The Joy and Pain of Publishing

Sometimes it's interesting for readers to discover the background of books and the origins of storylines. One of the questions writers are most often asked is about their imagination - 'where did that story come from or how did you think of that?' they ask in amazement. Here we discover the truth behind the fiction.

In our guest post this week, North Wales based author JAN RUTH reveals the close-to-home story behind her upcoming Christmas novella.


Away for Christmas is a novella about the joy and pain of fractured relationships, the joy and pain of Christmas itself – because the festive period is not always fun for everyone – and the joy and pain of publishing books! But perhaps most of all, this is a story about staying true to oneself and looking for the real Christmas spirit beyond the baubles and the glitter. 

Regular readers will know that my characters tend not to be in the first flush of youth, and that the joy and pain of relationships are often par for the course. Christmas is very much a family time and can unearth a multitude of unwelcome emotions and in the case of my character, present plenty of troublesome hurdles before the festivities can be enjoyed. His ex-wife doesn't always make life easy, but Jonathan is determined to be a better dad, against all the odds.

And finally, the joy and pain of publishing books. There are some great publishers out there, ones who achieve results, look after their authors and understand the industry from the ground up. This story isn’t based on them.

It’s no secret that I’ve been round the houses and back again with regard to writing and publishing. Thirty years ago I used to believe that a good book would always be snapped up by a publisher regardless of genre, style, and content. In the real, commercial world, this just isn’t true. After several years of agents and self-publishing, a turning point came for me when a small press offered a contract for Silver Rain. This is it, I thought. This is the change of direction I need… but be careful what you wish for! Don’t get me wrong in that I had huge delusional ideas at this stage. I was simply seeking greater visibility and some respite from the nuts and bolts of self-publishing.

And all the outward signs were good: they took five back-catalogue titles and one new title, to make six contracts. This material represented several years of my life, several thousand pounds’ worth of investment in terms of editorial advisory, editing, proofreading, designing, formatting for ebooks and paperbacks, advertising… I could go on. Producing a quality product and promoting it to its best advantage doesn’t happen by accident. If you don’t have these skills yourself, then one needs to employ freelance professionals, as I’ve reiterated many times. Of course, we know there are a lot of ‘home-made’ books out there which don’t quite cut it, but this is certainly not the case for all self-produced work. What is slightly disconcerting is that I discovered (and so does my poor character Jonathan Jones) that this isn’t necessarily the case for traditionally produced work, either!

The process of trade publishing has less to do with the quality of material than you might presume, but it has a lot to do with what is or isn’t marketable at any one time. This isn’t bad business, it’s about making money to stay afloat. Small publishers are in exactly the same boat as the independents, but with far more overheads and problems with staff. Some of these staff may be inexperienced or learning ‘on the job.’ These small companies are up against the same fast-moving on-line industry as any independent but perhaps without the resources to manage it effectively, let alone build a lively following on Twitter; a following which has the power to engage. Traditional publishing, by its very nature, is painfully slow and this produces a massive clash with the shifting sands of on-line business. We perhaps don’t realise how fine-tuned independents have become in this respect.

Worryingly, new authors are often excited by offers from vanity publishers, or those who operate under the guise of assisted publishing, not realising the implications until it’s perhaps too late. Even contracts from those real publishers with seemingly no pitfalls or upfront costs, can dissolve into a horribly disappointing experience. Of course, my poor character thinks he’s landed lucky when a small publisher offers him a three-book deal. What could go wrong? If you’ve ever dreamed of writing a book or maybe you’ve just typed THE END to your manuscript, you might think twice about your next step…

Away for Christmas is set over three Christmastimes, and because I feel sure you’ll be looking for a few hours of warm and cosy escapism at this time of the year, I can assure you that there’s a happy ending by the time Jonathan makes it to 2017.

Inside Ingram

By Catriona Troth

Many of you who have your paperback books printed by the Ingram Content Group – whether through Lightning Source or Ingram Spark – might be surprised to realise that on any given day your book might be printed alongside a best seller from Penguin Random House, an academic text book from Oxford University Press, or even an indie published book from Amazon’s Createspace!

The family-owned firm, Ingram, which started in Tennessee, is now the major provider of Print on Demand services in the UK, US, Australia, France, and through its various Global Connect Partners, in many other parts of the world too. Italy is coming on stream soon, then India. South Africa is over the horizon. Ingram currently boasts 39,000 retail partners around the world, and that is growing constantly.

I was privileged, just before Easter this year, to have a chance to view the printing process for myself, at their UK base in Milton Keynes. I wasn’t allowed to take photographs (apparently there have been some suspected cases of industrial espionage in the past) but Ingram have kindly provided some stock photos to give you a flavour of the process.

The whole operation takes place in a large, brightly lit warehouse-like building. For the amount of heavy machinery they use, it is surprisingly quiet. It’s also temperature and humidity controlled. On the day we were there, the atmosphere was quite dry; so, high in the rafters, we could see jets of steam being sprayed into the air.

From all the orders that have been received, they ‘draw down’ approximately ten thousand pages at a time, of books that are to be printed on the same type of paper (either cream or white). This might represent ‘n’ copies of one book, or one copy each of ‘n’ different books – or more often a mixture of many different books and many different sizes of print run.

That set of books is then sorted by size, to minimise the number of times the machines have to adjust themselves. Covers and interiors are printed on different machines, but in parallel and in the same sequence.

Three main types of printers are currently in use. Printers using gel inks are used for all covers, as well as for premium quality coloured interiors. Then there are the toner-based printers, once used for most of the standard interiors. These, however, are gradually being phased out and replaced with newer ink jet printers, which can now match them for quality. The old toner based printers needed to heat the paper up in order to set the ink and then cool it again. Not only did this expend a lot of energy, but it also meant that the paper would shrink, as it dried out with the heat, then expand again, sometimes causing it to warp. The newer printers are thus both faster and more energy efficient.

It is amazing to see the half-ton rolls of paper being fed into the presses, which print continuously without pausing to take breath. Systems of rollers take up the slack and feed it out again, to allow for any changes of speed. One machine prints one side, before the paper is fed seamlessly into another to print the other side. Pages are printed either two or three abreast, depending on the size of the final book, and a machine called a plough folds the pages as they pass through, ready for cutting.

Out of this sequence of machines come stacks of pages forming each book’s interior. At the binding machine, these are matched up with the corresponding printed and laminated covers, using bar codes. If the bar code on the interior doesn’t match the bar code on the cover, the binding machine will simply refuse to proceed! If all is well, though, the machine cuts the pages (thus removing all the codes and markers using in the process) then folds and glues the cover to the interior. A separate process, requiring slightly more manual intervention, produces the ‘case bindings’ for hardback books.

It’s a system that never stops. They operate a day and a night shift, and print thousands of books a day. Already, the whole process works with surprisingly little human interaction, but that is set to be reduced even further, as robot technology from Germany is introduced.

Next time I place an order for one of my books with Ingram, I’ll picture it on its journey through that warehouse, from digital file to great rolls of paper, unfurling, printing, folding, stacking, then cut, glued and bound, and finally boxed, labelled and packaged – all in the matter of a few hours.