How Books Are Made

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 the differences between offset and digital printing, where book paper comes from, and the economics of book printing. And he and Arthur revisit a magnificent art-book project from twenty years ago.

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, editing, design, digitization, printing, and marketing before knowing whether a book will sell more than a few hundred copies. Perhaps early reader data can help solve that problem – something Andrew and his team have been working on for ten years.

Andrew has a broad, global perspective, coming to publishing from chemistry, telecoms, and music, and having lived and worked in Denmark, Austria, Italy, the USA, the Netherlands, Russia, and the UK.

Links from the show:

• Jellybooks
• See Andrew’s presentations on LinkedIn

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 has worked in Egypt, England and Scotland, collecting accolades along the way. He is the founder of Kotobarabia, the first Arabic-language ebook publishing company in the Middle East.

Links from the show:

• Kotobarabia
• Atama-ii Books
• Ramy Vance on Amazon

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 Publishers, one of South Africa’s biggest publishers of general-interest books, and now parent company to Icon Books in London. They talk about what it’s like to be a publisher, balancing predictable bestsellers with new voices, about audiobooks, and about acquiring Icon. They also reflect on the challenge of diversity in publishing, and the recent fallout over an unauthorised biography of Siya Kolisi.

Links from the show:

• Jonathan Ball Publishers
• Icon Books
• Mark Gevisser on The Book Lounge’s podcast

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?

Links from the show:

• Futureproofs
• Book Machine
• The Chicago Manual of Style
• New Oxford Style Manual
• Butcher’s Copy-editing
• The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst

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!

Links from the show:

• A visual overview of the modern production process
• Basecamp for project management
• Futureproofs for collaborating on page proofs virtually
• Seth Godin’s blog post and conference talk on the ‘lizard brain’.

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.

Links from the show:

• Jess Jardim-Wedepohl’s website
• Book Dash
• Jess’s books on Book Dash
• Snapplify classics covers
• Krita open source painting program
• Gimp image editor
• Procreate illustration app for iPad
• Blender 3D creation software

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.

Links from the show:

• Sam Beckbessinger’s website
• Like a F—ing Grownup (contains explicit language)
• Jessica Jones on Serial Box
• Hippo Wants to Dance
• Ulysses writing app
• Scrivener writing app
• Dale Halvorsen, aka Joey Hifi

How Books Are Made is a podcast about the art and science of making books. It’s for book lovers who believe that details matter, on paper and on screen: from the feel of the paper to the shapes of the ligatures, from hyperlinks to accessibility. If you want more intriguing book-making nerdery, subscribe in your podcast player to get the next episode, and see what you think.

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. 

Links from the show:

• The Home Hand-Book of Domestic Hygiene and Rational Medicine by JH Kellogg
• Penguin 60s
• Alice for the iPad