written by the children’s editors at Allen & Unwin

It’s True! These books are a team effort
These people help to make the It’s True! books:
Author Illustrator Publisher Editor Designer Typesetter Printer
Other people tell everyone about the book and get it out to bookshops:
Marketing expert Publicist Sales reps Warehouse staff
All but the author, illustrator and warehouse staff work at Allen & Unwin

Tantalising topics
When we were planning the series, we spoke to our own children’s authors (ones we already work with). They were very keen!
Editor: What would you like to write about?
Author 1: ‘I’ve always wanted to write a book about Crime! Please, please, don’t let anyone else write on that.’
Author 2: ‘Please, save Hair for me!’
Author 3: ‘I could do Blood, or Disgusting Food, or…. Just tell me which one you want.’
We then chose the topics we thought kids would really love.

Sometimes we think of a topic ourselves and then look for an expert to write about it – perhaps someone who has already published an adult book on a similar subject. For example, Dr John Long had done an adult book on dinosaur smugglers, and we asked him to write an It’s True! on dinosaurs.

Every so often, an It’s True! book happens almost by accident. One day we had a visit from a famous professor, a world expert on frogs. He had a huge list of the questions people always asked him about frogs and he wanted to publish the questions and the answers as a book. We asked if we could rewrite the information to fit the It’s True! series, and he said, ‘Yes, what a good idea’. One of the questions he’d been asked was about frogs eating other frogs, and so we decided to call our book It’s True! Frogs Are Cannibals.

Now that the the series is out in the world, people are beginning to write to us saying, ‘Have you got one on…, and if not, can I write one for you?’ There are so many good topics, we’ll be going till 2010!

A-plus artists
The It’s True! books include photos because they are about real things, but they also have lots of funny drawings. We already knew some brilliant artists, including Terry Denton. Leigh Hobbs and Craig Smith. We also found some terrific illustrators we’d not worked with before, like Travis Tischler (who is a walking encyclopedia on the subject of dinosaurs, and also builds fantastic dino sculptures) and Andrew Plant (who even managed to be funny about prehistoric bacteria).

Each illustrator has their own style, so each book looks different from the others. There’s only one rule. We said 'Do it your own way, but just don’t use too many complicated lines.’ (The ink spreads when books are printing, so you can end up with murky pictures if there are lots of fine lines).

Tricky titles
Finding good titles that begin with ‘It’s True!’ is hard. Terry Denton’s book on flight started out as
It's True! Flight - What goes up…
or
It's True! Don't look down! How humans learnt to fly
but we much preferred the short and snappy It’s True! Pigs Do Fly.
There are some great titles that never get used. For a book on cephalopods, we liked
It’s True! There’s an Octopus in My Coconut
but there was something in the jokiness of It’s True! Squids Suck that we couldn’t resist.

Cool covers
The It’s True! covers are designed by Ruth Grüner. She’s great at finding amazing photos – she unearthed the wacky girl for Hair, the gold handcuffs for Crime and the hilarious and amazing pufferfish used on It’s True! Animals Are Electrifying. Ruth is also really good at 3D effects –she created the ‘planet’ series logo, the shadows around the photos and the plasticky blobs on the back covers. She uses a software program called InDesign to help with these special effects, and she hunts around for weird and wonderful typefaces for the titles, a different one for each book. The lettering used for Hair is wispy and loose, the lettering used for Crime looks like the cutout newspaper messages used in crime stories, the lettering used for Romans is like an inscription in stone.


Enter the editor
People often think that a book is printed exactly as the author wrote it. Not quite true. Read on…
Once the author has written the first draft of the book, the editor gets to work.

The editor’s job is to make the book as lively as it can be. She’ll say to the author, ‘Can we turn this sentence into a question? Why don’t we put in something about the awful food they had to eat? What about changing the order so the most amazing bit goes first?’ She makes sure the text can be read and understood by kids aged 8-12, and that it will fit into 96 pages – the length of every It’s True! book.

The editor also makes sure all the parts of the book are complete, including
* an introduction and signature from the author
* a friendly biography about author and illustrator
* a glossary or timeline
* thanks
* list of books and websites
* an index

We even put in footnotes. We try to make the footnotes fun to read as well, and we put a drawing alongside the booklist or glossary or index whenever we can. (We especially love the tiny drawings in the Fashion timeline.)

Picture parade
The editor also invites the illustrators to work on the drawings. Those illustrators are a cheeky bunch and you can often hear an editor chuckling in her office when she receives rough sketches for an It’s True! book. Sometimes we have to weed out the pictures that are a little too naughty! (We took out a drawing of a barbecued koala from the Bushfires book, in case it upset people.)
The editor asks an assistant to hunt for suitable photos, starting with photo libraries on the Internet.

Brilliant blurbs
The editor writes the ‘blurb’ on the back cover, so the reader knows what’s inside the book and can’t wait to read it. We try to make blurbs funny, smart and short. There’s a meeting nearly every week to discuss the latest It’s True! news, and at the meetings we sometimes brainstorm ideas for blurbs and titles.
‘Do you think “flummox” is too unusual a word?’
‘What rhymes with creature?’
‘Do kids still say “ace”?’
We laugh a lot at our own jokes and silly ideas.

Enter the designer
The editor sends off the text and the illustrations sketches and whatever photos we’ve found to the designer (Ruth Grüner again), so she can lay out the pages. This is the best bit – now it starts to look like a real book. Ruth asks herself, ‘What font will work best? ‘How will the type best fit on the page? Exactly where should the picture of the dying explorer go?’ She finds interesting ways to present everything – she’ll make fact boxes look like a pinboard (in Fashion), or an old map or diary, or charred paper (in Bushfires). She tracks down more photos so that every double-page spread has some kind of image. She even scanned her own hair, and took a photo of her partner’s mohawk, for the Hair book

Getting it right
After each book is written, we phone museums and universities looking for just the right person to check the facts in it. We also send off proofs to proofreaders, who look for mistakes in spelling and grammar. The corrections from fact-checker and proofreader are then passed on to the designer.

The editor keeps track of all the different bits, so the book is ready in time to be sent off to the printer. Later on, she checks the printer’s proofs to make sure the cover and text are all in order – and then exclaims with delight when the finished books arrive, looking fantastic!

From file to finish
Once the designer and editor have done their work, the final file is sent off to the printer on a CD.

The book printers have huge printing machines which can print thousands and thousands of copies of a book in a few hours. The paper is in enormous rolls which run through the printing press in one continuous sheet. Then another machine chops the printed paper up into smaller pieces which are folded and glued together. The covers are printed separately and glued on afterwards. The books are then trucked out to the Allen & Unwin warehouse, ready to be sent to bookshops all around Australia and New Zealand in time for publication day.

Making a splash
We want everyone to know how good these books are. Before the books are printed, our sales reps visit bookshops and take orders. The Allen & Unwin marketing staff come up with eye-catching posters, bookmarks (and even printed pillowslips), think of slogans, and for special books they create a separate website, like this one. Near publication day, a publicist contacts radio and TV channels, newspapers, magazines and websites. She organises competitions, interviews and book signings to spread the word.

At the end of all that, we cross our fingers and wait, hoping people will buy these fantastic books by the thousand. Read them on the beach, under the doona or outside in the sunshine – and tell your mates!