LocalJune 27, 2024

Small Business of the Day: Conversations with Nadia Pupa of Pique Publishing

Local Stories

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Today’s Small Business of the Day features an interview with Nadia Pupa. Please find our conversation below.

We’re thrilled to have the chance to ask you some fun questions today, but before we get started, can you introduce Pique Publishing, Inc. to our readers.
At Pique Publishing, we do all things editing and design—from ideation to distribution for books, magazines, educational materials, and corporate documents. We can help you develop content, design it, and hand-hold clients throughout the printing and distribution process.

What makes us unique is our subjective approach. We are fully engaged with our clients by providing our ideas and opinions. Now, more than ever, clients want honest feedback. We’ve found that clients don’t want to be told what to do but rather to have a collaborative discussion about their projects. Pique Publishing is special in the sense that we want to roll up our sleeves and participate fully. We’ve been called into corporate meetings as a sounding board, to facilitate meetings, or to train staff on a variety of things related to writing, editing, and design.

Everything ties back to the company tagline, “Publish with personality.” It’s our motto, but it’s also an imperative sentence—our command, mission, and overall direction. To publish with personality transcends all types of projects and clients. This applies to authors and a variety of corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic institutions. At our core, we always focus on our clients’ end goal and mission. This is why we have repeat clients who spread the word for us. Word of mouth and referrals will always be our best and highest form of marketing.

What is your favorite service offering and why?
My favorite service offering is manuscript evaluations! I love this offering so much that I’ve presented on this topic locally and nationally for editorial organizations. This is a service that several editors might already be offering, but at Pique Publishing, we’ve figured out a way to streamline the evaluation process by separating the editorial service from the evaluation side of things.

In our process, we provide clients with three things:

1. Clients receive an annotated Word doc full of comments that range from directional to emotional. If something makes us laugh, we want our clients to know. If there’s a sudden plot twist that shocks us, we need authors to know. We can also give writers direction on identifying plot holes (fiction) or gaps of information (nonfiction), and most importantly, how to improve their content in a variety of ways.

2. We provide a clear and concise report that details the strengths, weaknesses, and suggestions on how to make improvements—broken by chapter or section. It’s essentially an instruction manual on how to improve the entire manuscript.

3. We include a 1.5-hour debrief meeting to discuss anything and everything about the client’s project. We answer all of our client’s questions and help them come up with a game plan for what’s next.

Every single client who has had a manuscript evaluation has been supremely impressed with the process. We’ve discovered items that they hadn’t considered. In a world where everyone seems to be turning to AI, these manuscript evaluations are paramount for establishing professional opinion-based feedback on published works.