Interview with Heather McDaid, co-founder of 404 Ink Publishing: The Risks and Triumphs 404 Ink Have Experienced Over Their First Few Years: by Klaudia Hanssen
404 Ink logo
404 Ink is an independent publisher, based in the heart of Scotland, Edinburgh. The publishing house was founded in 2016, and over the last four years, it has only gained prestige, with their authors and books winning awards, such as Saltire Society First Book of the Year and Outstanding Literature Award at the Scottish Culture Awards (404 Ink n.d.) securing its place in the literary world.
404 Ink’s approach differs from more traditional publishing houses. They believe in quality over quantity. They do not publish to fill their schedule but instead publish books which they believe are suitable to be published. Since their brand is built around working with new authors, “who might not naturally find a fit with larger publishing houses or traditional Scottish publishers” (Publishing Scotland), they have made their submission process very simple and straightforward, seeing as now they are only asking for a bit of information about the book and the author. They aim to make authors “spend less time on admin and cut to the heart of their work” (404 Ink n.d. (Submissions)).
Heather McDaid is an award-winning freelancer from the creative industry, who in 2017 won The Saltire Society Emerging Publisher of the Year. She got her first job in publishing through a mentoring scheme in the Society of Young Publishers. These days she does a mix of everything, from running Prose Apothecary, an Etsy shop selling theme-based pop culture television greeting cards, to juggling being a book editor for a cultural publication Skinny Mag, and lastly, co-founding 404 Ink
The name, 404 Ink, does it by any chance have anything to do with the fact that 404 is a standardised HTTP error? Or if there is a significance for why it’s named 404 Ink?
When we were launching, we felt that a lot of publishers seemed to look down on social media / certain digital things, and so we wanted to integrate something techy in there. Our initial name ideas were in the realm of Hex (like hex codes) and other HTML and coding phrases. We had the 'ink' part for months and threw any and every word in front of it - one day we got to 'Error Ink' which felt close but clunky and within minutes we'd come to '404 Ink'. So, in short, yes, it's to do with the computer error! As it's also page not found, our launch period before we had publications said '404 Ink - page not found, yet'.
404 Ink has a strong principle regarding working with freelancers; was that deliberate because both of the co-founders are freelancers from creative industries, or was that a coincident?
It was deliberate. We see the benefits of freelancing firsthand; we work with a lot of companies and can step in to offer expertise or dedicated time that clients may not be able to get in a full-time worker who has to balance many more responsibilities. We wanted to utilize that, but also in terms of launch costs, it's practical: we can't afford a full-time member of staff, we publish so many titles that one person might not be the best fit for all of them. On top of wanting to support the freelance ecosystem by offering more paid work (another important factor in our launch - everyone is paid), we like the flexibility that each title and author can have a team around them that is a perfect fit to them and the project.
When working with freelancers, do you hire them based on a commissioned brief or for a certain period?
We work on a commissioned brief mostly. Editors are hired to take the author from the first draft, through edits, to the finished manuscript ready for proofing. We work on design briefs with our goals, comparable titles, cover inspiration and send that to our chosen designer, where they will then do a few rounds of covers. Some covers have been a near first draft, others have gone through many more versions. We've had two longer-term freelance roles - publishing assistant and project officer, who assisted across the company and ran the relaunch of literary magazine respectively.
As a follow-up question. How much freedom are you allowing the freelancers to have, especially those whose tasks lean more towards the creative side, such as designers and illustrators?
In terms of designers, we put together a design brief of how we see it sitting, some comparative titles and keywords to sum up the book and messages to convey - and then hand it over to them to see what they do. While there's a lot of information in the brief, it also remains very open, and we tell our designers that if they see something different in the book, or have a strong idea that we've missed, absolutely include it. We are not designers - we have ideas of words and 'vibes' and put together Pinterest boards to capture that, but designers always manage to do something brilliant within the briefs, and so being rigid is in no one's best interest. With longer-term freelancers, we want them to be involved - our publishing assistant, though largely assisting with admin and events initially, would read key submissions for us and recommended what went on to be our first novel; our project officer worked with us on relaunching the magazine, but we were led by her vision and tried to give her as much freedom to do the job and apply her vision to it. The best balance for freelancing, particularly creatively, is a clear brief of expectations and outcomes but then leaving room for creative approaches within that.
Looking at a handful of 404 Ink published books, Nasty Women received praise from Margaret Atwood, and the audio rights were sold to Audible. Also, fan favourite, The Goldblum Variations, sold its publishing rights for international (excluding the UK) distribution to Penguin Books. Did you know when starting 404 Ink, that it would become as successful as it is?
There's literally nothing 404 Ink has achieved that we would have expected! We felt galvanized when working on a previous freelance project to join forces and launch something; we published books that excited us, and just followed our gut, we had fun. The goal was just: shake things up a little bit, make some noise, publish great books, promote great authors. We felt we did that, and in my own opinion, publishing is at its best (from the publisher pov, anyway) when you're doing something you love, and are properly invested in the books you're publishing and people you're working with, instead of chasing X awards or praise, etc. They're all amazing authors, we just want to get as many people to read them as possible, and everything else has been an unbelievable bonus that we still very much pinch ourselves over. Selling rights to Penguin was a definite professional level up - definitely unexpected for a publisher our size.
In your opinion, do you think 404 Ink would be as fortune or would take a bit longer to become known in the literary industry if it weren’t for the timings of political activism?
The serendipitous timing of Nasty Women in the wider world context is entirely responsible for where we are, I would say - having the idea in November 2016, crowdfunding in January 2017, publishing in March is something we were warned against by pretty much everyone in the industry, but we just had this gut feeling that the book could be something special if we could just nail that timing. We do owe a lot in 404's success to that initial spark as it was stratospheric to us as a two-person team, but having said that, we wanted to publish the book because we felt it was important - that was what mattered. We want to publish books that support and explore causes and ideas we believe in, but don't want to cynically chase 'hot' topics and use activism as a quick money maker. So, it has absolutely played a key role in putting 404 on the map, and it would likely have been a very different and longer road without that, but we don't want to ever abuse that for a quick gain.
Having worked at 404 Ink for four years, is there anything that you thought would be different? Was there a point at which you felt that 404 Ink could take a different approach to the path it embraced?
I think the path has always been quite set: while we've tried a few different things in terms of division of work, ultimately we always pictured it as the two founders and a freelance network. We had goals to publish more books per year, and while we've done some experimenting in that area, feel we're more comfortable publishing little but loudly, as was our initial goal, where we can really focus on each title without being stretched thin. Given 2020, that's probably the biggest difference - we were having a lower-key year as I was off on leave for the majority already, but the impacts of the pandemic are still unveiling themselves across the industry and will likely inform our decisions for the foreseeable, but we think sticking with our ‘publish little, publish loudly’ mentality is still core, and so while it's felt a winding road, we've not actually stepped too far away from our launching principles and ideas.
Bibliography:
PUBLISHING SCOTLAND. ‘404 Ink’ Publishing Scotland. Available online: https://www.publishingscotland.org/what-we-do/members/publisher-members/404-ink/ [accessed 15 November 2020]
404 INK. n.d. 404Ink [website] Available at: https://www.404ink.com [accessed 30 Nov 2020].
Edited by Jasper Evans