Marc beamed, happy to have earned the praise. He knew he was nice, of course, but he also knew he could be awkward with new people, that not everyone understood or appreciated his particular eccentricities, so it was always nice to hear that he'd managed to get through to someone. To Marc, it didn't matter at all that that someone was eighteen years his junior. "You're not a stupid little kid," Marc pointed out. "And you seem very nice, too. I'm glad we could meet." Maybe, when Marc sent a note to Sol come September, he would include something for her to give to Nico, if Marc could find anything he thought he would enjoy. (Books, Marc gave a lot of books as presents, for obviously reasons.)
Sol's comment that she hadn't even thought about the binding earned her a shrug from Marc. "Well, that's why you come here, to look around at what your options are. I don't think many authors have very firm ideas about what binding they want. It'd be less fun for us, if they did." Or at least, less fun for Marc, who liked to experiment and come up with his own ideas, rather than following the prescriptions of anyone else. "Have you given any thought to having pictures?" Marc asked. "I don't think romances usually do, except on the cover, but if you got the right artist, I think light-hearted pictures would carry their tone through the whole book."
Since Marc had been at school with Harry Potter, it had never occurred to him to wonder what it was like. "Did they?" he asked. "I suppose I would've told them it was mostly scary." Those were not the school memories Marc liked to look back on, though he recognised that they had shaped him in certain ways. "If you can make that funny, I wouldn't have thought turning a love story into a comedy would be all that difficult. But of course, I don't write anything."
The idea of a scratch-and-sniff made Marc chuckle. "What would you have it smell of?" he asked. "Roses? Chocolate?" Those were things Marc felt associated with romance. "People might like that, it might get them more in the mood of the book. But if it's funny, then you might also want something that's surprising. Like the kinds of things you'd find at Zonko's." He smiled, happy to come with as many ideas as it took. "That sounds great to me," he enthused.