A yellow excavator stands on a beach under a hazy lime sun, bucket resting in the sand, cargo ships parked on a flat horizon. Excavator is the second title in the Where Are You Going Today? series, written by Rachel Loader, illustrated by Richard O’Neill and published by One Wondrous World. It follows a digger from a Norwegian quarry to a seaside rebuild, where giant rocks are placed to hold back the tide, all told in rhyme for children aged 2 to 6.
Rachel had printed the first Tractor book with us that summer. When she came back in October to book Excavator, her opening email asked something few authors think to ask a printer: “Where are your printing presses?” She wanted to film her own book being made. This page follows that request, in her words, from artwork to press to binding line.
“I wanted to highlight the printing in the UK”
Rachel had a short behind the scenes clip in mind for the series’ social channels, modelled on a factory reel she had seen online. Her one condition? “But with less dancing!” The aim was to show parents where the books come from: printed in Britain, on responsibly sourced paper.
A busy factory floor is no place for visitors with cameras, so Mike offered the next best thing. Our team would film the job themselves, and Rachel could use every clip on her socials. He also confirmed the facts she wanted to tell her readers. The factory is in the UK, the papers are FSC certified, and her books are printed with vegetable inks. The series shop still lists FSC paper and vegetable inks today.
If you sell your books direct, ask your printer the same questions before you go to press. Paper certification and ink type take a minute to confirm, and they hand your marketing something concrete and checkable to say.
“Of the flat sheets before they are bound”
Rachel knew what she wanted on camera: the presses running, and the big printed sheets before they turn into books. Mike sent two of our earlier factory films as a guide and pointed her to the liveliest stage, the binder, “as the sheets then books trundle along the line.”
Artwork arrived on 23 October and the PDF proof followed the next afternoon. Rachel’s reply was short: “Yes I am happy with the proofs thank you.” In the same email she asked again for footage. Mike had already asked our production team to record the job on press, on the binding line and through every other process it passed. The press clip went over first (“Great thanks Mike”), followed by the trimming and binding films: “These are great thanks Mike!”
Nothing about the materials needed deciding. Back in September Rachel had told us the next titles should be printed to “the same as the Tractor Book you just printed”, so Excavator went to press on an identical spec and the series stays uniform from one spine to the next.
Wide pages for a coastline story
Excavator is 190 x 230mm in landscape format, the shape the whole series shares. That width suits Richard’s coastline: a sea wall running away to green cliffs, a convoy of loaders on a quay beside a red cargo ship, a barge low in the water at sunset. Richard is an award winning Yorkshire travel artist, and you can see it in the flat bands of colour, long shadows and glowing suns borrowed from classic travel posters.
The cover is 350gsm silk with gloss lamination. Tilt it under a light and the sky gleams, which suits the poster look and copes with sticky fingers at bedtime. The 32 text pages, on 120gsm uncoated, hold the rhymes in a clear, widely spaced sans serif, centred on white pages that face full bleed artwork. The uncoated stock keeps the text pages calm and soft to turn, so the colour stays in the pictures. Trimmed, collated and perfect bound with a 3mm spine, the book has a square edge and stands neatly on a shelf beside the Tractor titles.
Two details are worth stealing. Inside the front cover, an Instagram QR code sits in Richard’s sky, letting a parent follow the series before the story even starts. And the verse teaches real engineering. “In Norway, a quarry with very hard rock” opens a chain of events that ends with boulders lifted off a barge and old timber pulled from the beach between tides. If you write non fiction for under fives, rhyme can carry facts as easily as fun.
Watching the books run along the belt
Once the binding films had landed in her inbox, Rachel sent the line that sums up the job from her side: “the excavator books look great all running along the belt!” By then she was booking more Tractor titles, and her request for those came with a benchmark.
“The videos you did for Excavator were perfect”
Rachel, Where Are You Going Today? series
For an independent publisher, footage like this keeps working. It shows readers how a book is made, and it gives an author material for launch posts and stories long after the cartons are unpacked. We also labelled every carton for the distributor’s warehouse with the title, author, ISBN, publisher and barcode, so the stock could be booked in on arrival.
Planning book two of your own series? Keep the trim size, cover board and paper identical so the set lines up, and ask for press footage when you book. Our set up guide for perfect bound covers and spines helps you size a slim spine, these pro tips for a glued picture book deal with margins and gutters, and you can watch our presses and binders in action before you book the next title in your series with us.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
