Brascoe Publishing

Passionate Hookers is our forthcoming craft title. In this post we give you the full contents list to keep you excited, but also talk a little bit about the production and manufacturing process. It’s something you rarely hear from publishers, but one that we think is valuable.

In putting this book together – which took longer than we anticipated, as it often does – we have created a book that has really dominant colours and spreads. The colour bleeds off the page, there is magazine-style design throughout, and little things here and there that are really colourful. Colour has been important to us with Passionate Hookers because we believe that tiny little craft titles without it are doomed to look like 1970s productions forever.

But the colour presented us with a bit of a challenge in terms of printing. We didn’t want to print a huge run of these babies: we wanted to move things up a notch and go with print on demand.

So, after many months of scouting we found a printer in Sydney who has proved so far to be really good to us. All we are doing now is awaiting proofs with baited breath. For our international buyers, we decided to experiment with CreateSpace (CS).

The key thing about going with someone local and going with CS at the same time is that it gives you a real-time comparison of the experience. And I must say, our experience with CS has been pretty poor so far: not in terms of what it provides (which is brilliant) but in terms of book design.

We are BIG on book design: elegant design, wherever possible. If you want any good references for reading up on book design, drop a comment: I have some beauties I can recommend.

CreateSpace made our beautiful book look like a fifteen-year-old’s attempt at desktop publishing. It may have been the fact it was US half-letter size and not A5, but I don’t think so: we had redesigned it to fit the new size.

So, when we got the CS proofs we pulled them out, all excited, and then … we kind of deflated.

The reason for our enormous disappointment was as follows:

• the laminate wasn’t the laminate we requested (fixable, easily)
• the cover image wasn’t quite wide enough (again, easily fixed)
• the cover printed slightly crooked (not a big thing in itself, but a proof should show you how it’s going to come out in the run. How can we be sure it won’t be crooked?)
• the colours weren’t vibrant at all (disappointing, maybe fixable)
• the allowable margins on the inside were terrible (not fixable at all)

Of course, when I say ‘the allowable margins on the inside were terrible’, I mean to say that it was gappy in the wrong places, too close to the binding in others, and just weirdly wrong. It’s like CS have restrictions based on their printing machinery, which have informed their allowed printing spaces – it could be something else – but it sure as hell wasn’t informed by a desire for beautifully designed books.

So, if we can fix it we will – and in the meantime, we’ll work with our locals, whom we can phone or email and talk to. There’s a huge benefit in being able to actually be in touch with the people printing your books. It’s been highly valuable to us with our previous projects, and I think it’s really important to have a good relationship with your printer.

But – things are moving. Let’s hope we can simply approve the next batch of proofs and get this baby moving!

In the interim, here’s a snippet for you, to keep you excited:

Contents page for Passionate Hookers: a crochet anthology with substance (forthcoming)