How Books Are Made

The biggest decision in publishing is ‘who gets published?’ Whose ideas, world views, and idioms get added to the great library?

When we create machines to handle the drudgery of book-making, we free up our brains for more creative work.

Few people have helped to publish as many children’s books, in as many different ways, as Alisha Niehaus Berger.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 editor and entrepreneur John Pettigrew, the founder of Futureproofs. How can we innovate in this part of the publishing process? And what lessons can we learn here about innovation in publishing more broadly?

Arthur and his colleague Klara Skinner describe the entire book-making process in forty-five minutes. This is an episode especially for process junkies: a whirlwind tour through planning, commissioning, tools, writing and review, manuscript development and editing, design, permissions, typesetting, digitisation, artwork, stylesheets, software development, page refinement, proofreading, indexing, testing, deployment, publication, and those inevitable reprint corrections. Whew!

Since 2014, children’s book publisher Book Dash has printed over a million free books for children, including tens of thousands illustrated by Jess Jardim-Wedepohl – which makes her one of the most widely distributed children’s book illustrators in the country. Jess makes the monumental task of illustrating an entire book in a day seem perfectly normal. In this episode, Arthur and Jess talk about Book Dash, how she approaches book design and illustration, what it’s like to work under pressure, and what she reckons are important skills for young designers and illustrators who want to make books.

People who can build book brands and inspire fans are rare and amazing, even more so when they write their books, too. One of those people is Sam Beckbessinger, the bestselling author of Manage Your Money Like a F—ing Grownup, which is a book, a website, and a growing brand in several countries. She also writes for hugely popular kids’ TV shows, and was one of the writers on Serial Box and Marvel’s serialized novel Jessica Jones: Playing With Fire. She is irrepressibly joyful and optimistic, which is something we all need a dose of right now.

In this short trailer, Arthur Attwell describes some of his favourite books, not for their content but for the way they have been physically made: an enormous production from 1902, a marketing marvel, a Wonderland ebook, and the book that nearly injured his mother to get him married.