Everyone seems surprised when I tell them I’m starting a publishing house but have never worked in the publishing industry. I’m used to working for founders who had never had experience in the industry they were disrupting; in fact, not one single founder who I’ve worked for has had direct experience. I think that’s part of the magic of challenger brands: they’re seeing everything with fresh eyes and thinking, “okay, if I were to build this type of company today, for the first time, what would I prioritize? How can I make it make sense?” Often, the answers to those questions take them to a place that’s pretty far from how the traditional companies within that industry work. The same goes for publishing.
There is, however, a learning curve. While I can apply general principles of operations, marketing, and finance across different consumer verticals, I can’t take my experience creating an aperitif or a tube of mascara and apply it to making a book. Thankfully I have patient, kind, empathetic partners who collaborated with and helped me along the way. I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible in the book-making world (if you work for a Big 5 and you’re reading this you’re probably shaking your head and thinking “this girl still has no clue how the sausage is made!”) but I wanted to share what I know so far about creating a book.
The first thing I learned is how many elements there are to decide on when you’re putting a book together. Of course, you have to choose if you want to publish in paperback or hard cover. I opted for paperback because as much as I love a beautiful hard cover book, I want our books to live with you—to join you on your subway commute, fly across the country or the world with you, travel to a cafe with you. I wanted it to be slightly more elevated than your typical paperback, so I added French flaps to the cover. You then have to consider the paper weight of both the cover and the interior pages. How thick do you want the cover to be? You want it to have some heft so that it feels nice and can withstand the jostling around in your backpack or tote bag, but you don’t want it to be so thick that it won’t bend or open properly. And the paper—The Hours Before Dusk has a lot of illustrations, so the paper can’t be so thin that the illustrations bleed through, but again, if it’s too thick then the book won’t actually open or read comfortably. And of course, the two weights (cover and interior pages) have to exist well together. So now the weights are decided, but you also get to choose the size of the book and the color of the paper. Let me just say, apparently there are a million shades of white (somewhere my best friend is nodding her head vigorously, as she has explored pretty much all variations of white paint for her house remodel). My main consideration was the art—I wanted the illustrations to pop, so a bright white seemed the most reasonable to me. Finally, with the paper, there’s coated or uncoated. To be honest, I didn’t have a strong preference on this one, I left it up to my book designer.
Which brings me to my funny (perhaps funnier for me than for Noah, our lovely designer) little snafu. Initially I thought I would work with an American printer who had great access to paper (there’s a shortage right now) and quick turnaround times. I sent them a draft of the manuscript to start typesetting and when they sent it back to me, I was confused. It didn’t look good at all. I asked them why the layout looked so wrong and they told me my book designer would be in charge of that. Book designer? I thought book designers designed covers.
I was wrong. Book designers design a book in its entirety—from the cover, to laying out every single interior page and choosing the typefaces, margin widths, and font size, to the insides of the cover, to advising on all of the elements I mentioned above. I do some leadership coaching on the side and I remembered one of my clients mentioning that her husband was a book designer. It was the third week of April and I needed this book to go to press the first week of May, so I texted her immediately and asked to speak with her husband ASAP. She connected us hours later and we hopped on an intro call. He was insanely experienced and perfect for the job—he had studied at the most famous book designing program in the Netherlands and had designed dozens of beautiful books. I asked how long it usually took for him to design a book, and he told me 2-4 months. I laughed nervously and told him I needed the book to go to press in 1.5 weeks. Thankfully, he accepted the challenge.
He put me in touch with Die Keure, a Belgian printing house he’d worked with in the past and they, too, were up to the task of a very fast turnaround. I don’t know if either Noah or Die Keure will ever fully appreciate how thankful I am to them for working with me on my ambitious timeline, but they really saved me. We got to work immediately on finalizing paper for the cover and interior pages but we had to make a few more decisions, namely what kind of binding to use and how we’d handle the color and placement of the illustrations. There are two main bindings you can use for a book—perfect, or OTA binding. I’m going to get the exact wording of this wrong, but basically perfect binding is what you see on most paperbacks. They glue the cover directly onto the spine of the pages, and as a result the book won’t lay flat when you open it. It has a sort of springy-ness to it, it bounces shut when you try to open it. OTA binding is more typical for beautiful hardcover art books. The cover is actually detached from the spine, so when you open the book it lays flat. This option is much nicer, but also much more expensive. There’s a sort of middle ground, hand sewn binding, where the cover is still glued to the spine but done in a way that gives it more flexibility than the perfect binding. That’s what I opted for.
Finally, there was the issue of the illustrations. I learned that books are printed in increments of 16 pages, so typically if you’re doing a book with some color in it (photographs, art, etc.) you’ll strategically place the color parts so that you can print the majority of the book in black and white and only a small section in color (that’s why you see many books with a bunch of photographs placed together in one section in the middle of the book vs. on the same page as whatever they relate to). I did not know this was a thing when I started working with our incredible illustrator, so I had to print the entire book in color. And not CMYK color, which is typical for books and the most cost-effective (but very limiting in terms of color palette range), but in full Pantone color.
After receiving maybe 20+ different quotes for all the options, we finalized the specs. The last step was printing it. I flew to Bruges to be on press at Die Keure, and it was a surreal experience. The main reason for someone to be on press is to make sure that the design elements you chose for the book really do translate the way you envisioned on paper. I was nervous because I’m not an art director, I had never been on press before, and I wasn’t totally sure what I was looking for. During the first round of printing, I asked to amplify the black. The next round, we toned down the pink (which also had implications for the red). Then we added more depth to the green, and darkened the red. It was so cool watching the printing experts do their thing with colors. I learned about how ink and water work together (or, I guess, really do not work together) on a plate to create the negative space for what’s actually being printed. I saw the colors being adjusted in real time.
Like I said, I think I still only know maybe 10% of what truly goes into making a book, but I can’t wait to keep iterating with future books and editions. If you’ve made it to the end of this, congratulations! You might be just as nerdy as I am when it comes to how things are made ;)
And of course, I can’t leave you without a reminder that The Hours Before Dusk is on pre-sale for only a few more weeks, which means you only have a few weeks to buy a copy that will get a handwritten poem from author Jenna Matecki inside.