Two women, three jobs

Yang Ziduo, 31, recently joined as product planner at Douban, a website creating content related to films, books, music and recent events, after working as an editor for Guomai Culture and Media Co, a publishing house.

She now advertises the products Douban makes, but sometime next year she will be deciding content for bookmarks, candles, watches and even pillows themed on Chinese writer and poet Lu Xun and Shakespeare. She will also work on Douban's 2022 calendar. For someone who used to edit Chinese books, the work might seem very different, but not to Yang.

Together with her friend Yi Jie, 38, Yang has been producing and marketing book jackets since 2011.They also make pencil and Kindle cases. Her friend Yi paints. Yang, being good at photography, markets the products on Taobao.

In 2010, Yang, then a student of Chinese language at the Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, shared an apartment with Yi who, after graduating in screenwriting from the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, wrote scripts for some organizations.

The two joined an art festival for which they bought 100 tiles and painted 70 of them, with Yi painting the bulk. They managed to sell all but 7 to 8 tiles for 50 yuan ($7.65) each. The following year, they carried lighter and handmade book jackets to the festival and were surprised to find so many takers for their book covers, which can shield books from oil and dirt. "Also, there are subway passengers who don't want others to know what they are reading," says Yang.

The art fair took place on June 6 and 7 and by June 9, 2011, their brand, EchoKid, was born on Taobao, which wasn't an app yet.

In the beginning they made covers for standard book sizes. Later on, "if there was a specific theme, the design was tweaked likewise", says Yi.

Asked if she made book covers at Guomai, which she joined in 2018, Yang says: "Handmade and real book covers are a world apart. I went to Guomai to learn how to be a book editor. I'm not a book designer, but I can cooperate with one."

EchoKid hasn't tied up with any publishing house, but recently Thinkingdom Media Group approached them to make handmade covers for poet Yu Xiuhua's work Wo Men Ai Guo You Wang Ji (We Loved and We Forgot). Echo-Kid made 700 covers.

While Yang has now moved to Douban, Yi joined as art director at Gansu Wisdom Cultural Tourism Co in 2019. So has the book jacket work suffered? "I look after fabric and design, our tailors do the rest," says Yi. Being in different cities, they correspond over WeChat while choosing fabric. "We work on the computer, while our tailors do the laborious handwork," says Yang.