Podcast Interview: Peter Goodman 10/19/2022 - How to Think Like a Publisher

Carla King interviews publisher Peter Goodman on how to think like a publisher and how to publish with Stone Bridge Press.

Nonfiction Authors Association Podcast | October 19, 2022

“One of the important things–at least in the area that we publish in–is that the author have legitimacy, credibility, expertise.”
-Peter Goodman

About Peter Goodman

Peter Goodman is Stone Bridge Press president and publisher. Peter lived in Tokyo, Japan, for ten years, where he worked as an editor for English-language publishers Charles E. Tuttle and Kodansha International. He has served as in-house editor, ghost writer, translator, and project manager on over 400 Japan- and Asia-related titles. Peter established Stone Bridge in 1989. He is past president of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association and past Board Chair of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA). For several years he was host of the Inside Independent Publishing podcast, with IBPA. He is currently on the board of the Publishing Professionals Network and host of The Stone Bridge Podcast.

Nonfiction Authors Podcast: Peter Goodman

Find the video podcast, show notes, links, quotes, and podcast transcript below.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Watch the video interview on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or on our YouTube Channel where you can subscribe to our playlist.

Got feedback on our podcast? Want us to consider a guest or topic? Please let us know on our feedback form here.

Show Notes

Links

In this episode…

What a publisher prioritizes when evaluating a proposal.
Insight into sending query letters to publishers.
Do publishers consider money when reading through a proposal?
How your established connections influence a publisher’s decision on accepting your proposal.
How to write a proposal that stands out to a publisher.
What’s expected of authors after signing a contract with a publisher.
A day in the life of a publisher.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the interview series for the Nonfiction Authors Association. Today’s session is with Peter Goodman and we will be talking about how to think like a publisher. I’m Carla King, your host, and I’m happy to have you with us today. This interview will last only 30 minutes and you can find the replay on our Nonfiction Authors Association website and social media platforms including YouTube, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

And now I’d like to introduce our guest.

Hi, Peter. Welcome to the podcast.

Peter Goodman 1:13

Hi, Carla. Nice to be here. Thank you.

Carla King 1:15

Well, thank you. Because all of us authors want to get in the head of a publisher. So thanks for offering. I think, also, that too often authors forget there are real people with specific needs who are looking at the proposal. And that you have specific real pain points–frustrations. So let’s start with this–what does a publisher prioritize when evaluating a proposal?

Peter Goodman 1:48

Well, for us, I have to say every publisher is different, of course. So every publisher has their own needs, and their own process of evaluating things. When it comes to me, first thing that I think of is, ‘Do I like this idea overall? Is it a concept that’s interesting to me?’ There are certain subjects I’m interested in, certain subjects I’m not. Partly, that has to do with my own personal proclivities and interests. And sometimes it has to do with what I know is, say, marketable–what was there interest in?

So the first thing that hits me is kind of the overall idea–is that something that I find appealing just in principle. And probably the second thing–that I notice more than anything else–is the attitude, the tone, the way that the author presents him or herself when they’re writing. And that’s actually a lot more important than you might realize. It’s kind of like a first impression you might have of somebody that you meet at a party or something–is it somebody I want to spend time talking to? Because I say publishing is like a short term marriage, you know–18-24 months.

And I’ll give you an example. A while back, I got a proposal for someone who had a book on something that was very youth oriented, and they kind of start with, ‘Hey, editor dude.’ That was their salutation. And I’m not really the ‘editor dude’ type. Some editors might be editor dudes, but that wasn’t me. So that kind of set me off wrong. And the whole tenor of that letter was kind of like, ‘Hey, we’re friends, buddy, buddy.’ It was very informal. And it just rubbed me the wrong way. And it wasn’t so much–it wasn’t entirely that it wasn’t appropriate, but it was the fact that the writer was making all these assumptions about who he was dealing with. And I thought dealing with someone like that is, in a way, rather dangerous. You want someone who’s a little little more open, and a little more understanding of how the world works, and not just locked into their own particular viewpoint.

Carla King 4:07

So the guy didn’t do his research. He didn’t really know who you are.

Peter Goodman 4:12

Well, he knew the genre of books that we did, but he certainly didn’t know who I was, and I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to. But just overall, when you’re sending a letter out to a publisher, or any business for that matter, you really don’t know who’s on the other end. Some publishers–larger publishers–they have readers, interns, and those people maybe you can deal with very informally. But other stuff–the slush pile might go to a marketing person, might go to an editor, might go to a salesperson, might go to committee–you just never know. So adopting a neutral tone, neutral professional tone–I think is always safe. It may not be your particular style, but as a very first step, I think that’s the way to go.

Carla King 5:00

So do you usually like to see query letters first before the whole proposal?

Peter Goodman 5:07

I’m of two minds about that. Part of it depends on the proposal. In general, to save time, if people do it right–if they have a short letter, and they have one or two documents in PDF form, that’s fine with me. It saves a lot of time. I can look at it, if I’m not interested, I just say no. And hasn’t been a great waste of anyone’s time to do that. What I don’t like to get are short letters with, ‘Look here, go to my internet site, go to my Dropbox, and download 17 megabytes of information. And then we can talk.’ That’s not the way to do it. Sometimes a short letter saying, ‘Here’s my thing. Are you interested? If so, I’ll send you more.’ That’s also fine, too.

Carla King 5:55

I was just in a conversation with an author who has a very extensive blog. And she’s like, ‘Well, maybe I should just ask the agent or the publisher to look at my blog.’ And I thought, ‘Hmm, I don’t think they’re gonna do that. I think you need to put your blog in a Word Doc, and make that available in Google Docs or something like that.’ Because I mean, I think most publishers are super busy. You don’t want to go hopping around on blogs and social media.

Peter Goodman 6:21

Right. Certainly don’t want to have to do the author’s work. It’s kind of the proposal writer’s job to get people interested. I will say, though, that one of the things I was thinking about before we talked–if somebody provides their social media handle–like their Twitter, or their Facebook, or Instagram, or something. If I’m the least bit interested, I’m very likely to click on that just to have a look, because I’m curious. It’s hard for people to resist, because they are sort of inherently nosy and curious about things. So I think it’s okay to provide that. I wouldn’t hang your entire proposal on whether or not the publisher actually goes and does that. But I think it’s okay to include. Also, as far as attachments go–I’m very wary of opening up Microsoft Word files from people that I don’t know. I’m much more likely to open up a PDF file, which I think is less likely to cause problems.

Carla King 6:42

Well, that’s interesting, because I’ve been advising authors not to even attach anything. Because I noticed that my email provider sometimes doesn’t deliver them. So I say always use Google Docs, or Dropbox, or something like that.

Peter Goodman 7:27

Like I say, I don’t mind getting PDFs if they’re short and to the point. Like sometimes getting a CV for an author–that’s useful to have. And I also don’t mind getting Dropbox links, but it’s not necessarily the case that I’m going to go follow them.

Carla King 7:59

What do you mean by a CV for an author? That’s a resume.

Peter Goodman 8:04

Right. You know, one of the important things–at least in the area that we publish in–is that the author have legitimacy, credibility, expertise. And so the CV is a very good way of demonstrating that they have their degree, they have their body of publications. And if they’re academics, they will often have the CV, and that’s the easiest way for them to demonstrate their bonafides. If they’re a trade book author, they’re not likely to have a resume or a CV, because that’s not the world they live in.

Carla King 8:40

Got it. Do you think that publishers think about the bottom line when they’re looking at a proposal? How much does money really count?

Peter Goodman 8:49

Oh, money counts a lot. But it’s not just money, it’s complexity. And what’s it going to cost me to produce this work? How much pain, and effort, and labor is going to be involved? If, for example, I know dealing with nonfiction writers–say a nonfiction book that doesn’t have any illustrations in it, there’s just straight text. Well, if it’s just straight text, fine. But does it need an index? Are there a lot of footnotes? Is there a lot of stuff that has to be checked? Are there quotations that need to get permissions? All that stuff represents extra work, extra time, extra money that’s going to be involved.

A lot of times, the author–if they’re used to this, and they’ve done books like this before–they have all that stuff tied up in a very, very neat package. And the publisher, aside from line editing and standard editorial approach, is not going to do something. But that’s not always the case. So if a book comes in with a lot of complexity–maps, illustrations, things that need permissions, things that need fixing, retouching, etc, etc.–all that stuff adds up. And it can be a perfectly wonderful book. But it’s just, it’s too much effort. And for the amount of sales maybe that we expect to get, and what we know is going to be required to print and carry through the editorial design.

I’ve done this long enough to know kind of how much this is going to cost in rough terms. And I can do the math in my head. And I can pretty much figure out in just a couple of minutes whether I’m ever going to make that investment back. And if I’m not going to make that investment back, what can be done? We’re not a nonprofit. But a lot of publishers who do publish nonfiction books are nonprofits. And sometimes there are grants that are available. Sometimes the author has stipends that they can make available. There are awards and fellowships. All that stuff, of course, represents extra time that the publisher has to put into it. And it may delay. If you’re waiting to see whether you can get funding, that may set things back for a year or even two years.

Carla King 11:13

Interesting. So I imagine small publishing companies, large publishing companies probably have illustrators on staff. So you’re thinking about working with your own staff, and then also hiring out contractors.

Peter Goodman 11:31

We don’t have any illustrators on staff. So any work like that, we would hire out to a freelancer.

Carla King 11:41

So is that what you’re talking about–maybe an author has a stipend, or something that could go toward an illustrator or illustrative process?

Peter Goodman 11:49

Yeah. We might lump it into a production grant, or something like that. And then we might get that money ourselves and use it to hire an illustrator, or an indexer, for example. Indexers are very expensive. Or that may be something that the author can provide with our guidance. And we will say, ‘Don’t hire an illustrator, don’t get the index done without talking to us. Because we’ll give you the direction. And you can handle the transaction, but we should be involved in it to make sure the job is done right.’ So there’s a variety of different ways it can go.

Carla King 12:30

Well, sounds like you have a lot of flexibility in working with an author, depending on the projects.

Peter Goodman 12:38

Yeah, well, depending on the project, depending on the author. I’d say it’s more dependent on the author and what the author brings, and what their connections are. And how savvy they are, how worldly wise they are about the way things work. I mean, sometimes authors are authors–they’re writers–they’re not entrepreneurs, or marketers, or publicists, or artists, or anything like that. They have a good idea, and they have the skill, the talent, and time to write about it. And so it may be non-productive for us to talk to them about this sort of thing, because they–well, it’s not that they don’t get it, it’s just they don’t have any experience with it, they wouldn’t know where to start. So sometimes we say, ‘Well, we have to do this before we can go ahead. But we’ll need your help along the way in providing us with synopses, and contacts, and stuff like that, and let us do the work.’ So it varies quite a bit.

Carla King 13:42

Right. So you’re looking at who the authors’ friends, and professional network, and contacts are as well. What are you looking for there? What do publishers generally look for there?

Peter Goodman 13:52

Well, these days, it’s so important now that the author be plugged in. I mean, I think all authors know this–at least commercialized trade book authors. They know they have to have their social media. They don’t need to have one of everything. One good site would be plenty. But they have to have some way of communicating with the outside world, and representing themselves as an author with content. Sometimes a publisher will step in, and kind of create the web presence for the author who doesn’t have any, and is not in position to do it. But they have to be open to that–they have to be, in a way, open to being exposed, and in public, and kind of be available to the public. And to reach out and to be engaged in the act of life of their reading community.

I would not say that we would not publish a book of an author who doesn’t have any of those things–it would certainly depend on the book. But being mediagenic is really, really important. So if, in a pitch letter, an author has their website–put that in there. Like I said, most publishers, if they’re curious, they’ll go and look. And better make sure it’s a good one–not a website that looks like it was done in 1995. But you know, it can be a really important part of the pitch, making the publisher feel comfortable. It’s like, ‘Oh, this is an author that we can really work with.’ Doesn’t make the job easy, but it makes it easier.

Carla King 15:35

I know there’s such a scramble for authors to redo their websites now, because they look different, they need to be responsive–which means that they have to look nice on the iPhone, or the Galaxy, or whatever.

I’d like to go back to proposals. You probably get proposals that are three pages long, and twenty pages long, or more. What makes you read on, and what makes you just stop and put it away?

Peter Goodman 16:08

Well, a three page proposal would be pretty discouraging. I know people mostly send emails, but if you could think in terms of a one page, typewritten proposal, that’d be kind of what you’re aiming for. I will read on if the topic is of interest, and if I feel that the author is capable, professional, has the credibility and the talent to pull it off. I’ll read on if it intrigues me. What turns me off very quickly is–in addition to being too informal and not appropriate in terms of how they interact in the first place–but if they try to sell me like I’m a consumer, and they’re trying to sell me a used car. So I would say avoid a lot of hyperboles, stick to the facts. Keep it very, very clear.

I need to know what you’re proposing, who you are, who would be interested in it, who is the market for it? Maybe what other comp titles are out there that have done well. If you’ve gotten all the permissions, if illustrations are all done, if everything has been tied up–I’d really like to know that. Because that’s the first thing I ask–if we’re dealing with something that’s like a translation, or has a lot of photographs–did you get permission, all that stuff?

And I need to know, also, what a person’s scheduling and financial requirements are. And I always ask, ‘Do you have any financial requirements?’ And sometimes it’ll be, ‘I need to travel.’ They usually don’t put an exact dollar amount on it, but they’ll say, ‘I need to support permissions, or cost of hiring an illustrator,’ that sort of thing. And some might have a rough idea–like, oh, maybe they’re looking for a couple $1,000 in addition. So that kind of thing. It’s really kind of a recitation of facts in an attractive and concise package, is what really sells it for me beyond the actual content.

Carla King 18:35

So how much detail do you like? I mean, I did just throw out three pages to twenty pages as an example. But how long is the average–a good book proposal? I know you’re gonna say, ‘It depends,’ maybe.

Peter Goodman 18:48

I would think you could pretty much cover everything a publisher would need to know in a page, page and a half, at most. I really don’t think it needs to be any longer than that. What sells a book is not the details, it’s the whole concept of the book–the overall content of the book, and where the publisher feels it fits in with their list, and who they know buys their books, and what they know about the publishing world at that particular moment–the zeitgeist of the moment–and where they think maybe the market is going.

So get a book on Japanese food, for example–a book on all about sushi. Well, that’s been done, that’s maybe dated. But a book emerging about soba as being the next step after ramen noodles, well, maybe that’s just like, ‘Oh yes, I understand. Soba is the next big thing in Japanese food and maybe we can be prepared for that.’ Knowing, however, that it might be 12 or 18 months before the book actually gets out on market.

So anything that was last year’s news is going to be last last last year’s news by the time it comes out. So publishers kind of keep that in mind. I don’t think it’s a very scientific thing, at the end. It’s very much a Las Vegas type of system that publishers have. They rationalize a lot of the decisions that they make. They try and make the numbers add up as best they can.

But at the end of the day, a lot of it is really a crapshoot. Or it’s publishers like me–an independent publisher–just simply following their own muse and saying, ‘Oh, I like that. I think I’ll do that just because I think this kind of book ought to exist.’ That’s why publishers like me went into the business in the first place–because we like the work, we liked the information, we think the world is a better place because of the kind of work that we do. And at the end of the day, probably no good reason is going to stop us. And we will continue to make foolish publishing mistakes in service of a greater good.

Carla King 21:05

Probably just because you liked the project and liked the author. Yeah.

Peter Goodman 21:09

I’ve done all those things. I don’t regret it. But it’s not good business, necessarily.

Carla King 21:16

Right. And would be better business if the author already had the contacts and had the savvy to help sell the book when it came out.

Peter Goodman 21:25

Right. Make it easier for the publisher to rationalize their foolish decision.

Carla King 21:31

But how can an author help the publisher sell the book? Before it’s done? After it’s done? I know we always talk about platform. But do you have any specific advice? Or any stories about what’s worked and what hasn’t?

Peter Goodman 21:44

Well, we do. Publishers have their own community of readers. And we have our Facebook and Twitter feeds and all that. We have an idea of how many people are regularly checking in to see what we do. We have a newsletter that goes out. So we have that as our baseline. And the question for us is–what is the author going to bring to that? Are they just going to be talking to the same people we’re already talking to? Or better–do they have their own expanded world of interested readers?

So when we sign up a book, or when we’re talking to an author, we will ask them, ‘Who do you know? Who are your contacts? Do you know any big name journalists, or people who work in influential journals or magazines, that you can call in your chips and get a review before the book comes out, which is very beneficial to us? Or even after the book comes out? We have a questionnaire that we send them. Once we sign a contract, we have a long questionnaire that we send them. It’s very detailed, and it asks them all this stuff. Where did you grow up? What school did you go to? Do they have an alumni magazine? Who do you know who works in media? Who are all the contacts? If you’re at a university, what are the names of your colleagues? Who’s open to review? Etc. Etc. And some authors tend to know a lot of people–they’re already highly networked–and others don’t. But we’ll take whatever we can get.

And then we will work closely with the author before publication, after publication, to reach out to those people. And also to try and see if there are any–well, these days, they’re Zoom launches, as they’re called–bookstores that we can work with to set up virtual book signings. And we’ll work that maybe three to six months in advance of publication. And we have a distributor consortium, and they have someone on the inside there who will also help us coordinate some of those things to make sure books are available at the time of the talk, or they have some means of selling them. So there’s quite a lot–we demand quite a bit of the authors to be engaged. We don’t expect them to do our work. But we do expect them to be helpful, and if an interview request comes in, to not turn it down. To make themselves available, and to sometimes do all the demeaning things of having to talk to journalists who know absolutely nothing and haven’t done any prep at all. It’s all part of it.

Carla King 24:28

Exactly–been there. Oh my gosh. We just have a few minutes left. But I’d kind of like to ask you–what’s a normal day like for you? What do you do all day? What do you like doing the most, and what do you procrastinate with? I mean, what, what is it like to be a publisher?

Peter Goodman 24:53

Well, I can’t imagine anyone’s day is like mine. I’m very small outfitted at this point. I used to have six employees, and now I’m down to one. Morning starts with email, of course, like probably most everybody else, and I have a whole list of things that I need to be paying attention to. Some of them are administrative, some of them are involved with accounting, some of them are legal.

I enjoy spending most of my time–if I can–on editorial stuff, and particularly on art direction, book design, typography. I came into the business as an editor. But because I was working in Japan, I had to be engaged in all the different aspects of the book that took place in the English language. So I got involved in promotion, marketing, publicity–especially in typography, because the Japanese book designers didn’t have much of a sense of, you know what’s the difference between a Serif face and a Sans Serif face. They didn’t understand the connotation of it. I mean, they sort of do, but they weren’t native born to it. So they always needed the input from an editor to make sure that the choices that they made were appropriate.

So I got really involved in both design and typography there, and I really enjoy that. The content that you’ve been working on–just words on a page–they all kind of coalesce into a design that has its own form, its own, its own identity, and character, and personality. As book designers and editors, we give that to the manuscript, but at a certain point, it becomes its own thing. And kind of nurturing it from the zygote stage, into the embryo, and into the full born child is really quite a lot of fun–it’s very, very satisfying. So if I can spend time on work related to that, I’m very happy. But not much of my time, unfortunately, can be spent on that. I wish it were different. There’s just a lot to manage, you know–lots of details.

Carla King 27:07

Yeah, I can imagine. It’s a business, right? You’re not just reading books all day, and editing, and doing all the fun stuff, right? Accounting–we don’t think about that.

Peter Goodman 27:16

Yeah, I feel sorry if people want to get into publishing. For me, maybe 10% of my time is spent doing publishing, editing, design. The rest of it is really just administering things, or going over things that happened, as opposed to working on things that are in the process of becoming.

Carla King 27:38

Well, yeah. You’re a small business. It’s a lot of hats. Well, I really appreciate the time to get in your head. And insight into you and your press. And I’d love it if you could talk about the press, and where we can find that, and your podcast, or any books that you have coming out.

Peter Goodman 28:02

Great. Well, stonebridge.com–we got in very early. So stonebridge.com is our website; very easy to find. I started the company in 1989. I had been in Japan for a number of years, came back and started up a publishing services company for a couple of years and then started Stonebridge itself. We’re now distributed by a consortium. So we have national and international distribution. We’re, I think, first of all press–we’re very lucky to have the distribution side of it more or less figured out. And consortium now is owned by Ingram. So that gives us an entry into the world of Ingram, which is vast and huge and ever growing. And that provides us with a lot of advantages.

We do publish books–mostly about Asia, and particularly Japan–because that’s where my own personal interest is. And I lived in Japan for a number of years. We’re publishing trade books, but some of them are fairly specific. Like we have a large book on the Tenryu-ji Temple. It’s 300 books devoted to a single temple in Japan. It’s kind of a trade book, but it’s not of general interest. Some of the books we do are very appropriate, not as textbooks but as classroom supplements. Because they’re kind of quasi academic, you might say. They’re rigorously produced, but they’re not academic texts.

What we have coming out soon–we’re particularly hopeful about this book we have called Tokyo Stroll, which is a 500 page illustrated guidebook with 150 maps to Tokyo. It was supposed to come out two years ago, but the pandemic hit. Japan closed down. And it’s just announced today that Japan is opening up now to individual unsupervised tourism in October. And our book is–we’ve delayed and delayed and delayed–I finally said in August, ‘I can’t wait anymore. We gotta go.’ And so we’ve updated it, and sent it to the press in August, and it’s coming out November 22nd. So our timing–for once–we seem to have hit it just right. So we’re looking to get people who are now going to be planning their trips to Japan for next spring.

And we have a new book called The Thorn Puller coming out, which is a translation of a novel by a Japanese writer named Hitomi Ito. And it’s a very, very interesting book. You might call it–it’s kind of a memoir, kind of a fictionalized memoir. I really don’t know how much of it exactly is true. But it’s a fascinating look into the world of a Japanese woman who was struggling between California culture and Japanese cultures, trying to deal with her aging husband and her ailing parents back in Japan.

Carla King 31:06

Wow. Well, that gives us a wide view of the range of books that you publish, right?

Peter Goodman 31:14

We do publish a very wide range. And the thing is, we published books about Japan, but there is no single Japan market. You have a baseline of people–maybe 2000 people–you could say are Japanaphiles. They’re interested in anything and everything, but that’s really not enough to support a project. So every book is kind of its own universe. And that is a bit of a curse. It’s very, very hard to constantly chase these rather narrow markets for every book we do.

Carla King 31:45

That’s right. Because one is travel, one is novel, one might be academic, one might be about calligraphy or something like that, right?

Peter Goodman 31:52

Yeah. A lot of interest in say, Japanese pop culture–Anime, Manga, that sort of thing. But if we’re doing a book on Japanese aesthetics, well, that’s not the right crowd for it. So we have to completely switch around who we publish the book for. It’s all in the same sort of Japan universe, but Japan is a very, very highly evolved, complicated, sophisticated culture with many, many parts. So you can’t just say, ‘Oh, this book is for anyone who lives in Great Britain,’ you know. That wouldn’t work.

Carla King 32:26

So interesting. Wow. Well, good luck with that. You must know a lot of different journalists and media outlets, right? I mean, your publicity machine must be challenging sometimes.

Peter Goodman 32:47

Yeah, it’s a bit down to–I wouldn’t say it’s a science–but we have certain steps that we go through. We know there are certain people that are always going to be interested. There are a lot of Japan bloggers and Japan-centric sites out there–people we can always grab. It’s expanding that a little bit farther that’s more difficult, because when you go outside of the people who are knowledgeable about Japan–the knowledge level of Japan is rather superficial. It used to be cherry trees and geisha. And now it’s automated characters with big eyes and weird foods and strange contrivances.

Carla King 33:27

Well, authors listen up. I mean, this is the struggle of a niche publisher. And yeah, thank you so much again, Peter. Appreciate your insights.

Peter Goodman 33:36

You’re very welcome.

Carla King 33:38

And thank you to our listeners for joining us today and every week. For a list of guests and topics just check our schedule on the site, use your favorite search engine, or better yet, sign up for our mailing list at NonfictionAuthorsAssociation.com.

Quotes from our guest

“So adopting a neutral tone, neutral professional tone [when reaching out to a publisher]–I think is always safe. It may not be your particular style, but as a very first step, I think that’s the way to go.”

“And [another thing] that I notice more than anything else–is the attitude, the tone, the way that the author presents him or herself when they’re writing. And that’s actually a lot more important than you might realize. It’s kind of like a first impression you might have of somebody that you meet at a party or something–is it somebody I want to spend time talking to? Because I say publishing is like a short term marriage, you know–18-24 months.”

“One of the important things–at least in the area that we publish in–is that the author have legitimacy, credibility, expertise.”

“But [authors] have to be open to [social media]–they have to be, in a way, open to being exposed, and in public, and kind of be available to the public. And to reach out and to be engaged in the act of life of their reading community.”

“What sells a book is not the details, it’s the whole concept of the book–the overall content of the book, and where the publisher feels it fits in with their list, and who they know buys their books, and what they know about the publishing world at that particular moment–the zeitgeist of the moment–and where they think maybe the market is going.”

“The content that you’ve been working on–just words on a page–they all kind of coalesce into a design that has its own form, its own, its own identity, and character, and personality. As book designers and editors, we give that to the manuscript, but at a certain point, it becomes its own thing. And kind of nurturing it from the zygote stage, into the embryo, and into the full born child is really quite a lot of fun–it’s very, very satisfying.”