Questions posed to The Folio Society

When you commission an illustrator is there a specific process you use to allocate a correct candidate?

A: I read the book in question initially, plus we have a briefing meeting with Editorial for any other guidance about the book that I should know.

Following that, I will think carefully what I feel is appropriate to the book - what style would capture the mood, tension, and genre and then think who would be right to illustrate it. It could be one of our existing illustrators or I might have to look around.

When you are working with an illustrator can you tell us any information on the deadlines and time scale that they have to work to ?

A: The deadline depends on where the book falls on the schedule. Currently we sell our books by forward commitment. By that I mean that annually we produce a prospectus featuring all of the forward list titles available that year. Although the books are shown in the Prospectus, photographed, and feature a number of illustrations, they aren't actually available to buy until the month they're advertised as being available in. The Prospectus goes out to members in September, and features books available from then through to around June the following year.

In order to have books for marketing to photograph, and illustrations to tempt people with, I have to commission the work for all titles ahead of the game, and ask for a small number of illustrations for marketing purposes. Some illustrators have to complete the rest of the illustrations very soon, if their book is available to members as soon as the prospectus comes out, others have a long time, if theirs isn't due until the following June. So, to cut a long story short, they have between 4 months and a year, roughly. That is to produce a binding/cover design for me, and a number of inside illustrations, between 6 and 12 full page colour illustrations on average.

What fees do you pay to your illustrators? Do you normal pay a royalty based on sales?

A: We pay a flat fee for illustration, with no royalty. We pay around £500 for a full-page colour illustration. Half page or spots will vary on size and colour. In addition, an illustrator will receive 6 copies of the book they've illustrated.

I hope that answers your questions.

I receive a lot of illustration samples from illustrators, as you can

imagine. One thing that I'd like to stress, when any of you come to show work to prospective clients, is that you should try to show applicable work as much as possible. That's even if you have to do a personal project to prove that you're up to the task. Make sure you do your home work, so you know what people commission.

The main commissions I have are for fiction - adult classic, and modern classic. We have very few children's books. Therefore if anyone shows me work, I expect to see really good evidence of people, especially fictional people, rather than just observational drawing. We need to be convinced that someone can illustrate a story, can convey emotion, tension, period detail.