Fable Books
( case study )
An independent publisher in Edinburgh wanted its books to look like a family on the shelf. We built a spine system that turns a row of titles into one picture.
- Client
- Fable Books, Edinburgh
- Services
- Identity, publishing
- Year
- 2024
- Team
- 5 people, 12 weeks
( task )
Fable published 30 titles a year, each with a cover from a different freelancer. Bookshops shelved them apart, and readers could not tell a Fable book from any other.
( solution )
Every spine now carries the same grid: an orange band for fiction, grey for essays. The endpapers repeat the mark as a pattern, so even an open book says who made it.
Results
41%
more backlist sales in the first year
30
titles moved to one spine system
12
weeks from the first sketch to the first print run
“Booksellers now give us a whole shelf where we used to get one slot.”
( next step )