Nahno McLein

To work as a publisher means in the first place handling all the different stages of making the books. That can be disappointing and exhausting, but also exciting.

In my case, I first of all worked in a team. In our office, the only permanent staff consisted of my boss and me. We were the heart and the core of both projects: the literature website and the publishing company. There were also wonderful, indispensible interns and the author of the first two books, who at the same time is best friends with my boss and co-starter of the company.

Luckily, there are and were no problems in the team - I've never felt so much part of something. In a way social life and work gets mixed up, when we had sandwich parties on Thursdays, fun promotion events and trips to Berlin underground musicians.

Then there is outside communication:
For the first book, a marketing idea consisted of getting confectionists to help us with a recipe for "Harald"- the chocolate-bean-chocolate cake, the main protagonist of the children's picture book. We got two recipes, one for Harald and one for cupcakes, for the kids to bake.

The illustrators:
Here you can be lucky or not. For our second book we employeda wonderful illustrator who almost feels part of the team. She quickly adjusted to our ideas, made different cover versions, combined the best ideas and even adjusted minor things in no time. This makes work easy and fun.
Other things can be a bit tricky, especially if your illustrator is also friends with the author and sees the project as a freetime fun thing. It's a balancing act between getting the necessary changes done and not coming across as a mean publisher who wants to destroy the original ideas behind the project. I would say there are some aspects a publisher just knows better about selling the final edition. Still, our goal was to suit the book and the author more than just making profit - being an alternative to popular publishers.

Last: the printing agency
I'm so glad we had an understanding printing agency. Otherwise, we would have been lost. There are so many things you have to learn about printing and without their help and support we could have messed up bad and be utterly disappointed with the results. (well, we don't have the books yet, but I'm confident)
Now we know how to
- layout the printing file,
- what format it has to be,
- what pdf x-3 is,
- that ICC profile are a hassle,
- what book sizes are better than others,
- which fonts are totally stupid,
- how to use a ftp server,
- which paper is suitable,
- the difference between CMYK and RGB,
- and all the other choices you have to make before your job can be done.

In the next few weeks, I might take part in a smartphone customers insights survey, which would mean that I will blog frequently about choosing, buying and using a smartphone. More daily news on my new tumblr.

I told you about that summer work, where I'm in charge of publishing at least two books for a newly started publishers.

So far, we have finished editing the first book. It's a children story, for about 4-8 year olds, about a chocolate cake, who is struggling to shine like the fancy cakes. The illustrations are almost finished after we decided to change the cover. The best part so far was when the print press send us the first copy of how the book will look like. It was all in white, hardcover and felt amazing in our hands.

The second book is still in the editing process, but we employed an illustrator already and are really keen on seeing the first visualisations. It's all very exciting.

This weekend I also met with 13 international people - from Iceland, Finland, Isreal, France and Germany - for a weekend of talks, trainings and planning session. This is for a summer camp we are organising for European teenagers and young adults. As part of the camp, I will give some creative writing lessons and I'm curious about what the mix of cultures will generate creatively.

Do you have special summer plans?