Problem: In pursuit of expanding the reach of WCA represented titles, the WCA Rights team attends international book fairs twice a year. In order to more efficiently market their titles, they bring with them a promotional brochure or “hotlist” consisting of around 40 titles the agency collectively agrees have international market potentional. The Fall 2023 Frankfurt event marked the first time this brochure would not be made using Microsoft Word.
Solution: The hotlist for the Fall 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair was instead created using Canva to improve ease of use, accessibility, and collaborative functionality. In transitioning to a new software for document creation, a new style guide was also necessary.

Hotlist

The Rights team at WCA attends two international events every year, the Frankfurt Book Fair in the Fall and the London Book Fair in the Spring. At these events, the Rights team presents a brochure (“hotlist”) of around 40 titles represented by the agency to shop around to international agents for subrights. The contents of the hotlist consist of one page per title where all the necessary metadata and additional information is presented: title, author, agent, release date if one is available, rights sold, description, and any important pull quotes from press. Additionally, the hotlist includes recent sales and prizes as a means of promoting the agency and the success of their titles both domestically and internationally.

Prior to my time with WCA, the hotlists for book fairs and other networking events had been created using Microsoft Word. This process posed a few challenges due to the limitations of Word. Namely, Word is simply not intended to be used for graphic heavy or large scale layouts, and any minor change often shifted the entire document in unpredictable ways. As such, the Rights team decided to transfer the design from Word to Canva. The design process was handled by another intern who spent a few weeks with the agency as part of an employment program with the TDSB.

My role in this project began by transferring information about the titles agents had deemed “hot” enough to be presented to co-agents in Frankfurt to the hotlist template. Since this was our first time using the Canva template, and the intern who had designed the template had already departed, this process involved a lot of adjusting the design to fix issues of usability. We ran into some issues unique to Canva, such as the fact there is really no easy way to wrap text around an image the way you would in Word (believe me, I scoured the internet for the magic button that would fix this). Instead, we had to come up with a creative way to group text boxes and images to “fake” the text wrap to maintain the original design and utilize the most page space possible for copy.

Once the bulk of the information was added, I began the lengthy process of ensuring all the information was up-to-date, reaching out to agents with any clarifying questions about their titles, and proofreading the copy for errors in accordance with the style guide. Through this project, I developed a great deal of patience and efficiency to read the same document multiple times while maintaining a high level of attention to detail. Additionally, the process allowed me to learn about the decision-making that goes into marketing in the publishing industry, particularly with regard to international markets.

Style Guide

As this was our first time using Canva instead of Microsoft Word to create a hotlist for an event, we ran into a lot of bumps in the road that required trial and error to get right. As I troubleshooted various parts of the process, I made sure to keep notes on what worked and what didn’t for my own reference in case a similar problem arose again. While I was doing this, it occurred to me that these notes would also be useful for future interns working on similar documents. Additionally, a lot of the information in the previous style guide that I was working off of no longer applied due to the transition from Word to Canva. In response to this, I decided to put together an updated and improved style guide for future interns.

Since I had been keeping notes throughout the entire process, the project itself only required editing those notes for clarity and organizing them into a concise and readable document. I decided to create this document using Canva to ensure it would be easy to edit if any changes needed to be made in the future, and to keep all the hotlist documentation in one place. In the interest of style and consistency, I did my best to make the Style Guide match the hotlist’s aesthetics and branding.

Since it is an internal document, I can’t share too much of it, but I have included a screenshot of the title page and table of contents.