Behind the Scenes: Children’s Book Publishing Assemblages and Social (Inter)actions

Authorship is both a product and a process. This article uses an Authorship as Assemblage Model (that I developed—Winters, 2010) to investigate the behind-the-scenes collaborative authorship of the picturebook Jeffrey and Sloth (2007). Specifically, using narrative recount and interview transcripts, I will demonstrate how Ben (illustrator), Maggie (editor), and I (author) assembled modes and semiotic resources, while continually shifting among the social (inter)actions of designing, negotiating, producing, and disseminating as we interpreted and realized multimodal meanings in the book.