Emma Barnes and the How Books Are Made logo

Managing metadata for drama-free publishing

We take for granted that books contain no mistakes, but the absence of mistakes is no small achievement. It takes care, commitment, and very, very good processes.

In publishing, even a small mistake can spell disaster. Luckily, there are people who spend careers helping us avoid those disasters, by giving us the words and the tools to care about the details. Their work is not glamorous, but it is fascinating. Much of that work is about metadata: the information about books that makes up the circulatory system of the book industry.

In this episode, Arthur talks to one of the smartest people in the field: Emma Barnes, the founder of the publishing-management system Consonance, and the managing director of indie publisher Snowbooks. She’s also a university lecturer, and the creator of the online platform Make Our Book, which schools use for their kids to make beautiful books from their own stories.

Links from the show:

Editor
Helen le Roux
Researcher
Emma Sacco
This episode was published on 1 August 2024.
Supported by Electric Book Works: publishing reinvented for the digital age.

Transcript

Arthur Attwell:

Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made. A podcast about the art and science of making books. I'm Arthur Attwell.

Arthur Attwell:

I often wonder, why do humans love books so much? We love them so much that we spend vastly more to buy them new than to buy them secondhand. We love them so much that we've never let them become infested with advertising. We even believe what's written in books more than we believe anything else. And I think part of the reason is that books, as we find them in bookstores and libraries, are so consistently fine.

Arthur Attwell:

Not flawless, but certainly unflawed. In almost every other way we read the world, we devote half our attention to spotting mistakes in how our sports teams play, in what others say online, in our housekeeping, in our restaurant food, in our colleagues, and in ourselves. But pick up a book and we get to turn that floor spotting off for a bit. Because the whole point of publishing is to produce something that contains no mistakes. The proof of this, of course, is in the surprise and perverse glee we take in finding the error that slipped past the proofreader.

Arthur Attwell:

The absence of mistakes is no small achievement. And there are people who spend careers making it possible by caring about the details and giving us the tools to care about the details. Their work is usually invisible and seldom glamorous, but it is intricate and, given a moment's reflection, utterly fascinating. Today, we're gonna talk about something like that, about metadata in publishing. The information about books that has to be right or the things we take for granted will break. Believe it or not, structured metadata is the circulatory system that makes Amazon libraries and bestseller lists possible. And before you glaze over, luckily for you, I'll be talking with one of the most compelling and wonderful people I know in publishing, Emma Barnes.

Arthur Attwell:

Emma is the managing director of the fabulous indie publisher, Snowbooks, and the founder of Consonance, a software service that has won multiple awards and must have saved more than one publisher 10 000 hours of drudgery. She's also a university lecturer and the creator of the online platform, Make Our Book, which schools use for their kids to make beautiful books from their own stories. And there's much more, which we'll get to in a moment.

Arthur Attwell:

Welcome, Emma. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. So it's lovely to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Emma Barnes:

No. It's an absolute delight. And we've been trying to do this for oh, god. It must be months and months, but life is so busy. I'm very glad we're finally on the phone together.

Arthur Attwell:

Long time coming. And the longer it's been, the more things I've seen you doing and saying that I want to ask you about. So that's a good thing because there's loads to get into. The one thing I'm not going to leave for some later future of publishing question, something we can just get out of the way earlier, is AI, finally the tech that will solve all of our publishing problems.

Emma Barnes:

You know, I hate it. I hate it with a passion that burns brightly. I have such unusually strong feelings of contempt. And I was thinking, why do I have this visceral fury? I was thinking about it, and I think it's because it keys into something that I've gone on about for two decades to no apparent effect, which is technical literacy in publishing and my feeling that it is an important attribute of any modern publisher. And I feel like if you know the first thing about how programming works and how programmers work, then you would be extremely skeptical about trusting something like AI with your business, with your ethics, with your policies, with your content, with your people, with the way that you're interacting with your customers, your suppliers in the sense of authors.

Emma Barnes:

And, you know, there is plenty of information and evidence out there on how badly wrong it can go. It's a powerful technology and in the right hands for the right use case, fantastic progress, you know, insights – powerful capabilities that mean that there are actually some things that can be done that we weren't able to previously do.

Emma Barnes:

My son and I went to a wonderful museum in Edinburgh recently, and there's a planetarium in there. And the showing that we went and watched was a deep dive into the oceans. It was like one of these 3D Max things, but, you know, educational.

Emma Barnes:

Partway through that, it showed that there were lots of little robots hovering in the oceans, coming every now and again, delivering data to a satellite, and then diving back into the depths to collect another couple of weeks of data. And vast amounts of data are being gathered from the oceans to inform information about currents and how complex systems like weather works. Brilliant!. You know, use it to phone in your blurbs – getting a computer to regurgitate other people's shady words anyway.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Emma Barnes:

There are appropriate uses, and then it fills me with horror that you might use— I actually can't think of a single use case in the whole of publishing where AI is a good thing.

Arthur Attwell:

I'm glad others are pioneering so that I don't have to waste my time on the hype because there are plenty of sensible things to get on with. I sometimes think that I like to substitute the word 'AI' for 'Dobby the house elf', and everything makes more sense then because that's essentially every time I ask ChatGPT to help me with something, I feel as if I'm getting a Dobby reply. Utterly unreliable, incredibly powerful, and astonishing, but I wouldn't trust it with anything at this point. We will see.

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. Absolutely. You know, that curve that people speak of, it's an early stage technology. Blockchain, with ten years further along, and I've had similar senses of contempt for that. There are a few use cases, but, I mean, nothing that you'd write home about.

Emma Barnes:

It shouldn't be banned. There are great uses, but I feel like if you're gonna play with fire, it is your obligation, morally, ethically, and from a good business sense to know what you're doing. And so I want people to put the work in, understand how computers work in their bones viscerally, and then proceed with caution.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah. The people who are most warning us against this are the programmers among us like you and I, and we know what a house of cards most codebases are. You are known for building amazing, sensible software, including a multiple award winning publishing management system, and so we're going to talk a bit about publishing management systems. And let's start with the basics. What kind of information does a publishing management system track?

Emma Barnes:

I suppose it's probably worth saying how this system came about. I started a tiny publisher in, I think, it was 2002 or 2003 now, and I needed a system because after only about five works, it gets a bit leggy – the amount of stuff that you need to hold in your head. And heads are not good places for metadata. So I needed something. And I had come from big business, like Deloitte and big retailers and places where supply chains are not a new thing.

Emma Barnes:

And so I thought, well, in publishing, there will be some off-the-shelf software that I can use, and then that's, you know, one problem solved. Of course, there wasn't. It was all either big weird Windows grey box things or very quirky stuff that I didn't really touch. So I Excelled it for a bit and then I FileMaker'd it for a bit and then I Accessed it for a bit and then I bit the bullet in 2011 and started learning Ruby on Rails which is a web development framework. And obviously was terrible at the beginning and now twenty years has passed and I'm fine.

Emma Barnes:

So yeah. It was one of those: I needed a system, so I wrote it. And that's like twenty years of my life summarized. Consonance is very much rooted in the pragmatic reality of publishing, which I think is one of its strengths. But it's also I mean, I have a bit of a — I wouldn't say an aesthetic eye — but it bugs me when things aren't lined up and aren't pretty.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Emma Barnes:

So Consonance is a pleasant environment in which to spend vast numbers of hours of the day. It's a back office system for other industries. You know, if you ever use PayPal, there's a series of screens and it's got transactions on it and you can see your money going in and out. It's that sort of thing for the creation and movement of products, of books. At the core, there is bibliographic metadata. We're talking titles, ISBN-13s, product forms, dimensions, the page counts, the authorship, the illustrators, the translators, and so forth. But the wonderful thing that the book industry has had for years, that sort of certainly predate my entry into the industry, is this standard format for communicating this sort of information, and it's called ONIX. It's an acronym, 'O, N, I, X' It's an XML format, which in sort of modern programming terms is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. It's, if you know any HTML, if you imagine a paragraph tag in HTML, you start with a 'p' in some squiggly brackets, and then you put the content of the paragraph.

Emma Barnes:

And then you close the 'p'. You have a backslash and a 'p', and then now you know that the paragraph is over. That's exactly what ONIX is. You know, you start with a tag and it might say something like 'title', and then it says the title of the book, and then you stop talking about the title. It's super simple on that granule level and yet wildly complex just because there's so much of it.

Arthur Attwell:

Right.

Emma Barnes:

And there's so many products that we're all talking about. But, you know, it's a lingua franca then. I can send data to somebody in South Africa, in North America, China, and they know exactly what I'm talking about because the information I'm sending has been labeled.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah. We have a retailer here in South Africa, our largest online retailer, and we list some books there. And because our local ecosystem doesn't run on ONIX, which will horrify you and horrifies me regularly. Everything is done by manual updates and occasional spreadsheets, and it is an absolute headache to get something fixed once it's on that retailer. If the author's name is spelled incorrectly, or the wrong book has the wrong book's description, or the ISBN needs correcting. It's just an impossible process.

Arthur Attwell:

Whereas if everything came from my in-house metadata system and zipped across to the retailer in ONIX, no humans would ever have to look at anything. The machines would take care of it all. And that's really what we're trying to do, Right? We're trying to let the machines take care of the drudgery.

Emma Barnes:

Absolutely. And isn't that just the key difference between automation and AI? There's so much headroom, so much scope still left for us to pass the drudge to computers. It's like that Pink Floyd song 'You've got to have your dinner before you have your pudding.'

Emma Barnes:

There's plenty of things that we still have yet to let computers do to alleviate the load rather than muddying our most prized aspects of the industry: the content; the way we relate to people.

Arthur Attwell:

Yep. For sure. There are publishers still not using good back office management systems like Consonance. What kinds of processes and tools do publishers use when they're not using a system like Consonance to manage all their bits of information? I imagine you see that in people that come to you.

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. Yeah. And I often try and stress to people because, weirdly, I'm the salesperson at Consonance as well and naturally not a good salesperson because I'm trying to put people off as much as possible, introducing unnecessary complexity into their lives when it's not necessary. I'm very often urging people to understand that you don't need a system to be efficient. You need a process and you need commitment to that process.

Emma Barnes:

And so, and I think I did a blog post a while back, it's entirely great to set up maybe a spreadsheet, learn how to do validations in a spreadsheet so that you're validating your inputs, to get consistency and flow for things such as the to-do list or to keep track of your permissions.

Arthur Attwell:

Right.

Emma Barnes:

You know, if you're doing a permission heavy product, you might want to make sure that you clear with all of the copyright owners that you have asked them for permission and they have delivered it to you. Don't keep that on an email. Put it in something that is fit for purpose, and that could be a Word document or it could be a spreadsheet or it could be Consonance. But the important thing actually is the mindset. It's having that sort of crystal ball in your head thinking, 'if I don't get organized in this particular regard, how difficult is my future life going to be?'

Emma Barnes:

And it can get very difficult. [ARTHUR LAUGHS]

Emma Barnes:

But the weird thing about something like Consonance, I suppose, for a lot of systems like this, success is an absence of crisis. And that's pretty hard to know. You know, it's these sort of alternate timelines that you could go down where bad things haven't happened. It's a funny thing to think about sometimes, but I think this is why I value Consonance so much for my own use, because Snowbooks, my little publishing company, existed in the before times before I'd written a system.

Emma Barnes:

And I did everything wrong. I put the wrong price on Amazon and lost a shedload of money, and miscommunicated a publication date to a big UK retailer back in the day – I almost said the name, and I'm not going to because I'm still sore about it. Because, you know, one single bit of data was wrong because the publication date, just a date field on an email or a spreadsheet somewhere, because that was wrong, there was miscommunication about when the promotion was going to go live. The promotion that I had paid £1200 of my money for, and that was lost. And it's like that link between, 'oh, it's boring data', to some real world disastrous, horrible week.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah. And I should mention that the nonprofit I cofounded, BookDash, uses Consonance and are very happy using it. We used to use Google Sheets, where we would track everything, and we were very systematic, and so the mindset was there. But there just comes a time when suddenly these spreadsheets just aren't nimble enough, and one needs something a little bit more sophisticated. But you're quite right, it's a mindset.

Arthur Attwell:

The irony is that if you have an organized mindset, you need a sophisticated system like Consonance perhaps less, than if you don't, but you're more likely to look for it and want something a little bit more powerful than a spreadsheet.

Emma Barnes:

I think some of our, I use the word carefully, but some of our happiest customers are those that unfortunately had a disaster before working with us. And so they know in their bones what it could be like, and so they value the absence of disaster.

Arthur Attwell:

Sometimes the disaster is a single catastrophic event related to one piece of metadata, like your expensive mistake. And sometimes it's a slow creeping disaster of growing number of inaccuracies that make you not trust your own system anymore, and it's hard to clean up.

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. Absolutely. Which, again — sorry, I keep going, I said I didn't want to talk about it kind of, and now I am — but growing AI into that already potent flammable mix, why would you do it to yourself?

Arthur Attwell:

Yep. Absolutely. AI is still an inexperienced junior staff member, and why would you put less than twenty junior staff members in charge of something that you then don't have the capacity to oversee anymore because now they've done too much? Use it carefully.

Arthur Attwell:

I know that one of the problems that can beset metadata management systems is just using the wrong words and then getting in a tangle. I remember when I was setting up the system we use for publishing books now, each book was just going to be called a 'book' in the system, which made sense to me. And then, of course, I realized that we made all kinds of book-like products from one manuscript, and so what even was a book? And then I read a post that you wrote, pointing out that one should use the word 'work' instead of 'book', and then a work can have things like titles and books and so on. And that was such a little breakthrough. But it's uncelebrated work, the work of naming things. I imagine it's a big part of what you do?

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things, isn't it, that it's the absence of confusion that indicates success? Nothing is the desired outcome. Just a sense of obviousness. 'Of course, they'd call it that!' What's that adage in programming? There are only two difficult things in programming: caching and naming things.

Arthur Attwell:

Yes. Exactly.

Emma Barnes:

One of the great privileges, I suppose, of writing Consonance is having a very clear understanding of the domain or domain to indicate the business that we're in. And you can be an amazing programmer, all skilled up on the latest this, that, and the others. But if you're writing banking software and you don't know anything about banking, you have to put in a lot of extra time into the process of understanding your users, making sure that you're representing the workflows accurately and correctly. And with being of publishing, it does shortcut quite a lot of things to sort of really know in our bones what these things are. And we went down the same route as you, started off talking about the objects.

Emma Barnes:

The objects that have an ISBN, we call them books to start with. But since we cleave so closely to the ONIX standards, you know, ONIX can support spinners and bookmarks and—

Arthur Attwell:

Wow.

Emma Barnes:

—maps and globes and, you know, all sorts of things that you definitely don't call a book. So that's a problem. The thing is, though, that this is one of those tightropes between the world of efficient business and the world of the love of books.

Arthur Attwell:

Right.

Emma Barnes:

And nobody at, you know, in the Hay Literary Festival would talk about the product that they've just published. It takes the love out of it, takes the joy out of it. But I feel like professionals as we are, managing the logistical processes of producing books in an efficient way for the financial betterment of our authors—

Arthur Attwell:

Sure.

Emma Barnes:

—fundamentally. We can hold ourselves to a professional standard, not a local vernacular. I feel like precision in communication has been gifted to us through standards like ONIX. It makes a lot of sense for one less thing to have to be talked about.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah. I have spent many hours literally reading the ONIX Standard because there's a part of me that is utterly fascinated that there are people in the world who have spent years of their careers, decades perhaps, figuring out how to name everything to do with books and then putting it down in this amazing document. And, you read it, you suddenly realize, wow. There's a word for that and that and that and a term, and people need to be able to share this information. And, of course, because we are professionals.

Emma Barnes:

Absolutely. And within Consonance, we try to walk, again, that tightrope of providing the right level of information about how these names came about and how best to use them, without being condescending as well, because I feel like there is a certain level of professionalism in the wider trade. And I feel like it's incumbent on everyone to kind of skill up to the level that is appropriate and to use the tools that are available to us.

Emma Barnes:

Sometimes I worry within publishing, I certainly used to worry about this for my own performance, that we are to an extent middle managers. Publishing, historically, has not been the creator of the words for the most part. It doesn't print the books. Many publishers don't typeset the books in-house. We don't produce the ebooks in-house. We don't hold distribution centres. Some of the big ones do, but we often outsource that.

Emma Barnes:

There's a lot of the operations of publishing that are subcontracted to a third party and that can bring great benefits but you lose a bit of the understanding of bits that matter if you subcontract everything, and you're sort of left as the hub. You don't wanna be the hub, because hubs can be disintermediated.

Arthur Attwell:

Yes.

Emma Barnes:

And so a lot of our publisher clients who are particularly successful and interesting have kept in-house the aspects of the process that matter the most to them and they really shine as a result. I mean, BookDash is an obvious point, but I'm not going to, you know, sort of fan your ego too much.

Arthur Attwell:

[LAUGHS] Thank you, though.

Emma Barnes:

But, you know, folks like Canelo, they have absolutely aced the idea of producing exquisite quality digital products. It sounds so silly and obvious. Of course, you're going to do that! But they occupy a unique position in their exquisiteness.

Arthur Attwell:

When they got going, I was one of the ones who thought 'that's never gonna work, you can't have an ebook only publisher. Print is the only place there are any margins.' But of course, they found those margins because of their precision and dedication to efficiency, as well as keeping close to that love of books and quality. But yeah, as a result, what they achieved totally blew me away.

Emma Barnes:

It's really rewarding to feel that one plays a bit of a part in this array of interesting well-run businesses. Another example I always feel grateful thinking about, is that one of our clients is Boldwood and what they do is license words from an author and do the absolute utmost they can to get those words into as many formats as possible. And this is great for using Consonance because they publish eleven products per word.

Arthur Attwell:

Wow.

Emma Barnes:

So there's the hardback, the paperback, three different ebooks, downloadable audio, physical audio, large print, all in-house. So Consonance enables that because that just results in a proliferation of data.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Emma Barnes:

And so I really like being able to provide the tools that help people be very creative and to ethically do the right thing. If someone's licensing the work that they have created, you know, given to the world, you want to do it justice. Hard-nosed business efficiency should be used to do the right thing.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely. You mentioned that while most publishers are a hub and everything gets outsourced, how do you see metadata being managed in businesses? I remember as a junior editor and assistant editor many, many years ago – twenty something years ago – the work of inputting metadata into a system was given to us juniors. It always gave me the heebie-jeebies because we didn't really know what we were doing and how it was important – why it mattered. Yeah, I've always been curious. How do you see businesses? Where do they leave the responsibility of managing metadata?

Emma Barnes:

The good ones, bake it in to everybody's day. You get what you put in, don't you? If you are letting the least powerful person on your team control your front window, then you will get the results. And I think there's a 'how-to run teams' piece in this as well, isn't there, about responsibility and authority? The more junior the person who is taking on this vast responsibility, the more authority they need to be gifted from the rest of the team.

Emma Barnes:

And that very rarely happens. In some non-Consonance publishers, the power of personality can be quite strong. And so a very domineering commissioning editor is not going to listen to somebody who was an intern last week and is on their first assistant editor role saying, 'could I please have a blurb that scans better?'

Arthur Attwell:

Mhmm.

Emma Barnes:

I thought very fleetingly, once, about making Consonance styled, or on certain pages, be styled exactly like Amazon to give that sense that the data that you are typing into your metadata management system is going to go on the Internet.

Arthur Attwell:

I wanted to pick up something that you mentioned earlier. We were talking about how you've spoken for a very long time about the importance of learning to code, especially among people in publishing. And I know you've said before that's partly because you'd like them to be able to automate their own way out of drudgery, copy pasting, and also because you'd like them to be able to be more thoughtful about things like Blockchain and AI, when the hype cycles come around. But what I'm curious about, though, is why it matters so much to you to speak so openly and consistently about it because you could just sell people software?

Emma Barnes:

It's a great question. I think that it comes down to having been in positions so very often where I have felt belittled and talked over, talked down to, condescended to, especially as a young woman in an industry where my opinions have not been taken seriously. And I think what an ability to do programming does is give you agency. It gives you power. It gives you such power. It's disproportionate to the effort and that's what I like about it. It turns that dynamic on its head. You are the 'guy' who can get the company out of a pickle because the wrong data's up on Amazon and you need to get rid of it. It protects your career. It gives you power over the man. [LAUGHS]

Arthur Attwell:

[LAUGHS] Absolutely.

Arthur Attwell:

You've also spoken in the past about not working for the man. Is that something you'd still maintain, given the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, running your own business? Is it worth it?

Emma Barnes:

It is a nontrivial enterprise to start your own company. I was thinking about this earlier in the week. The sheer number of hours spent in terror that I have spent over the last twenty years because of cash flow, because of reputation management, because of fear of you know, nothing is going wrong, and still yet I am paralyzed with fear because something might go wrong. Running your own business is just, it's fraught. And I was thinking about it because quite recently, we've moved to the far north of Scotland from the London area.

Emma Barnes:

And, you know, I'm approaching fifty. I'm getting on a bit. The things I care about are changing over time. I don't really care about achieving the things that I wanted to achieve in my twenties. What I do care about is living a life that is consistent with what I want to sort of get out of it.

Emma Barnes:

I care about how people are treated in the day-to-day to as well as in the wider way. I want people's working days to be peaceful. I want an absence of agro. I want calmness. And so I would never change leaving an actual paid job and starting up on my own. But I do really feel possibly scarred by how difficult it's been. And therefore, I am super grateful that just at the moment, that everything I have worked for has resulted in a really, really nice life. So I am very lucky that the cards fell in my favour.

Arthur Attwell:

Takes a long, long time and a lot of focus to get there. Well done.

Emma Barnes:

Well, you know, well done you. I think there should be like a secret wink, or like a rolled up trouser or something for those of us who've done twenty years, and it's hard to say how frightening it can be. I think it's alright to celebrate the feeling of, you know, having worked hard and got there.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah. Your journey with Consonance, of course, began, as you mentioned, with Snowbooks. Do you still get time to publish at Snowbooks?

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't need it to pay the bills anymore, so that makes it a much more enjoyable business to run. No, but it's a vital part of it really because it keeps Consonance so well informed.

Arthur Attwell:

Sure.

Emma Barnes:

I definitely have that thing where, you know, a programmer hat on. I'm working with my team on Consonance, and then I use it with my Snowbooks hat on. And I'm like, 'No! It's all wrong. This is what we need.' So it's — what's the horrible phrase, eating your own dog food?

Arthur Attwell:

Unfortunately, that's the phrase we got stuck with, and it was too true to abandon.

Emma Barnes:

So am I allowed to plug?

Arthur Attwell:

Please do. Yeah. That'd be great. What are you working on?

Emma Barnes:

This is the great thing. But, well, one of them, I'm not even gonna name, but I'm gonna give you the heads up. Because the nice thing is I don't have to keep a pace of publishing going. So I only publish books when they really, really, really work for me. And so I'm doing two this year, grand total of two. And one is a history of the fighting fantasy—

Arthur Attwell:

Oh, wow.

Emma Barnes:

—which is very emotive and very much gets people in the sternum.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Emma Barnes:

If you grew up in the eighties and you've read Forest of Doom, these are the books that made us who we are. And so these histories are fantastic. And some of the images and the work that the authors and the illustrators put in is just transcendent. That's a series called You Are the Hero.

Arthur Attwell:

Fabulous.

Emma Barnes:

And then there's another book that's gonna come out in December, and that's by an author of ours who we first published years ago. He wrote a book called Lint, and his name is Steve Aylett. And it's you know, when you read a novel, novels mean different things to different people. And some people are driven by story and there has to be this crisp narrative arc and other people are driven by character and they love to, you know, discover the characters within. And Steve Aylett just throws all that out the window and immerses you in sentences of such profound discombobulation that you either feel a sense of overwhelming gratitude and relief because you're finally reading something that makes you sing or you're like what the flip is going on here?

Emma Barnes:

All I can say is that I got the most incredible supporting review in from Alan Moore, him very self, the other day about it, and there's other accolades coming in from people whose opinions I value. And so Steve Aylett's next book from Snowbooks in December, Get Them While They're Whole.

Arthur Attwell:

Fantastic. I believe in the early days of Snowbooks, you would have the same person be the book's editor and designer and typesetter and publicist. I mean, I love that idea because I could see all the amazing value in having all those interrelated parts in one brain. But, of course, the hard part is finding people who can do that. They're very special.

Arthur Attwell:

Have you been able to maintain that more or less?

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. Well, I've got an exceptionally tiny team on the Snowbooks side, and we do manage that. Yeah. But it's mainly me now because you're right. It's a funny job to have, and there's no real job title that it can cover fully.

Emma Barnes:

I mean, it's actually quite an unfair job to give someone in a way because the responsibility is absolutely vast.

Arthur Attwell:

Yeah.

Emma Barnes:

I tread very carefully in letting people be subject to the terrible responsibility that it brings about. But I think it's an absolutely correct model. I think it is the only way that you're going to get joined-up thinking.

Emma Barnes:

Communicating across divisions is hard, and ironically, one of the benefits of Consonance is to help that joined-up thinking. Nobody else that I've ever met has done what I've done, which is to forget about communicating and just isolate the whole process within one human. I think it's worked really well for our books over time. It gets people really annoyed. I had a stand up argument on a street corner once in—

Arthur Attwell:

Really?

Emma Barnes:

—yeah. In London by a very important publisher saying that 'you don't know the first thing about economics. What about division of labor? What about Adam Smith?' [ARTHUR LAUGHS] It's like I personally criticized him.

Arthur Attwell:

Goodness me. Somehow alongside all of this, you have also created Make Our Book, which I want to talk a little bit about. What is Make Our Book and how does it work?

Emma Barnes:

So Make Our Book is a website and schools or other groups of people who organize groups of children go on it and they type in their children's writing and then Make Our Book typesets it beautifully and produces an exquisite volume that 100 percent delights. I mean, isn't that just – what a lucky idea I had.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely. It's so wonderful for a child to see themselves as an author of a real book. It's just absolutely so special.

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. I absolutely love it. It's actually the perfect business because, you know, from Snowbooks' point of view – from trade publishing – if you think about it, you start with zero money, and then you start spending money. So you might pay an advance and then you pay the print. And then you're always paying the distributor for stock charges.

Emma Barnes:

And then you might pay some promotional money upfront to a retailer. And then you sell the book to a retailer, but on consignment or on some long term, so that they don't pay for it for ninety days. And then you might get some money in, months and months after the whole thing started. Oh, and you're paying payroll of course—

Arthur Attwell:

Of course.

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. And then you get money in, and you really have to hope that that money in, many months down the line atleast covers the money that you've expended. And it's, I mean, any number of negative credit. It's stressful. It's gambling.

Arthur Attwell:

Sure.

Emma Barnes:

And it's not really something that can be forecast with any degree of accuracy. Whereas Make Our Book, aside from the fact that you're delighting children and perhaps giving them the idea that they can be responsible for the words of the books in the library just like the other books. I mean, all sorts of things. There's money upfront. There's no returns.

Emma Barnes:

There's delighted customers. It's all completely automated, of course, because I've made the system. All that happens to me now is that I get a ping on my phone saying that some money has come in. I check the book for quality purposes. I trigger the flow of emails that says to the school: this is the timescales by which the book's going to be delivered to you.

Emma Barnes:

And then I get to see something on the Internet saying, 'oh my god. We've received this box of books, and my children are so happy'.

Arthur Attwell:

Fantastic. And am I right that the school will arrange the writing of the books with their children using the website for free, and then usually the parents will be the ones who will want to buy a copy because who wouldn't, an extra one for the grandparents. And then your system arranges the printing as a print-on-demand process and sends the books off to the school. And the school gets to make a little money as well. Right?

Emma Barnes:

That's it. Exactly. And some of the schools who have quite a high amount of resource can then gift the money that they make to other schools. And we have had some really good groups of people able to access the service because exactly as you say there's no kind of money upfront until the school themselves has received any money, either from the council who might be funding it or from parents or from sponsors or you know some other mean. There's no flaw so far.

Emma Barnes:

I was racking my brains actually a couple of months ago thinking there must be problems. There must be problems. And the only problem I could alight on was what happens if a child grows up age thirty, sees the writing in the book, you know, from when they were tiny, and thinks, 'well, I didn't give my consent for that'. Do you know what I mean?

Arthur Attwell:

Right.

Emma Barnes:

And this thing exists in the world, and I don't like it. So I've introduced requirements into the terms and conditions that schools use this as an opportunity to elicit consent, make parents and carers, as the responsible people at this moment, review the subject matters so that to the best of their ability, they are thinking of the future child.

Arthur Attwell:

Right. It's an important skill in itself. We live in a world of creators now. We all get to create, and that's something that I think we're still wrapping our heads around as a society.

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. Yeah.

Arthur Attwell:

Is Make Our Book available outside of the UK, or is it at this stage just UK based?

Emma Barnes:

Yes. Well, the power of print-on-demand! Yeah. So we print locally, and we've had books in Australia, in North America, on the European continent. Yeah. No technological impediment.

Arthur Attwell:

Fantastic.

Emma Barnes:

The other thing I like about Make Our Book is that I do exactly zero marketing on it. But I like to have it as a controlled experiment of what happens if you just do something well and you eliminate all of the chatter and the blather and you just write a good system, create a good process, have customers do the talking for you. I mean, it's not a huge business by any means. It shows that marketing probably does work, but I like that it is the purest example of doing something well that I can possibly do. I only need to pay the rent from the earnings or anything.

Emma Barnes:

It's a proper little gem of a— I'm really proud of it.

Arthur Attwell:

I think that's fantastic. And I think that it is such a great example of something we've touched on, which is that you have, through years of curiosity and learning and experimenting, developed the ability to do a lot of jobs in one mind. You understand how businesses work, you know how to programme, you can design. And I think that I get so excited when I see a young person starting down a path of just multidisciplinary experimentation and learning because that's what they'll be able to create. I don't think you could do Make Our Book if you had a team of five people and a VC investor to create it. That just wouldn't work.

Emma Barnes:

Oh, it would be so miserable! The words they use, the 'VC' is I mean, I've tried to eliminate the vocabulary from my mind, actually, but they would be trying to make it make money.

Arthur Attwell:

Mhmm.

Emma Barnes:

And that skews things. It is a huge privilege to be able to do something that doesn't have to make money. Imagine if we could do our, you know, all of our work, and there wasn't this sort of tying the things that we love, to eating. [BOTH LAUGH]

Arthur Attwell:

Wouldn't it be wonderful?

Emma Barnes:

Honestly, I so rarely read novels anymore because I am just so used to having to scrutinize them to extract cash from them. That's the trouble. You know, you do what you love, and it runs the risk of butting up against the realities of life.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely. Well, you've continued to set an example for what it is to learn in multiple areas. And please keep talking about the need to learn programming and technology skills in publishing. It's not going unnoticed even though it must feel that way to you.

Emma Barnes:

Well, that's nice to hear. I think there are upsides. I just want people to know about the potential upsides to consider – that it's worth putting the effort in. It will provide you with more options. And it's options, isn't it?

Emma Barnes:

It's like we tell the kids, you know, 'work hard at school, and then you'll have more options.'

Arthur Attwell:

It's one of the big ones.

Emma Barnes:

Yeah. Technical literacy. That's what you want.

Arthur Attwell:

Absolutely.

Arthur Attwell:

Emma, it's been an absolute pleasure. I'm so glad we finally got to have this conversation, and I hope there'll be another one before too long.

Emma Barnes:

Brilliant. See you soon.

Arthur Attwell:

This episode was edited by Helen le Roux and researched by Emma Sacco. How Books Are Made is supported by Electric Book Works, where we develop and design books for organizations around the world. You can find us online at electricbookworks.com.

Supported by Electric Book Works

Podcast art by Karen Lilje