Shelf Life

James Kwan is an animator and illustrator who has created work for major clients including The New York Times, LEGO, and Netflix, and contributed to productions such as Netflix’s BoJack Horseman and NBC’s Elf: A Christmas Musical. His critically acclaimed children’s books include Dear Yeti and How It Feels to Be a Boat.

When you begin a new project, how do you first imagine the world of your story? 

Every project starts a bit differently! My first book, Dear Yeti, started in a children’s book class at Pratt. The professor, Pat Cummings, recommended starting with something you would want to draw over and over again (because you will have to!). For some reason, I wanted to draw hikers looking for monsters in the woods, like a minimalist Where’s Waldo, so I ran with that. Other books have been inspired first by ideas, characters, even music!

What happens after you have an idea?

Once I start on an idea, I’ll create a document where I brain dump all my thoughts. Over time the idea begins to take shape, and I’ll turn it into a dummy (or a rough draft) of the picture book. The dummy gets pitched to publishers, and if someone likes it, we finish it from there! It’s a much longer process than most people think. My most recent book, I Come From Another Galaxy, was an idea I started working on 10 years ago!

How did your education at Pratt shape the way you approach writing and illustrating children’s books?

I majored in animation at Pratt, where we learned a lot about storyboarding, storytelling, and character development. So when I make children’s books, I approach them like little movies.

How does your experience in animation influence your approach to books, and how do these two forms of storytelling diverge?

In children’s books, I love that I get to spend much more time on a single “frame,” whereas in animation you have to crank out work extremely efficiently because there is so much that goes into that. On the flip side, I miss that children’s books don’t have music or audio to help build the mood.

What surprised you most about the journey from being a student to becoming a published author with books on shelves?

Growing up, English was always my least favorite subject, and I never connected with the books I had to read in high school. I wouldn’t have guessed that I would be making my own books today.

What advice would you give to Pratt students or alumni who want to create their own picture books?

It can take a long time for these things to actualize, so be patient! 

Adrian Shirk is a literary agent at Driftless Literary, a boutique literary consultancy that represents experimental literature across genres, with a focus on bringing books to independent and small presses. Shirk, the author of hybrid memoirs Heaven Is A Place On Earth and And Your Daughters Shall Prophecy, is also a member of the performance group The Party Theater and an Adjunct Associate Professor, CCE, in Pratt’s Writing Department. 

How did your time at Pratt shape the way you think about bringing unconventional projects to publication?

I came of age in turn-of-the-century Portland, Oregon, and cut my teeth on DIY punk scene media culture and queer literary culture in the region. Pratt massively expanded, and in a lot of ways reinforced, that education. Uniquely among academic creative writing programs, Pratt was staffed by working writers, many of whom were involved in legacy indie and small press poetry publishing communities and projects and presses. Those are the people who helped elucidate an understanding of publishing that extended beyond tiered understandings of “big is better, and small is fine, but less.”

It helped me to articulate and understand, Why do we publish books? How do we want to publish books? What are the different choices we have? How big is a book’s audience? Some books are meant for 500 people, and we make that book for those 500 people. Some books are meant for much larger audiences, so we figure out a way that that book can reach a larger audience.

What do you see as the agent’s role in bringing a book into the world? 

There are as many ways to agent as there are literary agents that exist. But, in general, you’re acting as the emissary and intermediary for the author. Often an agent’s role is to see many things in the work that the author hasn’t even seen yet—including things like who might want to read that book, and what kinds of publishers are connected to the communities and audiences who might want to read that book.

When an offer is on the table from a publisher, you become the negotiator of all of those contracts, which include an enormous range of complicated legal and economic decisions. Generally, in a traditional context, an agent also becomes the permanent bookkeeper of all future earnings that the book makes throughout its life.

What does it look like in practice when you’re working with authors? 

We take on 12 projects a year. How those projects function is that an author pays us a retainer, we do developmental work with them at the beginning, and then we do a submission process which focuses primarily on the indie landscape, but also includes—if we think that there’s a real fit—some literary imprints of the Big Five. And then, if and when there is a sale, we do not act as the agent on contract. We negotiate the contract on behalf of the author, but the author is enshrined in the contract as the sole recipient of all future earnings of that book. All royalties, all sales of subsidiary rights, which include film, audiobook, TV, dramatic adaptation, and sales to foreign markets—all of that goes to the author in perpetuity.

How do you want authors to think about the publishing process?

I know so many people with so many amazing books who are struggling to navigate this landscape. Or, they’ve gotten agents, and then that agent, forced to bend the project to some kind of market trend, required that the author change the work quite a bit, then tried to sell it, and it didn’t sell, and then that author is abandoned by their agent. That happens a lot.

I’m very interested in demystifying and resourcing authors so that we stop relating to publishing as a kind of mysterious golden egg being handed down from on high to a special baby for reasons we don’t understand. Instead, I want to reverse that power dynamic entirely: I, the author, have the tools and knowledge to try to understand or figure out what kind of place and life and resources my book needs, and to create a strategy or process that moves from there, rather than one that submits oneself to some kind of nameless power.

That’s true for all the workshops and on-off consulting we do. The end-all, be-all is not to predict market trends and earn commissions off of books that have been spiritually orphaned, but to have a much richer, much riskier, exciting literary landscape full of empowered authors. 

Maeve Norton ’15, an art director at Scholastic, designs covers for popular middle grade and young adult titles, including Goosebumps and The Baby-Sitters Club, while also pursuing her own illustration, lettering, and storytelling.

Can you describe the art director’s role in bringing a book to life?

Art directors are responsible for all visual aspects of the book, from the cover to the page design and even the case under the hardcover jacket. There are a lot of different ways we can go about bringing a book to life, and this really depends on the book! Sometimes that means hiring an illustrator; sometimes it means hiring a photographer for a photoshoot. Sometimes it’s as simple as a knockout type treatment. Each book needs something different, and it’s an art director’s role to know what it needs and how to best situate the book in a crowded market. 

Aside from the visual aspect, we’re also managing schedules with the artists and printers, handling proofing samples, and working very closely with our editorial, sales, and marketing teams to create something that stands out and simultaneously sits well within the genre.

How did your education at Pratt prepare you for art direction?

My time at Pratt uniquely prepared me for my role as an art director, and I think that was largely because the ComD Department has a foundation year before moving into your major. I was lucky enough to take some courses that didn’t necessarily relate to my illustration major, like packaging design, critical visual thinking, and a zine course. At the time, these electives were chosen purely for their fun appeal, but looking back now I can see how they inform my daily practice today. 

Another way Pratt prepared me to be an art director was through our class critiques. In those sessions, I learned how to talk about art, articulate my notes, and present them to people in a way that is digestible and collaborative. I would say 90 percent of my job today is influenced by that education.

When assigned to work on a book, how do you translate the world of a book into a physical object?

I always like to read the manuscript and then approach the design in a 360-degree way, and this can mean getting quite granular with how the book resonates with me. Sometimes, a book may feel like a specific color, texture, or stylistic treatment. I’ve made entire playlists or listened to albums on repeat if they speak to the tone of the novel and the design choices I’m pushing forward. 

An author has already done the heavy lifting of world-building, and it’s my job to pull from that world in a visual way. If the book is about dragons, maybe we see a scale texture throughout. If the setting is tropical, I’ll lean into warm colors. My job in creating a cover is to signal to a reader in three seconds what this book is about, and I pull a lot of subtle cues from the novel to achieve that.

What is the most challenging part of your job?

The most challenging part of my job is occasionally working on books that I am not the target reader for. A girly cult YA novel? Right up my alley. But, a war story centering around a boy and his dog? I have to dig a bit deeper for that. What motivates me, and is also the most rewarding part of the job, is remembering that every book is some kid’s favorite book ever. Something that I don’t necessarily connect to may be the book that shaped a child’s life, and that understanding pushes me to create better work every day.

Anna Sergeeva is the founder of Dear Friend Books, a bookshop and wine bar that operated in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, from 2022 to 2026. In 2026, she launched the independent publisher Dear Friend Press with her debut book Aquabet. 

How did your time at Pratt shape Dear Friend Books? 

At Pratt, I developed my knowledge around information organization, then I was able to apply it at Dear Friend Books in a way that was unique but still based on the foundation of what I learned about physical and online organization systems. At Dear Friend Books, books were organized across the seven chakras, with the books categorized more on their energy or essence rather than their specific subject matter. We didn’t have any labels on the shelves, instead basing the space around serendipity and synchronicity. 

How did your artistic practice influence your approach to launching the bookshop? 

I say that as an artist, I work with language as a medium, so a bookstore or a space that’s based around storytelling is part of the practice inherently. I saw it as a communal sculpture made in collaboration with the team that worked there, but also every single person that came in. 

What surprised you most about your journey of starting a business?

The difference between the creation phase and the operations phase. As an artist and like a creative worker, the ideation phase and the beginnings—like designing the logos, working on the layout of the actual space, figuring out the vibration of the events—all of that is completely different from your day in, day out. The sinks flooded, the gate didn’t close, this person called in sick. Either you have to have two sides of you or work with partners who can fill in, because that’s a lot to take on as one person.

What inspired your decision to expand Dear Friend into a press?

On the front wall of Dear Friend Books, we displayed artist zines and small press publications, submitted through our website. I’m constantly trying to support and uplift what other people are doing, which leads to the desire to do that for ourselves. The press’s motto is Sancto Sanito Om nos Critura Sonat, which is “Every creature sounds with a holy sound” in Latin. Voices from the depths of souls are what uplifts.

Can you tell me about the first book from Dear Friend Press, Aquabet?

Aquabet is a meditation on the alphabet. It’s a hybrid work and very much rooted in memoir, poetry, and photography. I deconstruct the alphabet as the original artificial intelligence and hold it responsible for the chaos of the contemporary condition: systemic oppression, climate crisis, human violence, and so forth. As a technology, the alphabet has controlled the structure of our brains and our thinking but has become so internalized that we don’t think of it as a technology; we think of it as our consciousness. 

After Aquabet, do you have plans to produce your next title?

I’m putting one foot in front of the other because everything is kind of a DIY process, from interior layouts, design, editing, printing, working with the printer. Now, I think the next step is more distribution-focused. I want to fulfill the whole life cycle and understand a bit more about the opportunities, the cost, the difficulties before diving into what’s next. But I definitely would want to do an open submission period and share that work.