Is this normal in publishing… or am I being taken for a mug?

When your project goes a bit pear-shaped you might wonder if that’s just how the illustration industry is.

Well, this week we’re talking all about what's good, bad, and normal... and whether there are red flags you should look out for in your illustrator-publisher relationship.

Highlights:

• Why it's never okay to get feedback on a Friday and be asked for a full redraw by Monday 🙃
• What’s typical in the picture book process (roughs, colour roughs, final art, etc)
• When changes are fine… and when they’re totally out of order
• How to set better boundaries (and how to stick to them)
• Our own early-illustration-career experiences, and what we'd do differently now

Timestamps:
00:00 – Is this normal? A horror story from an illustrator
02:00 – Unrealistic deadlines & being pressured to work weekends
05:00 – When publishers ignore your roughs completely
06:30 – What a healthy picture book workflow looks like
09:00 – Final artwork and why changing it is a big deal
12:00 – Bologna book fair: what gets shown
14:30 – When you can trust your publisher/designer (and when you really can’t)
16:00 – Agents behaving badly 
20:00 – Why this doesn’t mean all of publishing is bad! 

#NotAllPublishers

Links an' that

• Our picture book course doors are opening SOON! Keep yer eyes peeled and grab the freeebies here: https://www.thegoodshipillustration.com/PB
• Got a question? Send it our way and we might answer it in a future episode!

Bye for now!
 x The Good Ship Illustration (Helen, Katie & Tania) 

Come and say hello!

✏️ @thegoodshipillustration
🌏 www.thegoodshipillustration.com

p.s. We love answering your illustration questions. Click here to submit your question for The Good Ship Illustration Podcast 🎙

Transcript

June -
===

[00:00:00] ~Right. ~I've got a really good question today, which is comment a lot, probably a lot of picture book illustrators in early days. Fire away Helen. Yeah, well I had a, I had a Zoom call with an illustrator who's done one of our courses and sent a question to us and we answered it in the Zoom call, but it just left me really intrigued afterwards because I didn't know the full situation.

~Um, ~and she actually emailed me to tell me what the situation was and we ended up having a Zoom call 'cause it was so interesting. I So she had, a publisher and she had an agent and [00:01:00] things had gone very, very wrong. And what I realized by the end of this call was basically she was asking me, is this normal?

Is this acceptable behavior? Is this what I should expect in the world of publishing? 'cause if, if it is, it was a nightmare and I don't think I can do it. And uh, it was a really good chat. Okay. So, ~um, ~she was saying, so the relationship went really wrong. So then absolutely everything that she was asked to do became really, really difficult. It was one of those horrible situations where everything she did, they didn't like it.

And the harder she tried, the worse it got. And anyway, one of the things she was asking me was, ~um. ~This happened numerous, numerous times to her during the project, but they would take, she would hand in some work roughs or whatever for her picture book. They would take ages to get back to her weeks or months to get back to her.

And they'd get back to her on Friday and they said they wanted the whole thing redoing by the Monday or the Tuesday. That's crazy. Yeah, [00:02:00] it's horrible. Horrible. Yeah. Horrible. Well, the assumption that you would work over the weekend as well. Yeah. After a massive delay in feedback. ~Mm-hmm. ~Yeah. With no updates.

One of those things happened eight DA days before Christmas and they wanted it after Christmas. Oh my God. Yeah. I've definitely been there, but not necessarily in children's picture. I've been in there. I've been there too. And you're so keen to please, in the earlier part of your career, you just LP and say, yeah, I'll do it.

Okay. Yeah. They just cats all your life. Yeah. Well, at first she decided she would try to, and then she thought it's impossible and she said no. Um, but then. The agent in this situation wasn't helping at all because she was saying, you just have to do it. If you can't go along with it, you'll be seen as a problem.

It could damage your career in the future. ~So, ~oh dare you have boundaries. She felt scared and manipulated and the whole thing just, it just sounds horrible. Would you answer an email on a Friday afternoon? Well, I, I might answer, I might look at [00:03:00] it, but if they were asking me for something for Monday, it would be a definite no, and I probably wouldn't reply.

I would just go away and have my weekend. Although I have relationships with some, with, you know, the publishers who I really love and work with all the time, they would ask me something like that, so incredibly rarely that if that was something that was desperately needed. It would be so rare, and they would be so apologetic, and I would understand the urgency that I would probably consider it in that circumstance.

But this sounds like it was throughout the whole relationship. This is the way it went. Yeah. That's the thing. Like if they had a reason why it was so urgent mm-hmm. Then maybe you'd be like, oh, okay. Yeah. I think like the best, most boundaried version of myself wouldn't answer an email on a Friday afternoon.

Yeah. Because I'd be, I'd like you've answered it one hour before the end of the working week. Yeah. So I'll reply on Monday. Yeah. Yeah. In most businesses it would be, sorry to bring this to you so late, but anyway, let's speak about it on Monday. No one would say in a salaried [00:04:00] business, I would hopefully, here's the big problem that needs changing and probably needs an entire weekend's worth of work.

Can you get it back to me Monday morning? Because you put rush fees on that for a start. Advertisers will often do it well. ~Uh, ~you'll get that request for illustration for advertising because of newspaper deadlines, but they will always apply a double rush fee. Mm. And it's up to you whether you want to take it or not.

Have I been asked before? Once I was asked to do a book for, it was with a big publisher and it was for unicef and it was around the time they were launching the book around the time of the Commonwealth Games. It was like lots of ~um, ~uh, charities running together and I was asked to do the book, but they needed it really urgently, like roughs and final artwork within two weeks, something like that.

But they paid me a lot to do it because I had to put other projects aside for a while 'cause it was so urgent and they needed it Now. I had to put other projects aside, so they paid me a lot more than I would be paid usually. So you have [00:05:00] to, ~you know, ~set your boundaries and, and that's professionalism, isn't it?

You're working with,~ um,~ people in an industry where they acknowledge that this is not a reasonable request, so they'll apply, you know, they're double the fee because of it, but to be told it's normal. And could ~you, ~you know, could you do this over the weekend and not to be supported by your agent? Mm. I think the agent's role is really worrying in that, that she didn't support her and say that isn't normal.

And the other thing they asked her to do was completely finish one spread at a time. So completely finish the whole spread, have it finished to artwork, final artwork, time to final artwork, give it to them, see if there are any changes. Do the changes one at a time. Whereas, so if I'm doing a picture book, I do all of the roughs together, give them to the publisher, get some feedback, do all the changes together in one go, give them back.

When you go to your final artwork, I might do some little sample drawings to check that we're all happy with the palette. I might do a spread or [00:06:00] two spreads and say, are you still happy with the palette? Are we? And they'll say, yes. And then I do it all in one go, which then gives me the opportunity of when I've done all of the artwork and it's all on my wall in front of me, I look at it and think, are they all hanging together properly?

Have I learned a lot from the first spread I do, and now I wanna go back and redo that first spread because the work's loosened up. I wanna look at it as a whole. But they were asking one spread at a time, completed. That's not normal. That is not, I've never heard of that in publishing. That's just, that's just bending my brain completely outta shape.

Yeah, I think in my contract it says, no changes. At final artwork unless,~ uh,~ if, if it's outta the scope or you want change that final artwork, that should never happen because all the things are ironed out on your first black and white rough. Maybe there's a color rough. So that's two stages and then there's final artwork.

Everything should have been solved by the second stage and you would wouldn't be redoing work. But like you said, the rhythm and the consistency that you've [00:07:00] created might change throughout it. And then they might change you as well. Because not only are you thinking, have I got a consistent rhythm or approach?

Hmm. By them changing final artwork, which to me is a horrific idea, they will change your overall consistency in the se sequence of images. That's completely, I know, I can't imagine in the world of picture books, it is quite normal to go back and change final artwork, is it? Yeah. Quite. ~You know, ~I'm trying to think of the last few books I remember.

In how to hide A lion gone to final artwork and came back and said, do you think that you've drawn the hand? A bit weird on that one? And I looked at it again. I was like, yeah, it, maybe I did. Yeah,~ I,~ I don't want it to go out looking like that now. My eyes have spotted it. Can't see what you mean. Yeah. So that kind of thing does happen in picture books often you'll hand in final artwork.

I ideally, I like to have all the rough signed off that [00:08:00] we all agree, we've gone over them so carefully. Yeah. That we all have read through it numerous times so that when I'm going to final artwork, there's no kind of gray area or things left to be decided. So I do very, very few change on final artworks.

One time I handed in final artwork, and then after it was gone, I suddenly had an idea that. In, in how to hide a lion, the the lion and Irish should have a little packet of plasters on the ground beside the lion while he was having his paw tended to. ~Mm. ~So I just drew a little packet of pasts and sent it in a post in a tiny envelope saying, can you drop this in?

Oh, amazing. So like, yeah, changes happened, but not in the way that they happened with this book. It sounds like your motivation there is, you want the book to look its absolute best. Yes. And you've had a brainwave of thought. Oh yes. And sometimes the publisher. Have a brainwave and they get me excited about it and I go, you are right.

I am gonna, yeah. Change that blanket to,~ uh,~ [00:09:00] a check tartan. You're right. They would have a tartan blanket. I'm gonna fix that. Yeah. I think mutually beneficial rather than you've done this wrong. ~Yeah, ~yeah. Luckily you have that system where even though your work's analog and painted, you can add ~a, ~a kind of cutout painted piece if you want to adjust things afterwards, usually.

But for a lot of people, final artwork is like, okay, you've ~briefed and ~briefed and checked and checked. Right. I'm going for it now. And this can't be changed because it's such a complex and time consuming system to create this. But I think the advent of digital has meant a lot of art directors or art editors are used to saying, could we change that or could we move that?

And in digital work you could even then sometimes it's quite difficult. Mm-hmm. I think for people who are still working in analog, to be asked to go to final artwork and then be crit afterwards, changes. I have had changes happen though. Oh Lordy. I have had that happen with a publisher and I, and they'd commissioned me to do one more and another book and I gave them the money back and just found another publisher.

'cause I handed in the [00:10:00] artwork and they came back with so many changes as if they hadn't even really looked at the roughs properly. It was awful. Yes, exactly. It was Abso, it was just awful. Like what's the point of a rough stage? Yeah. It was awful. So I just gave them back the advance. So this is, they didn't ask for it back though.

I have to say they didn't ask for it and I don't, and I have had situations where I've done. I've been signed, this is early days, years ago, signed a four book deal. The first book, the relationship didn't work out and I've ended up redoing loads of stuff and it's been a nightmare. And I've walked away.

All the staff at the publisher changed. Nobody remembers they gave me in the advance and that's it. I just, well, they'd be calling. I've never, I was gonna say, they'll get Dutch. Did. Now look up. Wow. These publishers don't exist anymore. I'll be fine. So exciting to hear. Yeah. Oh, so I don't know that they even always ask for the advance back if the relationship goes wrong.

I think the best thing to do is just get this project out of your hair and never work with that publisher again. Move on. And going back to that last question [00:11:00] is it is not normal to be asked to do finished artwork one by one. No. Never. And changes to be applied. Never at each point. It's not normal for somebody to email you on a Friday expection stuff on Monday or Tuesday.

So the other thing that happened was just before Bologna. She handed in a full set of color offs. I never ever do a full set of color offs, but maybe some people do. It's such a, a publisher specific and illustrator specific world of picture books. Everybody works a bit differently. I've never done a full set of color offs ever.

I'll do a sample color piece, not full color offs anyway, in this situation she had, and I think maybe some people do, I don't know. I dunno why you would need to do that. If they know your palette, they've seen your folio and they've seen your rough drawings. I dunno why they'd need a full set of color offs.

Anyway, she did, gave them to the publisher and the publisher hacked them all upon [00:12:00] Photoshop, cut bits out, patched them, completely changed the book and asked her to have to repaint it as they'd photoshopped things together. But then decided it would go to bologna like that, like a hatchet Photoshop job.

So she was asking me, is that normal? So yes, sometimes when bologna is looming and you've only done a little bit of artwork, and you might not be, might not be final artwork. It might be, this is I think, how it's gonna look, but I haven't worked my palate out yet. They might take that and sometimes stuff goes to Bologna that's not final artwork and you, you're not that happy with, but you're happy for them to take it.

Um, but chopping all of your work up on Photoshop, sticking it together, knowing you are unhappy and taking it, I mean, it's a gray area, but I would say that's out of order. I wonder if she told them she was unhappy. She did. Oh, she did? Okay. Yeah, in that case, that doesn't seem very, but I have had [00:13:00] publisher ring me and say, um, we would love the stuff you've done for Bologna, but you know, we've looked at it in the contact.

'cause they'll make like a, oh, what you call it. I've forgotten the name of it, but it's like a leaflet that they show co edition publishers to see a few books together on this leaflet of what we've got coming out and they can have a browse through it and I might have done a drawing. And when they've put it in context on the leaflet, they realize then they now need it to be a different shape.

And so they might say to me, do you mind if we just drop this coloring in the background and change the edge to a square or whatever? And I usually just say, whatever makes it look good on the leaflet, just go for it. So there is some amount of people working together to patch something together to look it's best to sell it.

But it's about relationship management, isn't it? Mm-hmm. I would think you could do a bit of, as a designer, you could have that level of intervention with discussion. ~Mm-hmm. ~Um. And sometimes people can do things to, to your work [00:14:00] creatively think Okay. But then it turns out they have actually really improved it.

And a designer's eye can recompose something. Yeah. And make it look a lot better. Yeah. I've experienced that before. But I think if you, if you're talking with the illustrator and you've got a good communication, it's not endless emails, which just is like, yeah. ~It, ~it always ends up badly if all you do is email back and forth and the tone gets worse and the vibe gets worse.

That's what happened in this relationship. You need and, and if you say you don't like something and they just go, oh, we're gonna do it anyway. That's not good for any relationship, is it? No, it's not. Is it? ~Um, ~it gets worse. Oh no. Really? Yeah. So now the relationship is totally broken down. She's really unhappy with the work she's making.

'cause it's been changed numerous, numerous times

poo Illustrator was having a bit of a breakdown about it, didn't trust her own instinct, whether this was normal or not. And the agent kept telling her just to get on with it, and this is normal practice. And so she didn't trust herself anymore. And at [00:15:00] one point the agent said that if she didn't just comply with it.

Word would get round that she was difficult and she might not work again. Nice. But you've had something like that as well. I, I've, exactly. This happen in my early career, it's exactly this common to a lot of early career illustrators. My agent, when I said the relationship was finished, 'cause she stood things up a lot between me and the publisher and what didn't want me to work for one publisher who are a huge publisher and I work with now because she'd fallen out with them.

So I left her and she wrote me, oh, I dunno, maybe three pages of a four both sides telling me why I would never work again, because she had that power. Really? Yeah. That's, yeah. It was scary. I mean, I didn't believe her. But it was horrible for somebody so much older than me with so much more experienced than me at the time to say something so threatening.

It was horrible. Imagine if, if you're an agent who really looks after their illustrators [00:16:00] listening to this, now they must be horrified that. There's that level of malpractice around and giving agents a bad name. ~You know, ~there is, there are great agents I've that, oh, I've f I've had fantastic agents since then.

Two, well one agency and my first agent was fantastic. Hillary, she retired and now I have Jessica and she represents Katie as well. We have a lovely time. She's gorgeous. She's so wise. There are so many good agents. I'm worried I'm telling that this as if all of publishing is terrible. It is not. And it's a case of finding the right publisher.

And my advice to this illustrator is finish this book. Get out of this as soon as possible. You probably won't like this book. Don't stick it on your website. Find a new, she's already got an offer from another publisher. Good. Ditch the agent. Sign with a new publisher and move on. Yeah. Yeah. It probably wasn't good for them.

It's not good for you. If anything, I feel like when anything goes wrong like this in your career, it's just a list of things like, make sure this doesn't happen again. Make sure this doesn't happen again. It's like, maybe I've talked about this before, but you know when you're in a hotel and it's a sign on the back of the door and it says like, do not boil soup in the [00:17:00] kettle and you're like somebody's boiled soup in this kettle. Yes. That you can go to every other publisher relationship really sure of what she does. Yeah. With boundaries. Yeah. Say at the beginning, you know, I don't normally work weekends and I'll let you know when my holidays are and they give you a deadline and you can look at the deadline and say, actually I've got a holiday before then.

So can we add a bit of extra time on? Just set out your boundaries. Or even, I don't work Friday, so if you email me on a Friday afternoon, I'm not gonna read it till Monday. I think when you see other people living those boundaries, it, you know it. It really helps other illustrators to see someone with that auto response on it saying, I don't work Fridays, seeing other illustrators who say I'm booking a holiday.

In fact, I'm booking three holidays this year. ~Um, ~and they won't change regardless of the work that comes through because for so many years you'll just make yourself available 365 days a year. And after 10 years in the job, you think, God, is this how it is all the time? It's really good to reconsider those, you know, your own personal boundaries.

And for someone like this illustrator who's been through this tough [00:18:00] time, there's a certain, you carry a bit of shame as well, but it's not because I think most people will have one of these. Big awful jobs in their Yeah, I have in their memory those books, I from them just pretend they don't exist.

They're not on my website, just pretend they don't exist and move on. That's it. What books, I'm not telling you and I should say as well, that that publisher might work with other people who have an absolutely brilliant time. Yeah. And it might be just a, A clash of working practice of clash of personalities.

Yeah. Other people might say to them, actually, I don't work weekends, and now they've been told that they don't contact them. Yeah. It doesn't mean that this publisher is always like this and a terrible publisher. Oh yeah. It also, when the relationship soured as well with the first couple of things, quite often you see everything else as a problem and some things might not be.

Mm-hmm. Some things might be normal in publishing, not [00:19:00] great. They don't work for you Maybe. That's how it goes. But once you've got a sad relationship, you think they're doing it to you on purpose. Yeah. Like the thing about Bologna, they do sometimes take work to bologna. You're not happy with. But you want your work to be represented there.

And it says at the bottom of every single piece, this is not final artwork. Yeah. Like the dummy we had walker took of salty to Yeah. You hated the front cover. 'cause I don't like the page. Yeah. I wasn't happy with the cover, but we needed something. The, all of that inside artwork, I did have completely changed now because I decided that the jumper, that Bernard Ni should have the Eiffel Tower on it.

Of course instead of a star of, so all of that has completely changed, but at the bottom of every page it says this is not final artwork. And everybody understands that. And who's seeing it anyway? Only the buyers. Yeah. It's not kind of being plastered everywhere. No. The public's just a narrow group of people who might be looking to purchase the the farm.

Right. A narrow people who are used to seeing work when it's in progress. So they completely accept. All right. Okay. This is [00:20:00] roughly how it might look, but this isn't the final. It better to have something represented at below you. Yeah, exactly. Have anything. Yeah. And you're not being mis, you're not being misrepresented because it's a temporary, it's just a staging post again, isn't it?

Before the work gets completed. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. ~So, ~but the publisher relationship's so close, isn't it? That's what really surprised me. 'cause for me, if something goes wrong, I'm like, oh, I'll have a different client next week, be fine. But I think for a book with a publisher, it must really get to you personally.

I think it does because you work with them for so long, you become friends with them, and then if that goes wrong, and then it feels like falling out with your friends. Yeah. Horrible. And with agents as well that are meant to be supporting you. That's really dicky. 'cause that agent is looking for their percentage and the fact that you then can't trust your agent because they seem to be supporting the publisher more than they're supporting you.

You wonder, is it a conflict of interest with that particular agent? Yeah. I wonder if it sounded like it was they want, yeah, this publisher maybe have a lot of people, a lot of [00:21:00] books go through this agent. So Yeah. And she wants to maintain a good, solid relationship with that publishing house. But she's not really allowing her illustrators.

She's not standing up for the illustrators. There you go. As long as everybody understands it's not usually like this. In picture books, that question at the beginning, is this normal? No. Is this acceptable? No, not really. No. No. But there's more publishers, there's more agents. Plenty more fish in the sea.

You can learn stuff and move on. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. See you next week. Goodbye. Bye bye. [00:22:00]