How Books Are Made

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.

Links from the show:

• The Lennon-Ritchie Agency
• Torchwood Literary & Scouting Agency
• Screen Daily article about the launch of Torchwood.
• Publisher’s Weekly article on the 2022 Sharjah Book Fair, quoting Aoife.
• Sharjah International Book Fair
• ‘Behind the Scenes: African Filmmakers and Writers on Interplay and Adaptation’ – a panel discussion including Aoife.

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.

Links from the show:

• TOC 2010: Frances Pinter, "Rethinking the Role and Funding of Academic Book Publishing"
• Knowledge Unlatched
• Open Society Foundations
• Central European University Press
• Open Climate Campaign
• Paperight

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.

Links from the show:

• Puntoaparte Editores
• WEF BiodiverCities report
• Puntoaparte’s BiodiverCities book (free PDF download)
• Palaeontology book Hace Tiempo (free PDF download)
• Handbook for tourism guides in Colombia
• Biblioperrito, the children’s book
• Rolling Stone, ‘50 great Colombian albums of the 21st century’
• Rolling Stone Colombia’s ‘25 great national albums’ republished by Polen Records
• Ultrageno - La juega (music video on YouTube)

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 Fund for Women. She is a thoughtful, pragmatic leader whose work continually inspires and effects change – not least at Wikipedia, one of the world’s most prominent publications.

In this in-depth conversation, Arthur and Anasuya discuss the bigger picture: where book publishing fits into the universe of human knowledge, and what that means for our decisions as book-makers.

Links from the show:

• Whose Knowledge?
• Whose Voices?, the Whose Knowledge podcast
• Akka Mahadevi
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
• People are Knowledge, a film by Achal Prabhala
• #visiblewikiwomen on Whose Knowledge

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 how you pay authors, can completely change the publishing game. Nick Barreto is Canelo's co-founder and Operations Director, and a self-taught book-making automator. In this episode, we hear how he built Canelo’s hyper-efficient workflow, and what it has helped them achieve.

Links from the show:

• Nick on LinkedIn
• Nick on Twitter
• Canelo
• Snow Books
• Consonance
• Pandoc
• Atavist
• LaTeX

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 that each book has a purpose; and that, as book-makers, our jobs get richer and more rewarding when we know and love what our books will do in the world.

Links from the show:

• Alisha on LinkedIn
• Room to Read
• The Peace and Equality Collection
• Literacy Cloud
• Savvy by Ingrid Law
• The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd
• Alisha’s ‘A Small Miracle’ post
• Alisha on the power of globally diverse children’s books
• We Need Diverse Books
• People of Color in Publishing
• Better World Books
• Pete the Cat

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 curve because they prioritise constant learning and an entrepreneurial mindset, and also because they’ve long known that ‘books’ are not the reason they exist. Rather, they provide information, and books are one smart way to do that.

Links from the show:

• Raghunandan Malik on LinkedIn
• EBC
• EBC Reader
• EBC Learning

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 from it.

Links from the show:

• Barbara Rühling
• Book Sprints
• Editoria
• The Construction of Authorship edited by Martha Woodmansee
• Ten Years of Book Sprints, a post on its origins by Adam Hyde

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 book sales. Before that, he worked in a range of senior publishing and marketing roles, and ran a wonderful book-making conference called Digital Book World. He has a sharp eye for lazy thinking, and that rare ability to grasp both the big picture and the tiny details that make it up.

Links from the show:

• Guy LeCharles Gonzalez on LinkedIn
• LibraryPass
• Panorama Project
• About the Library Marketing Valuation Toolkit
• Guy’s talk at DBW in 2010 after the iPad announcement
• Open Road Media and Jane Friedman
• Prince’s memoir, The Beautiful Ones
• Parasite: A Graphic Novel in Storyboards