Mostly Water by Aisha Fukushima.

When Aisha Fukushima came to Tell Tell, she was carrying a lot at once: a manuscript still in editing, a grant with hard reporting deadlines, and launch partners who had volunteered to host events only if the timing held. Rather than let the pressure narrow her vision, she let our team take on the production weight so she could stay close to the work itself.

Aisha had spent considerable time shaping her poems before bringing them to us, and we built the production process around protecting that care while keeping the calendar honest.

Developing the look of the book was a process of inspiration and experimentation. Aisha shared a vision board of library photographs, covers she admired, and interior layouts, along with notes on what drew her to each. She came in drawn to warm earth tones like terracotta, clay, and coral, soft neutrals like cream and parchment, and muted cool accents, and she pointed us toward a Japanese framing style she wanted to echo on the cover.

Our designers narrowed the inspiration into a small set of concepts and worked from there. We toned down the more vibrant colors so nothing competed with the cover photograph, pulling a brown tone from the image and adding grain to keep everything cohesive. Aisha chose the version with the darker brown background on the back cover. For the interior, we explored several font directions, including League Spartan as she had referenced, before settling on a serif that better fit the personal, confessional register of the collection and the Kaur and Waheed lineage she admired. We landed on five by eight, the more compact trim that suits this kind of intimate poetry.

We navigated the book’s interior as collaboratively as the cover. Aisha sent family photographs, some in black and white and some in color, paired to specific poems with captions she had written, and trusted Pedro’s eye to place the rest across the manuscript. Together we worked through the considerations that come with a photo-rich collection: paper weight, color versus black and white printing, image permissions and credits, and the cost tradeoffs of each at print time.

One recurring design thread was the symbol marking the end of each poem. We tried several options, including a double wave, a starry asterisk, an outlined star, and a four-diamond cluster, before arriving at a stacked three-wave breaker that tied back to the water imagery in the title and read as a fluid line break across the page. We standardized that icon throughout, aligned captions beneath their images, and formatted the longer-lined foreword and afterword to sit comfortably alongside the shorter poems.

Aisha opted for KDP, a print-on-demand and digital format that maximizes author royalties and makes the book available for global distribution. We walked her through account setup, the tax interview, and getting paid, then handled uploading the manuscript and cover files. When the printed proof arrived, on cream pages with a matte finish, it landed: she described it as feeling like a real book in the deepest sense. With distribution running through the platform, readers can order Mostly Water online from anywhere, and Aisha can order author copies whenever she needs them.