OUR MISSION
At Carter Publishing Studio we have one clear mission: we design and compose high-quality print and digital magazines, journals, and books. Our clients—magazine and journal editors, publishers, association executives, communications managers, self-publishing authors, small business owners—count on us to turn almost anything we’re handed into well-crafted, great-looking pages, when they need it and within a reasonable budget. We're proud to claim the appellation "Midwestern Nice"; that's just one of the reasons we've served some of our clients for almost two decades.
OUR SERVICES
Publication design (book covers and interiors, magazines, journals, newsletters)
Publication layout and composition
eBook formatting (epub, mobi, pdf)
Document/template clean-up
Editing/proofreading
New: Social Media Management and Consultation
“After more than a decade of association, Carter Publishing Studio continues to exceed my highest expectations. Laura is a highly skilled artist and personable professional, producing a quality product in a timely manner within a reasonable fee structure. I couldn’t be happier with what remains a strong partnership.”
—Richard D. Sjoerdsma, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Singing
OUR TEAM
Laura Carter — Owner & President
Laura’s decades-long career as a typographer began entirely by accident, but she couldn't be happier that she stumbled into a professional niche that combines many of her passions—typography, design, the written word, and technology.
She took her first typesetting job at a newspaper during a break from college, and before long she realized that typography had become her true calling. She wandered around the country—Florida, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nashville (TN), Missouri—working for printers, ad agencies, graphic arts studios, and newspapers. She learned her typography trade in the years just before desktop publishing burst onto the scene with the first Apple computer in 1984, totally revolutionizing the fields of typesetting and graphic design. Varityper typesetting systems and light tables gave way to Macintosh computers running desktop publisher software—PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and finally InDesign—and Laura loved keeping pace with the rapidly evolving technology and workflows. (Even so, she will always measure pages in picas and points rather than inches, and she still yearns for a whiff of hot wax every now and then.)
Laura eventually settled down in Missouri and spent much of the 1990s managing the typesetting department at a busy Midwestern publication printer, the Ovid Bell Press. It was there that she learned all about magazine and journal layout, prepress, and the printing process, and she guided her department's evolution from traditional journal typesetting into electronic prepress.
When the OBP phased out the typesetting department in 1997, Laura decided it was time to start her own publication design and layout business. Originally known as Carter Document Services, Inc., her company continued to provide journal composition services to many of the same publishers and associations she'd been serving for years, some of whom remain her clients 23 years later. The company's name was changed to Carter Publishing Studio in 2005. After more than two decades in business, Carter Publishing Studio, Inc., offers the full range of creative publishing services for print and digital platforms. With a small but talented staff, CPS turns out thousands of pages every year, creating books, magazines, journals, and newsletters to be read on paper, tablets, or computers.
In 2019 Laura ventured fully into the role of publisher with the establishment of Sweetspire Press, a small imprint that published two books in 2019 and 2020. She co-wrote one of those books, The Stillmeadow Years: The Rhythm of Life on One Family Farm, with siblings Heather Erickson and Tim Erickson.
Laura spends much of her spare time tending her vegetable and flower gardens, and she is passionate about cooking seasonally using the produce she grows and buys at the farmers market. Genealogy is another obsession, and she frequently pesters her family with her latest findings. She enjoys reading, live theater, cats, taking pictures of her garden and her cats, streaming way too many TV series, and laying down harmony tracks in GarageBand. She lives in Fulton, Missouri with her husband and frequently travels across the state to visit and attend shows by their daughter, a playwright and actor in Kansas City.
“Laura Carter of Carter Publishing Studio thinks like a publisher! Her concern about quality and her attention to detail is unparalleled. Composition and book design have always been strengths of the company, and we have been pleased with our close working relationship since 1997. Producing eBooks has been added to the repertoire of services, with terrific results. If you want a quality educational product that matches your company image, I highly recommend Carter Publishing Studio.”
— Nancy Collins, Greenbranch Publishing
Regina Troyer — GRAPHIC ARTIST
Regina is a graphic arts professional, and has worked in both creative design and technical print production since 1993. She loves to intuit solutions to problems and bring order to chaos. Skills include:
Publication design and layout (books, covers, catalogs, journals, magazines, workbooks, forms, ads, brochures)
Image correction and compositing (combining several images into one, altering an image to suit a situation, removing/replacing unwanted elements, and so forth)
Web banners
Product illustration
Charts/maps/tables/graphs/flow diagrams
Logo creation
Additionally, her experiences living and traveling outside the US have given her a well-rounded world view. In her free time she paints, cares for 6 cats, and builds anything and everything out of wood.