Egmont Books

For the last session of the year, we were joined by Junior Project Manager Anna Robinette from Egmont Books.

Egmont's production process is particularly inspiring due to their use of design and experimentation. The recent title 'Seed' uses a beautiful holofoil finish with ink printed over the top. This gives a great effect, but adds to printing costs. 'Sedric' uses a shorter and wider book size to the normal B-format, which fits in with the concept of the stubby troll. The cover for this book was also printed on the reverse of the cover card, which means it has a rough finish. This effect can be a cheaper method of attaining a matte finish, but this side of the card tends to be more porous and more ink has to be used to give a bright colour finish, which can negate savings on paper.





















Egmont publish both magazines and books for children. I was intrigued by the amount of inventive and exciting products in the line, like the Minecraft Blockopedia and the Star Wars 'build a star fighter' book. These titles are said to have 'play value', and as such need to be tested using toy safety standards, vigerously.

 The children's range has crossed over into toys quite significantly, which has raised some issues for tax categorisation - as books are untaxable, but toys are taxed at 20%.

After displaying some of their work, Anna broke down the role of a production department within a company into the following responsibilities:

• Scheduling production and distribution: chasing up slow designe and editorial staff to ensure the product meets deadlines 
• Printer and supplier management: making an educated estimate regarding the projected sales for a title and sending this to print.
• Safety testing: sending products to be safety tested in the crossover toy/book field is extremely important to avoid customer issues, to prevent recalls and - in the worst case - an irreparably damaged brand reputation
• Digital production: sending briefs to app designers
• Product development: ensuring products are viable and safety-tested
• Costing: based upon pre-agreed rates for standard books and ‘spot costs’ for extra products like finishes, extra pages etc.

Anna stressed that the most important skill in this field was communication, as liaising between each individual department to maintain the smooth and prompt production of a product is the primary function of her role. I will take this on board into future roles.

One other importance in the team ethos at Egmont was sustainability, and the production department works with the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) which ensure that the paper used in all of their products is sustainable and ethically farmed.

image and text design

Image Manipulation

 

Today I've been manipulating images in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. This will be the primary method that I will use to formulate my endpapers for the JSS assignment, as only one Pantone or shade of CYMK is permitted. I am now going to break down what I worked on with each image:

Bear one (brown): I created a greyscale image in Photoshop and saved it. Then I changed the Image Mode to a bitmap, and saved it as a .bmp file. I then added the file to InDesign and edited the colour to a nude swatch that I created from Adobe Illustrator.

Shakespeare: To create this bitmap image, I saved it as a greyscale image at 1200dpi. I used the Image>mode feature again to save it as a bitmap.tiff image. From this, I placed the item into InDesign over a tan background. I then changed the B/W image to a one-tone red. I think these colours work quite well together.
 

Bear two (pink): I re-opened the photo of the bear in Photoshop and saved it as a bitmap.tiff image at 1200, I edited the bitmap type to Halftone Screen which gives the image a comic book effect. From there, I placed this file into Indesign and changed the colour swatch to a Pantone+ Solid Uncovered in a light pink.

There are multiple versions of bitmap manipulation, these include: halftone, threshold, pattern and gradient. Each one gives a slightly different effect.

Text manipulation

For the above text, I utilised Adobe Illustrator to create the text using vectors. This is a better alternative to editing text on Photoshop because quality is not lost. 

I ungrouped the letters so each could be edited and manipulated individually, I enjoyed working in this way because the letters stayed crisp and were of print-quality. I then copied this smart image into Photoshop. By using the enter key after doing this, I could edit the text in illustrator and the smart image would transfer over to the Photoshop file automatically. This will be invaluable to my final typesetting and cover design assignment! 

academic publishing process (condensed)

As discussed in the previous post, an author can be commissioned through a proactive, reactive or collaborative process. After the commissioning editor and the author have made contact, the steps to produce a publishable and professional-standard monograph can be detailed.

• The author/academic submits a book proposal based on their research. This outlines a synopsis of the book, where its place in the market will be, a list of the contributors, how relevant the book will be to the market, and offers a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the content.
  

• The author -if not already on file - submits a copy of their CV, which details the published works and academic background of the contributor.
  

• The commissioning editor reviews the work and decides whether it is publishable based on market research and financial investigation into the costs of production using a P&L sheet. MUP aims to have a 65% profit margin, and will only publish after this amount. Here is an example of a P&L sheet:

• The title is sent to an acquisitions meeting, which includes members of staff from editorial, sales and marketing, and rights. These respective contributors determine if the book is publishable from their aspects.
  
  
• If it is commissioned, the academic publishing house will send out a house style attachment that outlines the writing style that is preferred.  This list is quite extensive, and contains grammatical, spelling and structural preferences outlined by the publishing house. An example of this sheet for MUP has been provided on Blackboard. The author must adhere to these rules if they are to be published.
  

• During this process, contracts between the publishing house and the author will be drawn up, these contracts talk about the digital, media and adaptation rights of a book, the revenue breakdown and the legal obligations both parties have toward one another. Some examples of these can be found on BlackBoard. Tony showed the group a few examples of their contracts at MUP, and we went through the contract line-by-line. It was very interesting how different the fiction/small publisher contract at Blue Moose was in terms of tone and address, in comparison to the academic contract.
  
  
• The work is then peer-reviewed by comparable academics in the field, these in-depth reviews work on a quid-pro-quo basis, and the reviewer is usually only paid £50 for the effort, or given five books from the publisher's backlist (in some cases).
  
  
• If the book passes the peer review process, the work is edited and finalised by the editorial team, the marketing and sales team work on the design. The cover is decided at this stage.
  
  
• The book at this stage is saleable, and the metadata and isbn must be put in place.
  
  
• Sales and marketing teams introduce the book at conferences and book launches, and the book is distributed through existing channels to retail outlets.