wondering what that means for their business. Some innovative publishers were going digital long ago, of course. Even three-generation family businesses like EBC (formerly the Eastern Book Company). As we hear in this episode with its director Raghunandan Malik, they’ve stayed ahead of the c...

When we really need to get a book written and published quickly, and can rally a dedicated team around it, how fast can we move? Book Sprints are the leaders in rapid book production. Their CEO and Lead Facilitator, Barbara Rühling, regularly leads her clients’ teams from zero to book in just five days. Arthur and Barbara talk about how she and her team work, and what other book-makers can learn f...

We all love libraries, but maybe we could love them a little more. Some money-minded publishing folk even wonder: what effect do libraries have on book sales? Luckily, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez can help answer that question, and many others. Guy is Chief Content Officer at LibraryPass, and till recently ran the Panorama Project, which measures the impact that public libraries have on reading and on b...

Even in our digital world, despite the insight of editors and the wonders of design, printing is really where the book-making magic culminates. In this episode, Arthur speaks to Mike Jason, a long-time book-printing expert. Mike Jason is the director of Academic Press, which prints books for educational publishers across southern Africa. He takes us through the book-printing process, and discusses...

Arthur speaks to Andrew Rhomberg, the founder of Jellybooks, about how publishers use smart ebooks to measure what readers think of a new publication, and to figure out whether it could be a bestseller. It is one of the marvellously crazy things about publishing that most books are published long before you have any idea whether they’ll be popular. Publishers will spend small fortunes on advances,...

Arthur meets up with an old friend, Ramy Habeeb, to share some fascinating, hilarious book-making stories. And he discovers that his friend has a whole other life, and pseudonym, as a successful novelist. Ramy’s ventures are a great example of how invention flourishes at the intersections of language, culture, and disciplines. Born in Egypt, he grew up in Bahrain and Canada, taught in Japan, and h...

For many of us, the role of ‘The Publisher’ is almost mythical: a distant, unknowable keeper of dreams. Somehow, we grant publishers enormous cultural cachet, but they are just people, and hopefully conversations like this one can help us better understand the kinds of decisions and trade-offs they make. In this episode, Arthur talks to Jeremy Boraine, the publishing director at Jonathan Ball Publ...

Books are enormously complex creations, and clearing them of errors takes the immense, repeated effort of editors and proofreaders. Proofreaders are unsung heroes, who often work best with pencil and coloured pens, and a stack of publishing reference books. Today, they’re often asked to mark up corrections on screen in PDF – but is that really best? In this episode, Arthur talks about that with ed...