Who Really Built Your Books - and Why the Law Pretends They Didn’t
- David Salariya
- Jan 25
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 29
The hidden labour behind British publishing, the legal gap that erases it, and the AI systems now locking that history in place.
There is a particular kind of silence in publishing, not the romantic silence of the library, nor the reverent hush of the reading room but this is quieter, more procedural - it's the silence that follows acquisition.
This is the silence that settles after a contract is signed and list absorbed, a catalogue quietly rewritten, the names on the books erased in the reprints. Books, we are told, are the work of authors, occasionally illustrators are permitted a credit. Publishers, of course, present themselves as the custodians of culture - steady hands guiding stories into the world, it is a neat arrangement, reassuring, marketable and also, in many cases, incomplete.
Behind a significant section of British publishing lies another layer entirely - companies and individuals who did not simply contribute to books, but built them, conceived, structured and them commissioned them. This was designing books as visual and intellectual architecture long before a publisher's logo was ever applied, yet, in the official record, they are frequently absent - these are 'The Packagers".
So what are Packagers?
A packager might originate the idea, devise the format, commission the writer, brief the illustrator, design the spreads, manage the artwork, oversee picture research, prepare production files, liaise with printers, and deliver a finished book - or a finished series - to a publisher whose role was principally sales, distribution, and brand placement.
That is why the credit question is more complicated than the familiar debate about ghostwriting.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This is not an accident of memory, It is a feature of the system: The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 - the legal backbone of British publishing, recognises certain creators and leaves others unaddressed, It grants moral rights to authors, rightly so, but leaves designers, concept creators, and the architects of book formats without equivalent protection.
The Official Version
The result is a telling imbalance: those who write the words may be named, but those who build the world those words inhabit can, quite legally, disappear. For decades, this was treated as an convenience, a quirk of contracts, the cost of doing business.
Now we are entering a time in which the official version of how books are made is not merely recorded - it is replicated, scaled, and fixed.
Artificial Inteligence
Artificial intelligence systems are trained on catalogues, metadata, and marketing narratives, they learn from what is written down, not from what actually happened, and what is written down is often wrong. When a book's origin is simplified, when a publisher presents an acquired work as its own creation, when the names of those who built it are erased or forgotten, that version does not only sit on a catalogue page, It becomes data, training material and It becomes in time, the dominant account.
The Gap in the heart of UK Copyright
The silence, in other words - echos and once it does, it is remarkably difficult to correct.
There is a gap at the heart of UK copyright law, not an obscure technicality, a structural failure - one that has quietly allowed decades of creative work to be stripped of attribution, absorbed into corporate catalogues, and presented to the public as if it emerged fully formed from institutions that had no hand in its making.
Book Packaging Legacy
Book packaging - the practice of an independent company conceiving, designing, commissioning and delivering a complete book or series to a publisher. shaped British publishing for over half a century, these were not peripheral contributors, companies like Bender Richardson White produced over 1,400 titles across three decades. Packagers wrote proposals, commissioned authors, designed books, oversaw printing, and in many cases delivered finished titles straight to the publisher's warehouse. The publisher's role, in such arrangements was frequently limited to sales and distribution.
Yet the people who built these books have no legal right to say so.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) grants moral rights - including the right to be identified as creator - to authors and directors, designers, concept creators. The people who build the intellectual and visual systems of the book. When a series is sold or transferred, as routinely happens in an industry dominated by five global conglomerates, the creator/designer who originated its format or the packager who assembled the whole enterprise have no legal remedy, they cannot assert attribution, they cannot object to the work being presented as someone else's founding idea.
Flat Fee
This is compounded by the legacy of the flat fee culture that characterised the packaging industry. Writers and designers were paid a fixed sum upon delivery - no royalties, no ongoing relationship with the work, often no credit on the finished book, a designer whose visual system sold millions of copies across twenty years received nothing when that format was acquired by a larger publisher and continued under a new name, the intellectual property had been purchased outright, standard practice.
Consolidation
The wave of consolidation that has remade UK publishing since the 1980s has turned individual cases of erasure into a systemic one, each acquisition is a potential erasure event, a packager who delivered a complete series to a mid-sized UK publisher in 1990 may find, thirty years later, that the series is now owned by a global conglomerate, actively marketed as the conglomerate's own creative property. The law offers no correction.
Now, artificial intelligence has made this urgent.
AI systems are trained on the publicly available record - catalogues, marketing copy, Wikipedia entries, press releases. They learn from precisely the sources most likely to reflect the acquirer's account of a series' origin rather than the reality of how it was made.
When a publisher presents an acquired series as its own founding creation, that claim does not merely appear in a catalogue. It enters the training data of AI systems that will reproduce it at global scale, indefinitely, the original creator's erasure does not simply survive into the digital age, It compounds.
Diversion and Inclusion
There is a further contradiction worth looking at, the publishing industry's commitment to diversity and inclusion is now structural and public. Major publishers produce annual inclusion reports, run mentorship schemes, make public pledges. The message, at every level of public communication, is consistent: who made this matters.
And yet, operating through the same organisations, in the same financial year, legal and cataloguing processes do the precise opposite, they remove names, they erase creative histories. They replace the complex, often diverse reality of how books were built with a clean institutional narrative, the left hand champions visibility, the right hand systematically destroys it.
The Independent Packaging Model
The independent packaging model was, for several decades, one of the more genuinely accessible routes into publishing for people without the social capital that conventional entry required. These companies operated in cities and regions beyond London, they were founded by people from a wider range of backgrounds than the conventional publishing houses of the same era. When their creative work is acquired and their origins erased, what is concentrated is not merely intellectual property, it is credited history.
Reform of the CDPA
Reform of the CDPA does not require reimagining UK copyright law from scratch. It requires four targeted changes: extending moral rights to designers and concept creators; requiring provenance disclosure when publishing IP transfers between owners; limiting the blanket moral rights waivers that standard contracts routinely contain; and establishing a voluntary register of creative provenance that would survive the passage of ownership and time.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act was a largely well-crafted piece of legislation, but it was written for a publishing world that no longer exists. The omission of designers and concept creators from moral rights protection was, in 1989, an oversight with limited consequences. In 2025, with five global conglomerates dominating UK publishing, with IP transfers routine, and with AI systems encoding the false record permanently - that omission is no longer acceptable.
Publishing has always been a collaborative art, the danger is not that collaboration exists. The danger is that parts of it are being quietly written out of history, and the law provides no remedy.
It is time to change that.
The Fiction Factory Is Only Half the Story
Recent commentary on book packaging has tended to focus on fiction: pre-plotted romantasy, celebrity novels, ghostwritten series, and the uncomfortable sense that
publishers are beginning to behave like content studios. That anxiety is not misplaced. But it is also historically incomplete.
Book packaging did not begin as a machine for producing formula fiction, much of its real power lay elsewhere: in heavily illustrated children’s books, educational series, visual reference, novelty publishing, activity books, co-editions, and concept-led non-fiction. These were not merely manuscripts passed from one desk to another, they were designed systems.
Some working ghostwriters do not want public credit, some are paid to write invisibly, by choice or by contract, and anonymity may be part of the professional arrangement. That should be respected,the issue is not whether every contributor must be named against their will.
The issue is whether the publishing record should be allowed to imply that work originated with the company that later bought, distributed, or reissued it.
There is a profound difference between a ghostwriter choosing not to be publicly named and a creator, designer, illustrator, editor, or packager being structurally erased from the history of a book they brought it into being, one is professional discretion, the other is institutional amnesia.
The articklein The Telegraph article titled “fiction factories” is useful, but too narrow, it shows that readers are beginning to notice the industrial machinery behind books. What it misses is that this machinery has shaped British publishing for decades - not only in fiction, but in the illustrated, educational, design-led books that formed the backbone of children’s publishing across the late twentieth century.
The question is not whether collaboration is legitimate, publishing has always been collaborative.
The question is whether ownership should be allowed to masquerade as origin.
There is a tendency, in publishing, to believe that what is printed is what endures, but endurance without accuracy is not preservation, it is distortion, repeated.
A book may survive its creators, and a catalogue may outlast the circumstances of its making, but when the record is stripped back to the point where only ownership remains visible, what is being preserved is not history, but a version of it - tidied, simplified, and in certain respects untrue. For a long time, that may have seemed sufficient, It is not sufficient now, because the systems we are building do not forget, they learn from what they are given, and if what they are given is incomplete, they will reproduce that incompleteness with perfect confidence.
The question is uncomfortably simple. Not who owns the books, but whether we are prepared to tell the truth about who made them.
David Salariya is a creator, designer, author and publisher with over 40 years’ experience in children’s publishing, founder of The Salariya Book Company, he is known for concept-led, design-driven books published worldwide.
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