For each book we publish, we at Ooligan produce a piece of collateral. Collateral, in publishing, is freebies or extras that match a specific book’s theme or aesthetic or go hand-in-hand with a particular part of the novel. It can be bookmarks, coasters, stickers, pins, and just about anything that can be designed and given with the newly published book.

Therefore, collateral acts as a sort of incentive to get readers to choose your novel or to help publicize the novel for its uniqueness and qualities that make it stand out. So, collateral plays a large role, and at Ooligan, we give away collateral at launch events, book festivals, and other tabling events.

When it came time for my team to decide what to do for and how we would approach collateral for our publishing novel, it was an exciting and ultimately fun process. However, what made it such a fun and exciting process was how we went about it, as a team but also by combining creativity and design skills. With that in mind, I thought I would write a blog to share how this process worked for us and why we ultimately chose the piece of collateral that we did.

Brainstorming Ideas as a Team

Since we think that teamwork produces the best ideas, we realized that choosing the collateral we would produce would require cooperation. Together, as a team, we met to brainstorm ideas and come up with fun collateral pieces and designs that would match our novel. For reference, our novel is a literary fiction called Supersymmetry written by S. R. Schulz. It is a novel about a young, single mom who—in an attempt to flee her current situation of postpartum depression, her son’s developmental delays, and childhood trauma of her own—travels to Croatia. There, she falls in love but ultimately must decide whether to stop running from her past and return to her son or stay in Croatia with her new love. So, our collateral could be focused on many different themes and ideas, such as motherhood, redemption, overcoming, love, travel, and so many other options. On top of that, we could design coasters, stickers, and bookmarks, and the options there were also vast. As a team, we created a list of all the different things we could create that highlighted the novel best.

As a team, we decided what we could design rather than making decisions from the top down, making sure that everyone’s opinions and ideas were considered. After great deliberation, we came up with designs that accurately captured our group’s imagination and vision, while also taking into consideration the novel, its themes, and thinking about our audience and what they would like as someone who would like this novel.

Creating Draft Ideas

After our list of many ideas and themes to highlight was created, I then allowed each team member to pick an idea they liked and create a piece of collateral. They could choose anything from the list, and it didn’t matter whether they all did the same thing, such as a bookmark or not. The point was to see the different designs and interests that could either be combined or explored further. As mentioned above, the designs were drafts, meaning there was no pressure to create a fully designed piece of collateral. This step was to again get further team engagement and to gather more creative ideas.

In the end, we ended up with four different themes highlighted, as well as four different formats that could be used. For example, there was a luggage tag that highlighted the themes of motherhood and postpartum. There was another that was a bookmark in the form of a boarding pass that you would get if you were flying on a plane.

Choosing the Design

We came back together as a team once again to make our final decision on what we would design and create to use as collateral at our launch party for Supersymmetry. To make our decision, we took into consideration many aspects, such as audience, design, branding, marketing, practicality, and many other factors. For us, capturing the essence of the novel was most important, as was thinking about the branding and the reader who would be picking up this book.

We picked these three main factors to focus on as they seemed to be what was most important to the entire team. So, taking into consideration branding, the reader, and the essence of Supersymmetry, we voted and settled on the idea of creating a bookmark that looked like a boarding pass with specific details of the novel and the specific fonts and colors of the branding guide. Again, doing this as a team made it easier to bounce ideas from one another and ultimately come to a decision that everyone was excited about.

Designing and Feedback

The original design of the boarding pass bookmark and the idea to combine these two designs were originally done by Alice Gatto, a member of my team. However, when it came time to design the collateral fully and with InDesign, Alice was not taking the class. So, a new designer stepped in named Kaitlyne Bozzone to help finish the design. She added her own twist to it while still keeping the integrity of the novel in mind and Alice’s original design.

Kaitlyne went through the process of actually designing the bookmark while also implementing feedback from our Copy Chief and our Design Manager. After feedback from the managers, the design became even more of a collaborative process and an even more unique piece of collateral. For instance, there are Easter eggs on the bookmark that only fans who have that particular bookmark will know about the main character. The process also helped make sure we used as much of our space as we could, such as doing a front and back design on the bookmark rather than it just being one-sided. After a bit of back-and-forth and the creativity of many, Kaitlyne has designed a final product that turned out to be perfect for Supersymmetry and perfect to use as collateral at the launch.

Conclusion

Ultimately, working together to create collateral produced the best ideas and created a team that flourished on cooperation and originality. It drew out the best ideas, and a little bit of everyone’s ideas ended up in the finished result. The main designer, Kaitlyne, performed an amazing job, and it all began with Alice’s idea. But during the entire process, everyone collaborated to offer suggestions, corrections, a list of ideas, and other things. We produced something that accurately embodies our shared vision by allowing each team member to participate in the design and decision-making processes. It serves as a reminder that, one innovative step at a time, teamwork can turn concepts into powerful designs.

Written by Julie Holland.