Our September 2024 Studio Hours began with a bittersweet conversation about the announcement that Digits & Threads will cease publishing at the end of this year. As Studio Members, many attendees have been with D&T since the beginning. While we understand the reasons and fully support our publishers, we can’t help but be sad to lose this great resource. Kim reassured us that the site would remain active through next summer at least and that they are investigating ways to ensure the content remains forever. We expressed our desire for continuing our Studio Hours gatherings in some way and maintaining the community that we have built over the last four years.
For our guest this month, we turned back to Kim. She put on her Nine Ten Publications hat and we spoke about non-fiction books and the challenges of operating a small press in Canada. She updated us on the upcoming book, Quilting, and gave more behind-the-scenes information about how the book came about—and how non-fiction books, in general, are developed.
Non-fiction books are marketed before they are made—a process that Kim quipped is “nonsensical!” Sales reps sell books to both independent and large, corporate booksellers months before they are released. Publishers often buy non-fiction books well before they are written. Decisions to purchase are based on a 20–25-page proposal which includes an annotated table of contents, a sample chapter, a list of comparable titles, and information about the author including their social media presence. The publisher then works with the author to create that proposed book.
View the library of Studio Hours recordings here.
Nine Ten Publications looks for books that cross disciplines. Such books are generally avoided by publishers, who believe that they are less easily marketable. The Nine Ten team feels otherwise and has evidence to back that up from the success of their first few books.
In the case of Quilting, Kim approached the author, Andrea Tsang Jackson, directly, asking if she had an idea for a book a mainstream publisher wouldn’t like. Andrea did, and the result is Quilting, a book which blends essays about creativity with quilting pattern ideas. D&T Editor Michelle (who has worked closely with the book as copy editor) found that even as a non-quilter, she still got a lot out of it. While the essays focus on creativity as it relates to quilting techniques, they provide invitations to find journeys of wonder in all aspects of your creative life. Kim is reminded of her 2014 book, Make it Mighty Ugly.
Kim updated us on the timeline for Quilting. It is now “in production,” meaning that the text and photography is complete, and the content is with the book designer, who will now set how the text and photography flow through the book. Kim expects the proofs of the final layout by mid-October. The next steps include a trip to a professional indexer and a proofreader. At that point, a print-ready PDF will be sent to the printer.
We chatted about corrections. How late is too late when you find an error? It turns out that your choice of printing method can make a big difference. With a digital press, corrections can be made quite late in the game. Offset printing, which Nine Ten uses for the higher image quality, has a more complicated setup process. Kim told us about the “Four-hundred-dollar comma,” a correction that they chose to make after an errant comma was found on the back cover of Gathering Colour!
After our great discussions about how books are made and printed, Michelle asked Kim for hints about upcoming publications. Book publishing in Canada is subsidized by the federal government, but those grants are only available to “established” presses—defined as publishing houses with at least fifteen published books. Books like Quilting and Gathering Colour are high-budget books, costing in the range of forty to fifty thousand dollars to make and taking over a year to produce. Nine Ten is also working towards some smaller, more affordable books to help establish the press. Kim gave us a list of titles that we can expect to see in the next little while—all written by authors that Studio Members have met through Digits & Threads, and all of which sound intriguing!
To stay in the loop with Nine Ten Publications, we were encouraged to sign up for the newsletter and to follow them on Instagram @ninetenpub.
While Nine Ten Publications has no plans to open a satiric poetry division, we can’t resist sharing this contribution from one of our Studio Members.
O sheep of my heart
Black as night
Nimbus of floof
Prance across the fields!
O my heart, to see the bracken
Entangled in your woolly locks!
– Anon. (to protect the guilty)
Featured photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
