It’s a colourful world

A large amount of the books we produce are picture books. With those it’s obviously very important that the illustrations are reproduced accurately. To make sure this happens, scans of the original artwork are sent to the printer. They will then try to match these illustrations as closely as possible and send us the results. A production controller and someone from the design department will then compare these print outs with the original illustrations to check how the colours were reproduced. This is especially important when it comes to scenes set at different times of day. A little bit too much red or blue can make a big difference when you’re trying to capture different stages of dusk. It’s also important to make sure that colours that occur on different pages of the book always look the same. For example, if the main character is an animal, its fur will have to look the same throughout the book. I really like this part of production because you get to work with the actual artwork supplied by the illustrator and work closely with the design department.

One of my other favourite bits is getting advance copies for picture books. When these come in I get a copy of the previous print run and check that the new impression looks just like the previous one. I make sure that everything is where it’s supposed to be, all the corrections have been carried out and that the colours are consistent. Especially with some of our best-selling characters it’s important that they look exactly the same in every book. I also take a close look at the cover and make sure that all the finishes came out OK. For example if there is a Spot UV (that’s the shiny bit, just in case you don’t know) on the title and maybe part of the illustration, the guide for this needs to be precisely in line with the writing or drawing it’s supposed to highlight, otherwise it would just look wrong. And if everything is OK I’ll just drop the printer a quick line and they will carry on with the rest of the books.

Most of the fiction titles are just plain black and white text so the only room for colour is on the cover and maybe the inner cover. In a lot of cases these are looked after by our in-house design team. So if something needs to be changed before a book can be reprinted I just ask one of the designers if they can do that for me. For example, if we’re changing the paper a book is printed on, this might change the spine width and we’ll have to amend the cover file accordingly to make sure the spine is just right for the width of the book. Sometimes we might use the inner cover to promote similar titles in which case the editor will talk to the designer who will then create ads to go onto the front and back inner cover.

I really like anything to do with colour just because it’s always a bit brighter and more exciting than the black and white bits. The best part is probably getting the picture book advances. It’s just so good to see that everything has come together perfectly and to replace the previous edition on the shelf with the new one.

And so it begins

Dear reader,

I am an MA Publishing student at the London College of Communication and was fortunate enough to land an apprenticeship in the production department at Hachette Children’s Books for the summer. I’ve been asked to write a blog about this placement, so for the next couple of weeks I shall delight you with my experiences in a busy production department.

When I started the MA I had one particular role within publishing in mind: editorial. It is probably safe to say that this is where most people thinking about a career in publishing see themselves. Now that the lectures have come to an end the situation has changed. While I have learned a lot about editorial and still think that it would be a fascinating area to work in, the course also introduced me to other job roles within the industry that I hadn’t considered before.

One of these is production, an area that seems to get overlooked by quite a lot of people. So I thought it would be a good idea to get some hands-on experience to see whether this might be something worth pursuing. Given that I’ve always liked the physical nature of books – the smell of the paper, the way they are bound, the different cover finishes – I really don’t know why I hadn’t thought of doing this earlier.

I’ve been at Hachette Children’s for about a month now and time really has flown by. My colleagues are very nice to me and don’t get tired of answering my probably mostly stupid questions. It might help that there are always biscuits at hand to ease the pain. Being introduced to people from other departments as ‘our apprentice’ still makes me look around frantically in fear of Sir Alan jumping out from behind a bookshelf to send me onto the streets to complete obscure tasks but I’m guessing this will pass.

So what have I been doing so far? Let’s start with ordering reprints. The way this works is that the sales or rights department send us a list of titles that need to be reprinted. We then cost these titles according to their format, the number of pages, the kind of paper, the cover finishes, the size of the print run and a few other things. We have a rather massive folder for this with scales for every printer we use. I still find these scales slightly confusing but I have a feeling that we’ll become close friends over the course of this placement. Then we wait for editorial to bring round copies of those books in which they have marked what needs to be corrected. These corrections are looked after externally and once we get them back we send them to editorial for approval. Once the costings have been signed off and the corrections approved we can order the title. With most reprints this is quite straight forward as the printers already have the files from previous print runs, so we only tell them how many copies we need and send them files with the corrections. Most of these go straight to the warehouse but we usually get two copies delivered to our offices just so we can check everything is OK and to keep a copy of the most recent print run on file. So in order to reprint a title I need to liaise with sales, maybe rights, editorial, the repro house and the printers So far everyone has been really helpful and I’ve enjoyed dealing with lot’s of different people every day.

So this is what happens with titles that were published a while ago. When it comes to printing new titles, anything that’s slightly out of the ordinary (and you can probably imagine that that’s quite a lot with children’s books) needs to be safety tested. So every book with pop-ups, stickers, cords, pens, toys or any kind of accessory needs to be tested to make sure it is safe for children to use it. These books are sent to toy analysts (I know, I had serious doubts about my career choice when I heard about this job too) who then do all sorts of tests to see whether the item has parts that are too small for little children, if the ink used for pens is toxic, how strong magnets are etc. At the end of all this they issue a safety certificate which will hopefully say that everything is fine in which case we can go ahead and print the book. These certificates are only valid for two years so if for example the rights department find someone who is interested in printing the title in a different language they first have to make sure that the safety certificate hasn’t expired and it might be necessary to have the title retested.

I’ve also had the chance to go to acquisition meetings. This is where editors present ideas for books they’d like to publish. Apart from the editors these meetings are attended by people from marketing, sales, rights, production and the managing director of the division. Depending on the type of book they are pitching the editors will present an idea for a storyline or maybe even a series of titles around a certain character, or they might bring in some artwork of an illustrator they’d like to work with. They also need to show that they have looked into the market, researched competing titles and understand who their target group is. After this everyone at the table will say what they think of the idea and whether they see it as a potential success and a decision will be made on whether or not to go ahead with it. Production will voice their concerns if they think a title might be too costly or that it wouldn’t be realistic to produce it on a bigger scale. They also give advice on the paper to be used and how certain things will come out on different kinds of paper and how this will affect the look of the book. I find these meetings really interesting as they show how the different departments work together and how important it is to always think about all the different aspects that need to be considered when working on a book or developing an author.

Obviously, this is only a small part of what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks. But I don’t want to bore you with too many details, so I will leave it at that for now and shall return with more fascinating productions stories in a little while.

PS: I actually wrote this a while ago but I never got round to setting up the blog. I’ll try to get the next post done soon.