Testimonials

What authors say about working with us

Every quote here carries a full name, the book it refers to and the service it is about. If a review cannot carry those three things, we do not publish it.

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What authors say

In the authors’ words

Each quote is about a different service, because a publisher is easy to like at one stage and hard at another.

Poetry is mostly white space and line breaks, and most printers treat both as errors to be tidied up. These ones asked for my spacing decisions in writing before the proof, then matched them exactly. The collection sold out its first run at a launch in a bookshop in Fremantle.
Tom Varela
Author of Ash and Ochre
I sent eighty thousand words and got back a report saying the novel started on page ninety. That was not what I wanted to hear in April. By August I had cut the first nine chapters and written four better ones, and the book finally did what I had been trying to make it do for three years.
Ruth Carmody
Author of Thirty-Six Winters
My text was 900 words and I was told, gently, that a picture book is closer to 500. We cut it together at the pagination stage and every page turn suddenly had a reason to exist. I have read it to about forty classrooms now and the carrot page gets a laugh every time.
Benny Okafor
Author of Wombat Doesn't Share

What every quote on this site has to have

Carry a full name: 100%
Carry a full name
A build-time check rejects a first name alone, which is the oldest trick in review copy.
Name the book: 100%
Name the book
So the quote is attached to something you can look up rather than floating free.
Page per quote: 1
Page per quote
No quote is reused across pages. A check fails the build if one ever is.
Star ratings: 0
Star ratings
We publish no rating without a real, checkable review count behind it.

Case studies

Two covers, decision by decision

Quotes tell you how it felt. These show what was actually done.

Emberglass

Sorel Vane

The brief: a fantasy series opener for an author who wanted no figure on the cover, competing in a category where almost every jacket has one. It had to work as a series system and survive at thumbnail size.

What we did

Built the whole cover from one heraldic emblem, so there is no figure to date the book
Set the mark symmetrically, which makes the series layout trivially repeatable
Used fine gold linework on deep teal, legible at 20mm where detail usually dies
Tracked the title wide so a single word carries the full measure
Specified the spine first, so books two and three line up on a shelf

What was delivered

Cover artwork for print, ebook and audiobook
Wraparound print cover with spine and barcode area
A series style sheet: emblem rules, palette slots and type scale
Layered source files

Bone China

Vera Lindholm

The brief: a first poetry collection where the publisher instinct is to make the cover beautiful and busy. The poems are spare, and the cover had to be too, without disappearing on a shelf of pale poetry spines.

What we did

Reduced the image to one object and one flaw, which carries the title’s double meaning
Shot it high key, so the book reads as deliberate rather than underexposed
Set the title in two short lines, large, because there is nothing else competing
Chose an uncoated stock in production, so the object and the paper agree
Typeset each poem to start on a new page, and costed the extra pages up front

What was delivered

Cover artwork for print and ebook
Print interior typeset to an agreed spacing document
An ebook with deliberate long-line behaviour
A costed print specification

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