A platform for a children’s publisher
We turned scattered work by authors, editors and designers into a production line.
- +60 %
- target growth in output: from 25 to 40+ books a year
- up to 7×
- faster text and storyboarding
- 3 › 2 months
- shorter production cycle per book
The pain
The publisher puts out around 25 children’s books a year, but each one is assembled like a one-off project. An external author writes the manuscript, an editor reworks the text in a private chat with a model, a designer lays out the pages in professional software, and the illustrator waits off to the side.
Edits and approvals live in messengers, and every decision that matters funnels back to an overloaded editor-in-chief. Not a production process — a book hand-assembled out of people, files and chats.
Audit
A four-page brief was already on the table, written by the client themselves. At first glance it was ambitious and technical. At second glance there was plenty of technology, little logic, and no answer to the question of what exactly was being built.
Rather than price development blind, we put together 80+ questions across 14 areas, traced a book’s path from subject to layout, and found the real task. The publisher did not need another writing tool — it needed one production system.
The product is the editorial process
The new brief described not a feature list but an editorial chain: one book project, four roles, one current version and mandatory points of approval.
Each stage hands its result to the next: synopsis to text, text to storyboard, storyboard to illustrator, finished images to layout. Until the previous stage is approved the next one does not open, and the system keeps the versions, comments, prompts and working material.
How the first version works
An editor describes the subject, the character and the task straight in the browser, then fills in the intent: age, format, tone, method. The system offers ways the synopsis could develop; the editor picks one, adjusts the detail and approves it.
From there the system lays the story out across spreads and drafts the text, then describes each spread from the final version: what happens in the scene, where the text sits, what the illustration needs to show. The storyboard goes to the illustrator, and the finished illustrations are joined to the text in a browser-based layout.
6 sprints6 weeks2.25M ₽
Six weekly sprints to the first working version. Target output: 40+ books a year against the previous 25.
WISEBOOKS is a stand-in for the brand name. The development timeline is actual. Cost and the growth in output are modelled figures; real impact will be measured after rollout.
+15 books
every year on top of the previous twenty-five
Got a problem? Let us take it apart.
You do not need a finished brief. An idea, a bottleneck or a process that has outgrown its spreadsheet is enough to start.
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