Diary of a Book: How to Change the World

January 18, 2021

In honour of the upcoming publication of How to Change the World on the 7th January, I thought I’d dive into some of the process work for this title. Written by Rashmi Sirdeshpande and illustrated by the phenomenally talented Annabel Tempest, this project was a massive undertaking but so enjoyable.

As the second book in a series (after How to be Extraordinary), Annabel and I had already worked out a ‘look’ which gave us some of the groundwork for this book. Things like fonts, rough text length, the book format itself (32 page extent, 250x250mm size), and the concept of one-story-per-spread were already in place, so we could hit the ground running with the roughs nice and quickly.

I began by dropping in the draft text supplied by Rashmi and the editor, Emily Lunn, to give us an idea of what we might like to pull out in the illustration and what may need to be emphasised or cut further. These text layouts are super simple, and tend to look a little like this:

From this we could see that it probably needed cutting back, as there’s not a whole lot of room for the illustration, but it’s helpful to share with Annabel at this stage to give her as much visual cues as possible. I also compiled research boards, with images and links to helpful websites that could inform Annabel’s roughs.

Annabel then supplied her initial roughs – which are a brilliant start and always get my mind whirring with more ideas!

Annabel always drew really lovely moments, but they often needed joining up to make a larger scene. At this point I resized, rejigged and shifted the emphasis to different areas of the narrative. Often some new illustrations are needed, so I tend to patch together what I’m trying to explain to Annabel as best as I can visually, and drop any other notes into an email. As visual people, I know that both of us will find a scribble easier to interpret than a 4-page-long email!

We go back and forth like this for a couple of rounds, tweaking the art. It’s also apparent from Annabel’s roughs that the text is too long, so Emily and I work on cutting areas down. We take in text corrections and feedback from Rashmi and other in-house stakeholders (art directors, editorial directors, publishers, international Rights executives etc.), until we have roughs that EVERYONE is happy with. A minor miracle!

The text is also copy-edited and sensitivity-checked, so hopefully there aren’t too many changes once Annabel’s started on the colour art. Inevitably there are a few, but it’s always helpful to try to minimise this where possible. And then Annabel gets started colouring up the spreads! This is my favourite part, as I get to see these pencil roughs really come to life. She has a talent for colour, often picking the palette right at the beginning as she’s sketching, then fine-tuning it throughout the whole process. The outcome is a vibrant yet natural palette that brings each world to life beautifully.

While Annabel was working hard on the colour art and sending it in gradually, I started compiling a few cover mock-ups using elements of her work. As with the interiors, we had a few elements we’d already worked on for Extraordinary, such as the title type, the location and font of the author/illustrator credits, and a top-left-to-bottom-right diagonal composition. I knew that the attendees of our Covers meeting – members of the Sales, Marketing, PR teams and more (around 20 people from across the division) – would want to see options in line with the previous title, as well as some alternatives. So I pulled together a range of rough ideas…

At this stage I’m just trying out as many things as possible: the wackier the better. This is when I share with my Art Directors, who help weed out the “wacky” from the “crappy”. It’s a lot of trial and error, and you can’t take feedback on these first ideas too personally! Often there’s a germ of a great idea in a rubbish option.

After a few changes, they get shown to the wider team at Covers (where we often talk about the title too, hence the different options).

People were keen on the globe, as it showed the inclusive nature of the subject matter, but having it as a central motif wasn’t working well enough. As ever, we ended up combining both avenues: the diagonal composition of the previous title, but incorporating the globe to differentiate the new book from the previous one.

We were stuck between the two approaches above, as sometimes happens, and Sales ended up sharing them with Waterstones to see which they felt would work best. And the choice for blue was made!

Once all of this was done, we have a chance to see printed proofs on the final paper stock and pick up on any small errors in the art or typos in the text. After this, all that’s left to do is feeding the cover out to online retailers.

And that’s it! It’s such a shame that this book won’t be seen on tables in bricks-and-mortar bookshops for a while, due to coronavirus. I love this book and think Annabel did such a stunning job. We found the process a lot trickier than How to be Extraordinary, as the stories were much longer and more complicated, and poor Annabel had to contend with drawing things that plenty of illustrators would balk at… (Crowds! Buildings! And loads of them on every page!) But she did a huge amount of work, managing to create a new style for herself in places, and was gracious enough to pass her layered files over to me for some fairly big, structural rejigging in places. Together, we came up with dynamic compositions that showcased the people at the heart of these stories.