What is a Book Packager or Producer?

Book producers, also know as “packagers,” are some of the most valuable players on the creative side of the publishing industry today.

Book Producers have earned this distinction for their mastery of one type of book in particular-namely, the “complicated” book.  A complicated book is just about any book that involves more than a straight forward, single-author text. 

Complicated books include all manner of highly illustrated or elaborately designed or multi-authored titles, such as how-to books, coffee table books, reference books, textbooks, cookbooks, historic subject books or fine art or design books of all disciplines including calendars and “special” corporate communications and histories.  Quietly, these books make up the backbone of the publishing business.

Creating complicated books is a labor-intensive craft that often involves whole teams of writers, editors, designers, illustrators, photographers, researchers and other specialized talent whose separate contributions must be integrated into a seamless whole. 

No one makes complicated books better than book producers.  This is because book producers are set up precisely for this purpose.  Staffed with experienced publishing professionals and equipped with sophisticated design and production technologies, they make it their business to devote the focused time, energy and attention necessary to bring these projects to fruition. 

But the book producer’s mastery of “complicated books” goes well beyond mere execution:  Book producers are visionary as well, conceiving and developing the books they create. 

Producers combine a distinct individual aesthetic with a keen sense of the demands of the marketplace and a savvy about what is technically feasible to generate a steady stream of smart, original ideas.  They are then able to pull together the necessary ingredients to see these visions through.  It is largely for this reason that book “packagers” are also known as book “producers” or book developers.

Books created by producers—or “packaged books”—defy easy categorization.  They cover an infinite variety of essential subjects:  art, medicine, cooking, history, parenting, gardening, sports, popular culture, self-help and more.  They run the spectrum of publishing markets, including trade, mass market, education, juvenile, professional and reference.  And every year, some of the most impressive and lucrative titles on the market are packaged books. 

Book producers bring products to market through deals with book publishers.  For the most part, producers make these deals based on proposals they have developed and written themselves, selling the publication rights to a book before starting work.  This sale, in turn finances the book’s creation or production. 

Depending on the nature of the particular arrangement, the book packager may deliver to the publisher anything from an edited manuscript to a fully-designed computer file to finished books—and then the publisher takes the project from there.  Marketing and distribution are virtually always the publisher’s responsibilities. 

With each passing year, book producers are becoming an increasingly vital part of the publishing business.  As publishing houses, eager to cut costs, streamline their own staffs, they turn more and more often to book packagers to fill the gap.  Outside the institutions looking to exploit their brands—from magazines to medical schools—have also come to count on packagers to help them develop books that will bear their names. 

Producers, meanwhile, continue to expand both the volume and the extent of their activity, providing unique services and greatly enhancing the world’s book shelves in the process. 

Packaged books are complicated projects to put together. 

Complicated can mean many things, depending on the project.  Often it means the project involves working closely with an outside organization, like a magazine or a medical school, to shape a book on which the organization can agree to put its name.

Sometimes complicated means coordinating the work of multiple authors, researchers, and experts, or supervising the creation of original art, photography or incorporating various reproduction techniques like silk screen printing, digital printing, and special die cutting for “pop-up” visuals or foil stamping along with the traditional offset lithographic process.  Sometimes it means executing a highly elaborate design, or even incorporating non-print materials, such as CDs, tapes, video, iPod recordings, branded products, juggling balls, flower seeds, unusual tactile objects, 3-dimentional objects, exotic materials, and substrates other than paper, i.e. plastics, fabrics, woods or other materials including multiple binding techniques for presentation or in-store display. 

Almost always, however, complicated means that the project calls for concentrated, labor-intensive activity.  And this makes most packaged books the kinds of projects that literary agents cannot offer to publishers and that publishers themselves generally cannot execute in-house.  And yet without such complicated books, publishers’ lists would be missing many a remarkable—and lucrative—titles.