A podcast about the art and science of making books. Arthur Attwell speaks to book-making leaders about design, production, marketing, distribution, and technology. These are conversations for book lovers and publishing decision makers, whether you’re crafting books at a big company or a boutique publisher.
At the heart of everything book-like is a printer, standing at a hand-powered press, turning paper into pages. When you hold a book that’s been typeset in metal, printed by hand on fine paper, bound and sewn with board and cloth, you realise with a visceral whoosh just how much a book can be a…
Read MoreEverything we read is coloured by its typeface. And humans read a lot, so font choices probably affect more people than any other field of design. In our daily lives, we rarely appreciate how much work goes into good type decisions, and how much energy we spend accommodating bad ones. Every day, by choice or…
Read MoreThere is no place more universally loved than a good bookstore. For its owner, achieving that is not as simple as it seems. The best book shops are much more than books on shelves and a coffee bar. Behind the tranquillity, its tiny team is buzzing for twelve hours a day, liaising with publishers, distributors,…
Read MoreBehind every great author is a host of unsung editors. By convention, they don’t get their names on books. What are they doing behind the scenes? A good book needs hundreds of decisions made and pieces organised. For this there are commissioning editors, development editors, production editors, copy editors, permissions editors, assistant editors, and proofreaders….
Read MoreCreative communities can be a powerful force for good. Online, they grow around tools that let people be creative together. What comes first, the tools or the community? Two acclaimed book-making platforms with vibrant communities are LibriVox and Pressbooks, both created by Hugh McGuire. On LibriVox, thousands of people have helped to create audiobooks that…
Read MoreWe take for granted that books contain no mistakes, but the absence of mistakes is no small achievement. It takes care, commitment, and very, very good processes. In publishing, even a small mistake can spell disaster. Luckily, there are people who spend careers helping us avoid those disasters, by giving us the words and the…
Read MoreWould you believe that the entire ebook marketplace – including Kindle, iBooks, and thousands of ebook stores – depends on the volunteer work of about a dozen people? There are millions of ebooks for sale online, and thousands more every day. How could any human bookseller check that they even work, and that they don’t…
Read MoreWhy 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…
Read MoreGood 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,…
Read MoreOpen-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…
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