Dariusz Kałka

“Can I give someone your number?”

That was all I heard from Agata, our resident editor. No context, no name, no subject. I said of course.

A few days later I was talking to Professor Dariusz Kałka – cardiologist, andrologist and sexologist, author of over three hundred scientific papers and founder of the Men’s Health Centre. He had an idea and he had a finished book. The problem was that both had been standing still for quite some time.

The manuscript had been ready for ages and was slowly growing a coat of indifference.

It is a good thing that neither the professor nor the people around him had accepted that this was how it would end. Hence the phone call. A few sentences were enough to see what needed doing and how.

Five hundred pages and hand-drawn illustration

Mężczyzna pod presją (A man under pressure) runs to twenty-seven chapters, over five hundred pages and a hard cover. Every illustration was drawn by hand. Typesetting, artwork, DTP, print preparation and print – all on our side. And then the selling, packing and shipping, which is the rest of the way to the reader.

A site that talks to the book

There is also the site with its store. Paper and web are not two separate worlds here: QR codes lead out of the book, so the reader goes from a chapter straight to the material that expands on it.

Only the warm-up so far

We are building an audience around it and we are right at the beginning. With the professor’s charisma the job is a good deal easier than usual, and the subject makes its own case – men are reluctant to talk about looking after their own health, and that is exactly the gap this book goes into.

The whole sales strategy and the whole of fulfilment sit with us. This is only the first book, and we have more ideas for what comes next than we have had time to build.