🖤 Meet our Team 🖤
Pen & Candle Publishing
Authors
Lisa Candel
Lisa is a French teacher in a secondary school. Coming from France, she moved to the UK after her studies for a fresh start. As far as she recalls she has always liked telling stories. Her earliest memory is making a poorly illustrated book about Christmas as soon as she learned how to write.
Within her books, she aspires to make people laugh. She believes there is no better compliment than being told you're funny, as she highly values being able to bring joy to others.
Editors
Spellin' Goblin
Our Goblin has a very simple system.
As the book is being written : Check every chapter when they are complete
Once the book is done : Read it from the start and corrects what needs to be corrected
A month after : Reread the book now that it has been forgotten and highlight everything that needs to be changed
Once the illustrations are added : Reread the book just in case.
If there are still spelling mistakes, ignore them. She's very sensitive and will steal your socks.
Illustrators
Procrastin Hermit
Procrastin is our most reliable (and only) illustrator but also our most stress-inducing.
She will have about 5-8 ideas of illustrations per chapter, which we need to tamper down to a more reasonable number.
She will then proceed to wait until the very last minute to start illustrating a book that is soon to be published, preferring instead to make concept art and reference sheets for a book that has not been written yet.
Once the due date approaches, she will isolate herself and blatantly ignore her primary needs in order to finish her job.
Cover & Layout Designers
Merry Bow
She thinks she's so cool because her job is to make the books look appealing to the readers. At least that's what she tells herself, truly she spends more time making sure everything fits within the trim without looking weird or that a font doesn't look cheap.
Judges books by their covers.
Marketing
Social Fairy
The Fairy is the most organised person on the team. Managing all our posts, our newsletter, our calendars. She. is. IT.
Don't be fooled by her dumb happy smile, her brain is constantly working at 300km/h.
Her antennas try to detect the latest trends to help the algorithm work in our favour, bring our content to people who might enjoy it.
What we use
No, we are not being sponsored by any of these but because I know how hard it is to figure out what other people are using when you're just starting, I figured might as well share all my hard work with you to save you the trouble!
No, we are not mad enough to just trust Grammarly to fix all our grammatical mistakes. But every time a chapter is done, we put it in there to see if there's any British spelling we accidentally switched with the American one. What we want is CONSISTENCY.
As the madwomen that we are. We use Pages for all our writing and formatting purposes. That included a lot of calculations to make sure nothing would be cut out during printing.
For our ebook formatting purposes. We tried KindleCreate but we found it too limiting.
All our illustrations and covers are made using ClipStudioPaint.
We mostly use this website to visualise ideas before getting started, vision boards for the Instagram page. We also use it to make pretty much all of our posts on Social Media.
If we post a video, that's what it was made on.
Pen & Candle Specials
Products
Darling Bunny
Darling adores goodies and cutesy useless things. If you see it in our shop, she's who you have to thank. Although, she singlehandedly destroys our budget with her grand expectations.
But we love her and she puts in a lot of work to make sure everything looks as nice as we can afford.
Most of our Ko-fi donations go to her.
Shipping
Mee Mouse
Don't pay attention to how tired she looks, Mee packages all your orders with extra care and makes sure they are all collected by Royal Mail.
She is balancing with another job and so can only do part-time with us on week-ends.
What we use
No, we are not being sponsored by any of these but because I know how hard it is to figure out what other people are using when you're just starting, I figured might as well share all my hard work with you to save you the trouble!
While we did originally want to make our own shopping page on this website. We realised export laws and tariffs and taxes were calculations our unit couldn't handle.
Funding the goodies to make them available isn't always within our budget, so we have opened a ko-fi to hopefully help us make more of them, either more diverse or in greater number :D
This is where we get our bookmarks, prints, etc.
For all our stickers
This is to get nice packaging, but unfortunately we can't afford it yet.
To get all our author copies and have them signed :P
