Printer’s proofs

Now your book is really at the starting line. The PDF book files delivered from your publisher have been transformed into a print-ready format in the printer’s pre-press department; printing is just minutes away. Ready, set, … .

Well, no, wait a moment. As mentioned in my last post, specimen proofs must first be printed off and sent to your publisher for approval. These allow publishing staff to check that text pages are ordered correctly, cover colours match, etc. Only after the approval of these printer’s proofs can the actual printing of your book proceed.

No author involvement

This proofing process is one that you will not be involved in – unless, that is, yours is an art book or similar highly illustrated work where fidelity of reproduction is paramount; here it might be appropriate for authors with their superior knowledge of the subject to be consulted.

Appearance

Just what these printer’s proofs look like depends on the type of printing intended and the type of equipment the printer uses. If it is a digital, print-on-demand job, then what the publisher is likely to receive is a printed copy of the book, i.e. looking exactly like all subsequent copies would look like.

However, if it is a traditional lithographic printing job, then – unless these proofs are machine proofs (more about them below) – the printer’s proofs received will be quite different and look nothing like the final printed book. The book pages may be in loose-leaf form or – more likely – gathered in signatures (in which case the proofs take the form of a bundle of booklets). Such page proofs may be called blues/blueprints, diazos, ozalids and Vandykes, depending on the technology that produced them.

In all cases, however, because these proofs are printed on something like an ink-jet printer (with all sorts of compromises being made with regard to colour, resolution, etc.), the proof print is only indicative – something to check that nothing has been imposed upside down or out of sequence, for instance. Even the cover proof tends to be printed using an ink-jet printer or similar but usually the quality is good enough to flag up any major problems.

Machine proofs

Although none of these conventional printer’s proofs match exactly what the final printed copies will look like, a ‘perfect’ proof is possible but not cheap; to get this requires a machine proof, i.e. a proof printed off the actual printing press that later the book will be printed on (and not just printed off; the press needs to be set up first – quite a rigmarole for a single proof copy). As you might guess, then, this printing of a single copy is an expensive proposition that few publishers contemplate investing in. (Again, it is the high-quality art book that may need this sort of proofing.)

Publisher feedback

If it’s anything like usual, the printer’s proofs for your book will arrive by courier at the door of your production editor and s/he will have only a short time to check these. The printing presses are not actually throbbing there, waiting to start on your book (no, there’s dozens of other jobs to be done, with presses often running 24 hours a day). But there is an air of urgency and no doubt your production editor will be praying for a clean sheet, no errors.

In your case, everything is fine; the proofs are approved and the printer gets the go-ahead to print. Now, finally, all systems are ‘go’. Time to descend into Hell’s Kitchen.

(Post #6 of the Printing section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

Pre-press

There are many types of printer, as we have seen, but your book is being printed for the first time. Chances are, then, that it will be printed by an offset printer, taking form in a rather scary, noisy place where huge lithographic printing presses tirelessly grab, ink and eject thousands of enormous sheets of paper every minute of the working day. Hell’s kitchen is not where the work begins, however, not where the print files for your book arrive from the publisher. No, the first stop is paradise.

Behind the double doors

More than likely, your print files will be delivered to the printer via the internet (though not by e-mail; the files are usually too large). But let’s pretend in your case that everything is on a DVD coming to the printer by courier.

Today, it’s Hasan making the delivery in his brightly painted courier van. He knows where to go, skirting the tumult of the print shop, dodging a fork-lift truck loaded with paper, and arriving at reception. Mrs Khoo is on the phone and, seeing the envelope and its contents description, silently begs that Hasan deliver it directly upstairs to the pre-press department. He doesn’t mind; Mrs Khoo looks just like his auntie.

The din of the printing presses follows Hasan up the stairs but, at the top, there are double doors. Behind them, all is hushed and a shoe rack reminds Hasan to remove his shoes; this is a clean zone sealed off from not just the noise but also the dirt of the outside world.

In front of him is what looks a bit like a gamer’s paradise: a series of rooms in which he glimpses big-screened Macintosh computers and all manner of other strange equipment. Nor are the people here like the solid, chunky guys wearing overalls you see downstairs; no, frankly, they look like office workers. Indeed, some of them could be the kids you see downtown in the video game arcades and internet cafes – nerdy types.

Welcome to the pre-press department.

Plate-making

Hasan has gone now, together with his shoes, but your book files remain and already they are being loaded onto the pre-press server.

Essentially, from this point, the PDF files delivered from the publisher are prepared for printing. A key process here is imposition, whose purpose is to remap the linear sequence of pages onto giant sheets of paper that ultimately will end up as 16-page signatures. This mapping is complicated because the original pages must be scattered, turned and placed on the sheet so that, when it is printed on both sides, folded and trimmed, the 16 pages appear in their correct sequence and orientation. The following diagram probably explains this better.

Just how the whole process is achieved depends a bit on how sophisticated the printing company is. Twenty years ago it was common for the typesetter to output to film, which was then manually imposed (or ‘stripped’) on a light table to create the sheets. (Indeed, camera-ready copy was also common at this time, i.e. laser-printed pages were cropped and stuck together inside a sheet-sized frame and then filmed.) Today, however, digital processes exist that quickly and accurately automate the imposition process.

Once the sheets have been created, the final printing plates can be made. Again, traditionally this was done via an intervening step using film but increasingly the direct computer-to-plate process is used. Whatever, the end result is a metal or paper plate on which a mirror image of each book page is etched and then – by the application or repulsion of ink – reproduced as a positive image on paper during printing.

Colour

The above description implies there is only a single plate used to print each side of the signature. But, if pages are coloured (i.e. more than black, white and shades of gray), then additional plates are needed. These days, typically four plates will be used, one for each of the CMYK process colours (cyan, magenta, yellow and black [key]) on which the printed colour spectrum is based. Otherwise or in addition, spot colours (specially mixed to a specific hue) may be used.

Should multiple colour plates be needed, then colour separation of the PDF files received from the publisher will need to be done as one of the first steps. Here is an example of how this might look:

Not so fast!

Once the printing plates are ready, your book is ready to print – yes? Well no, actually, because I’ve rather jumped ahead of things. At the time the signature files are created, specimen proofs are printed off and sent to the publisher for approval. I’ll describe these printer’s proofs in greater detail in my next post.

(Post #5 of the Printing section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

Indexing methods

As intimated in my previous post, there are different ways of preparing an index. I have identified four main methods, none of them ideal. These are the:

• traditional method,
• mapping method,
• mark-up method, and
• quick and dirty method.

Traditional method

The traditional method is that you prepare a manual index at the same time that you proof-read the text. There are several ways of doing this, by:

• recording the entries on the proofs (highlighting text and/or making notes in the margins),
• writing them down on index cards or several sheets of paper, or
• keying them immediately into a text document.

This method is simple. All that you need are the final proofs and a means to record the entries. The last way has the virtue of being an all-in-one method whereas, with the two earlier ways, there is a second step – to transcribe the entries – but they are visually much easier to work with.

If you have prepared the coloured mind map described in my previous post, then you can quickly ‘transcribe’ its text highlights over to the proofs and thus save a bit of time.

Arguably, the traditional method of indexing gives the best results because it allows a really thorough job to be done; everything is there before your eyes. It is, however, a painstaking (read: painfully slow) approach best suited to tortoise personalities.

Mapping method

A modern variation on the traditional method is to prepare a skeleton of the index (minus page numbers) beforehand and then fill in the page numbers by searching on a single PDF file of the book. (Obviously, this method requires that you receive the proofs as a PDF, not just in hard copy.) Acrobat’s search functions are very useful here and of course the text you are working with is the real paginated book (I find that psychologically useful).

This method can be done directly on computer (switching back and forth between Acrobat and your text file) but visually it is much easier to have the index skeleton printed out on paper (ideally with double line spacing), adding the page numbers to this and later transcribing them over to the text file.

As you can see, this uses the mind map to its fullest potential. The Acrobat search also allows you to find references that otherwise you might have overlooked. That said, this approach requires sophisticated and careful searching. For instance, in a study of nations and nationalism, if you only search for ‘nations’ then you won’t find ‘nation’ or ‘nationalism’ but doing a search on ‘nation’ might give you too many results to deal with. Better first to do a search on ‘nationali’ (to pick up ‘nationalism’, ‘nationalist’ ‘nationalistic’, etc.) then search for text often related to this term (like ‘ethno’) to find other entries.

In short, this can be a quick indexing method with the potential to give poor results but if used properly is a very powerful and fast tool. For this reason, it is the indexing method that I personally favour – also because its combination of broad-brush and nitty-gritty approach fits my temperament. This is the method best suited to impatient perfectionists.

Mark-up method

The mark-up method involves entering indexing tags in the book file itself.  It requires that you have a single text file generated from the typeset proofs (or, if you are brave, from the edited files delivered to the typesetter). Saved as a MS Word file, this must then be paginated to match the typeset proofs by playing with the font size and/or inserting hard page breaks. (The file need not be pretty; it simply needs to have the page breaks – every single one of them – at the same place as in the typeset proofs.)

The marking up process can be as slow a task as the traditional method (thought, again, much faster if you have prepared a coloured mind map in advance). However, when completed, the resulting index is instantly generated and with luck should not need a lot of adjustment. Index generation can even be re-run repeatedly in conjunction with adjusting the tagged entries until the index is perfect.

This indexing method has the virtue that you can regenerate the index as many times as you want until the results are perfect. Moreover, it is the best method to use if suddenly the pagination of your book is to be changed; this ‘merely’ needs to be reflected in the pagination of your base text file. Unfortunately, adjustments to index entries can be tedious. For instance, to divide a large number of single-level entries into groups of two-level entries requires that every single entry is manually updated to the new format. This is not something you want to do too much of. As such, this is the method best suited to organized, methodical people who already have the structure of the index perfectly clear in their mind beforehand (i.e. they have done some sort of mind map).

Quick and dirty method

My last method I call ‘quick and dirty’ but in reality it is not quick; perhaps ‘fast road to hell’ would be a better title. The version I know is done in MS Word but I know you can do the same in WordPerfect; quite possibly other word processors have the same feature.

Again, this requires that you have a single text file as your reference source (see above). What you then do is create a concordance file (a list of words to be indexed) then let Word automatically generate the index from your book file. Though quick to create, this is not something I’d recommend; the resulting ‘index’ will be full of junk entries that you can spend days (even weeks) weeding out and it may lack entries that later you realise are necessary. In the end, then, this method may save no time at all. Bluntly put, only serial losers would use this method a second time.

And there’s more

No doubt there are other ways of indexing a book but these four are the most common. Of course, an issue only touched on here is how your index is structured; this needs to be settled before you can start using one of these methods. Likewise, you must decide on exactly what you are going to index. These (and more) are topics for upcoming posts in this thread on indexing. (Just when I post these is uncertain as I’ll be travelling these next three weeks.)

(Post #6 of the Indexing section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here. This is a complete rewrite of an earlier post on the same subject.)

Proofing outputs

As I explained the other day when describing typesetting outputs, the days when authors received their proofs on what looked like a giant toilet roll are long gone. Today, everything is output as PDF files, which then can be printed onto ordinary (A4 or US Letter) paper.

Some more traditionalist presses may still only deliver hard-copy proofs to their authors. Increasingly, however, the actual PDFs are being sent. For authors, it is with the latter that a big revolution has occurred in recent years – with the development of these ‘soft’ PDF proofs. These can be read by anyone, using any type of computer, with the free Adobe Reader program. Editing of a PDF file is another matter; this is also possible but only with the full (paid-for) Acrobat program.

Initially, the limitations of Adobe Reader meant that authors could only print off the proofs and mark up any changes on the hard copy. These would then be faxed or mailed back to the publisher. Nowadays, however, it is possible to annotate PDF files without having to own a copy of the full Acrobat program; even in Adobe Reader, one can now highlight text and add yellow ‘sticky’ notes, for instance. Such annotated PFDs can simply be emailed back to the press.

Some authors can get far more creative than this. For instance, the prototype of Robert Cribb’s Digital Atlas of Indonesian History (finally delivered to the printer last week, hence my long silence this past fortnight) was created in InDesign and output as PDFs for the author to respond to. This he did by bringing the PDFs into CorelDraw and annotating them there, returning his feedback as JPEG files.

Adobe now also allows publishers (and anyone else with the full Acrobat program) to create special PDF proofs. These can be edited by their recipients, even if all that they are using is Adobe Reader. At NIAS Press, however, we have not adopted this proofing feature. Personally, we don’t think that editing a PDF file gives good results or indeed is a good idea; better simply to annotate the PDF file, do the editing in the actual typesetting documents, and then output new, ‘clean’ PDFs.

As you can see, there are several ways to proof your book. I pick up on this later in the week with fuller details on making your proof corrections.

But whichever method you adopt – working with paper or PDF – it sure beats the hell out of using toilet paper!

(Post #4 of the Proofing section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

Typesetting phases and outputs

For the last two weeks, I have been blithely discussing what typesetting is and the issues relating to it but without actually describing what is produced. Time for a short overview before we move on a new thread of posts, on the proofing process.

A duet

Typesetting is not a single event in the production of the book pages; rather, it is a multi-phased process and one interwoven with that for the proofing of the book. In a sense, one could look at typesetting and proofing as a duet sung by a tenor and soprano.

Their ‘performance’ looks somewhat like this (but note that approaches do vary between presses):

• Initial typesetting
• Output of first proofs
• First proofing
• Completion of typesetting
• Output of second (often the ‘final’) proofs
• Second (or ‘final’) proofing and indexing
• Output of print-ready copy
• Final-copy check
• Delivery of print files to the printer

Let’s look at the initial typesetting, its completion and briefly at how the proofs are output. More detailed descriptions of each of the proofing phases shall follow in my next thread of posts on proofing.

In addition, also required (and not mentioned above) is typesetting of the cover/jacket (more about that in my next post).

Initial typesetting

Practices differ between typesetters and another major factor is which typesetting software is used. However, likely steps are as follows:

1. Finalization of the page design (as discussed here).
2. Creation of typesetting documents meeting the design specification.
3. Conversion of those input files not conforming to the page design/software requirements (e.g. image files changed from colour to monochrome and from JPEG to TIFF format).
4. Marking up of text files with consistent paragraph styles that match those defined in the destination typesetting documents.
5. Import and placing of text files in the typesetting documents.
6. Assignment of paragraph and character styles to the text and any tables (or, if already done at step #4, then fine-tuning of styles).
7. Import and placing of any image files in the typesetting documents (often this step is left until completion of typesetting).
8. Generation of first proofs.

Proofing output

Not too many years ago, when typesetting was done on specialist machines, the initial proofs were output in galley form, i.e. as continuous text without any page breaks marked and printed out on what looked like giant-sized toilet paper. As the layout was finalized, the book would be paginated, subsequent proofs clearly showing the page breaks. These proofs, too, could be printed on long galleys or guillotined into their individual pages.

The output of today’s PC-based desktop publishing systems is utterly different, being based on the industry-standard PDF format (though other output formats are possible). Galleys are gone; everything is either printed on ordinary (A4 or US Letter) paper or output as PDFs. Moreover, there is little difference in the appearance of (say) the initial set of proofs and the final print files sent to the printer (not least, all proofs are paginated).

The shift to PDFs has been a revolutionary development for authors. This, however, is something I shall take up next week in a new section of posts detailing the proofing and indexing process. Proofing outputs are discussed in greater detail here.

Completion of typesetting

Just what is needed to be done to complete the typesetting process depends of course on if step 7 above was done during the initial typesetting or has been left until now. If the latter is true, then likely steps are as follows:

1. Keying of any text changes from the first proofing.
2. Import and placing of any image files in the typesetting documents.
3. Re-evaluation of the likely extent of the book including space for the index (not yet prepared, of course).
4. Possible adjustment of the page design (especially of the font size and line spacing) to meet the final extent set by the production editor.
5. Pagination of the book (including subtle adjustments to line spacing, to the placement and size of tables and illustrations, etc. to save on – or add – a few lines here and there so that the target page count is indeed reached); the ideal is that each double-page spread has even page bottoms, its composition is evenly balanced and the overall effect is aesthetically pleasing.
6. Finalization of any page-specific cross-references.
7. Generation of second (often ‘final’) proofs.

After the return of any changes resulting from the final proofing and delivery of the index, typesetting concludes as follows:

1. Keying of any text changes from the final proofing.
2. Typesetting of the index.
3. Generation of print-ready copy for checking/approval by press staff.
4. Delivery of print files to the printer.

Time then (almost) to move on to the proofing and indexing of your book but first let’s return to your cover and its finalization.

(Post #21 of the Design & Typesetting section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

What is typesetting?

With the design phase now completed, your manuscript and the design brief will be sent to a typesetter, who will take your text and illustrative material, setting it out on the page ready for printing.

An art and process

There is a lot more to typesetting (and its sister, typography) than you would think. Both have their origins in the Gutenberg revolution and each, in their different ways, were concerned with the presentation of textual material in type format ready for printing. In earlier times there was a big difference between them. Typography was the art of designing, setting and arranging type whereas typesetting was the process (or craft) of actually setting the type.

Note the class difference: typography wore a beret and twirled a designer’s pen, typesetting wore an apron, punched type and had ink on its fingers. As we shall see, however, the differences between the two have blurred in recent years.

Together, typography and typesetting combine an art and process that only really succeeds when invisible. In many respects, the layout of your book is comparable to the background music added to a film. Its primary duty is to make your text clear and accessible, but ideally it should also enhance the meaning with mood and style. Though stylish, the layout must also be durable (indeed timeless), transcending fashion. Much creative energy goes into this art, which is the subject of passionate debate among its practitioners.

At the forefront of the publishing revolution

The differences between typesetting and typography have narrowed (even blurred) due to the digital revolution and advent of desktop publishing (DTP), which has virtually obliterated other forms of typesetting in recent years.

At the sharp end of publishing – in the production of books, journals, etc. – the old, quite laborious and expensive process of producing print-ready material by hand-setting individual lines and pages of type (a job for well-paid tradesmen) has given way to on-screen, WYSIWYG page composition using personal computers and (usually) lower-paid semi-clerical staff.

In parallel with (and a precondition for) this transformation was the development of things we all take for granted today (everyone, not just publishing professionals) – the personal computer, DTP software, new digital fonts (see below), laser printers using the Postscript programming language, and PDF (which renders Postscript into a viewable, WYSIWYG format). An even more recent addition has been the arrival of text mark-up languages like XML; originating from the old pre-DTP typesetting systems, these are still esoteric, even for many publishing people.

For a while, typesetting came in-house for most publishers and many of the old, specialist typesetting firms went bust. In recent years, however, further cost-cutting by publishers has seen this typesetting work move out to local freelancers and further afield to places like India. (I have described this development elsewhere in greater detail, if you are interested.)

At the same time that the process of page layout has been transformed, a parallel transformation has been seen in typography. Here, there have been huge advances in typographical design, not least the development first of scalable, digital fonts followed by an explosion of new designs and more recently the digital capture and standardization of all the world’s varied alphabets and scripts in the form of Open Type fonts.

These advances have been an essential feature of the digital revolution in publishing. Without them, there would be no #e-publishing, no e-readers like the Kindle, probably no iPhone or other smart phone, and indeed even the PC, Web, etc. would be far more limited things than they are.

Key concerns and tools

According to Wikipedia, ‘Traditional typography follows four principles: repetition, contrast, proximity, and alignment.’ The same could be said for typesetting; they are classic requirements of a good design and layout. In essence, then, when laying out your book, your typesetter will be concerned to:

• Fit your text and illustrations into the agreed page extent.
• Place text and illustrations in an effective and appropriate combination.
• Apply a layout that is uniform and predictable.
• Implement a design that is elegant but also clear and readable.
• Deliver the print-ready PDF files on or before the agreed date.

Given the sophistication of today’s DTP software (programs like Adobe InDesign, for instance), the typesetter of your book will have a vast array of tools at his/her disposal to ensure these goals are met. There are too many to list here but among them will be:

• a selection of appropriate fonts in different sizes and styles;
• paragraph and character styles, assigning uniform values to text (font, size, colour, alignment, etc.) that can be globally changed in an instant;
• hyphenation, character spacing (kerning) and line spacing (leading), allowing fine adjustments to how much space an amount of text actually fills; and
• much more (e.g. alignment and rotation, linking to external files, layering, use of colour, etc.)

Such is the world of the typesetter. But, as shall be seen in my next post, this esoteric world about to impinge on your own.

(Post #8 of the Design & Typesetting section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

Copy-editing

If substantive editing is the endangered aristocrat of academic publishing, then copy-editing is the ubiquitous cleaner, tidying up other people’s messes. Cleaners never get bouquets on opening night but without them the show soon stops. (Something to consider when the amount of red-inked text returned to you turns you scarlet with rage. More about that in my next post.)

Actually, I am being unfair. In a recent post I have recounted how some authors regard their copy editors as obsessive and anal-retentive. I neglected to add that many other authors have a warm relationship with their copy editor, singling her out for especial praise in the book’s acknowledgements. Perhaps this is because the author realizes that the only person actually to have closely read his text is the lowly copy editor. A key factor, too, is just how this copy-editing is carried out (see below).

Copy-editing concerns itself with language, formatting and presentation issues. The copy-editor will read your manuscript very carefully (perhaps obsessively) from beginning to end, checking that grammar, spelling and punctuation are correct. She will also correct any deviations from the publisher’s house style and normal scholarly conventions (deviations that have escaped the scrutiny of the Style Nazi), and check that your citations match your bibliography (missing references and redundant entries in the bibliography are common). In addition, unnecessary repetitions, unclear phrasing, faulty transitions and verbosity may be flagged for attention.

It is unlikely that your copy-editor will attempt an extensive rewriting of your text or a general alteration of your basic style – copy-editors are not paid enough to spend time on such major surgery – but you may be consulted on anything that is unclear or needs fine-tuning.

The copy-editor also functions as a bridge for the author between the editorial department (primarily concerned with meaning) and the typesetter (focused on ‘fit’ and appearance). Thus, the copy-editor not only inserts corrections and queries but also marks up the text with typesetting instructions. If you get your copy-edited text back on paper, then you may see a whole lot of weird notations in the margins (for instance, a circled ‘H1’ or ‘A’ used to mark a first-level heading).

Exactly how the copy-edit is carried out can vary a lot and can a big influence on the relationship between author and copy editor. For instance, one of our copy editors is Jonathan. He works at home in a country cottage in one of the remoter parts of Britain. Jonathan edits manuscripts in paper form only; he hates on-screen editing (I can imagine him spreading the different parts of the manuscript out on his kitchen table, flicking back and forth between the chapter under edit and the list of references). He insists on receiving the full manuscript (including any preliminary material) and works through this methodically, returning the edited manuscript to us by post about 4–6 weeks later. Someone then needs to key these changes, often the author. Jonathan is a warm, lovely person but all of his dealings are with the Press; he has no contact with the author. There is no chit-chat during the edit but – if not entered directly in the text – there may be a list of queries and comments to the author appended to the finished manuscript.

In contrast, another of our copy editors I shall call Diane. She too works at home but in her case this is in a walled villa on the outskirts of a bustling Asian metropolis. Diane works on screen and often engages with her authors during the edit. She, too, insists on having the full manuscript but there is a bit more give and take here since material can be exchanged electronically on the fly. The job takes a bit longer but the result is that we receive a manuscript blessed by the author and in electronic format ready to typeset.

Which approach is better? That is hard to say. Undeniably, Jonathan’s approach could be called that of the past, Diane’s that of the future. But that doesn’t mean anything in terms of quality.

In terms of reference checking, some editors say that working on paper is easier (and hence more likely to be carried out thoroughly). But in terms of global changes (say, removing excess spaces and changing every instance of ‘analyze’ to ‘analyse’, except those found in direct quotations), working with the electronic files is best (let’s just hope there are no font problems). Finally, in terms of author engagement, you would expect ongoing chit-chat to work better than the hands-off approach but the reality is mixed; human chemistry is a wonderful thing.

Anyway, whatever the form that the copy-edit takes (but depending on the size and complexity of the copy-editing job), you should receive your edited text back from the publisher within one or two months. As you can see from the examples of Jonathan and Diane above, the corrected text may be delivered to you in electronic form or on paper. If in electronic form, then there are quite a few choices including PDF proof documents ready for annotation and Word documents with tracked changes or showing the results of before–after file comparisons. If you receive the copy editor’s changes on paper, you may see the pages annotated with correction marks in the margins and inserted in the text (examples of these to be linked here once I’ve worked out how to do this).

So the copy-edit is finally done. The question now is, what are you going to do about it? Something to explore in my next post.

(Post #4 of the Editorial section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

Indexing methods

Following on from my previous post, there are four main ways of preparing an index, none of them ideal.

All that you need for the first method are the final proofs and maybe some paper. For the second you need a PDF file of the proofs. The last two methods require that you have a single text file generated from the typeset proofs (or, if you are brave, from the edited files delivered to the typesetter). Saved as a MS Word file, this must then be paginated to match the typeset proofs by playing with the font size and/or inserting hard page breaks. (The file need not be pretty; it simply needs to have the page breaks – every single one of them – at the same place as in the typeset proofs.)

• The traditional method is that, while you proof-read the text, at the same time you prepare a manual index, recording the entries with highlights or notes in the proofs, or keyed immediately into a text document.
• A modern variation on this method (which I personally favour) is to prepare the outline of the index (minus page numbers) beforehand and then fill in the page numbers by searching on a single PDF file of the book. Acrobat’s search functions are very useful here and of course the text you are working with is the real paginated book (I find that psychologically useful).
• The mark-up method involves entering indexing tags in the book file itself. This can be as slow a task as the traditional method but, when completed, the resulting index is instantly generated and with luck should not need a lot of adjustment (e.g. to divide a large number of single-level entries into groups of two-level entries). Index generation can even be re-run repeatedly in conjunction with adjusting the tagged entries until the index is perfect.
• The quick and dirty method commonly used is to create a concordance file (a list of words to be indexed) then let Word automatically generate the index from your book file. Though quick to create, this is not something I’d recommend; the resulting ‘index’ will be full of junk entries that you can spend days weeding out and it may lack entries that later you realise are necessary. In the end, then, this method may save no time at all.

Just what you index is another issue of course, likewise how you structure your index. These are topics for later posts (or alternatively you can take a look at our book; there’s a lot more on the subject there).

(NB: A substantially revised treatment of this subject can be found here.)

Requirements and costs of self-publication

Not easy, nor cheap

Due to technological developments in the last 25 years, it is far easier today for private authors to prepare, typeset, produce (in printed and/or electronic form) and promote their own work – in other words, to dispense with the services of a publisher altogether. Easier, but not easy.

Self-publishing is not something done in five minutes nor is it about saving money (though an attraction for some authors is the potential to earn more by getting a bigger cut in sales). If you are venturing down the self-publishing route, be aware that you can face a lot of work and considerable costs achieving your goal.

That said, what you face here are different trade-offs: between doing the work yourself and hiring someone else (the subject of my next post), and between producing a high-quality product and turning out something that is (and can look to be) done on the cheap. Obviously, the publication format (discussed in my previous post) also has a huge effect on effort, costs and which skills are required.

In the costs stated below, $ = U.S. dollars. These rates are approximate and based on charges I have encountered for hiring freelancers. But they may also be close to the fees charged by the author-pays presses discussed in my next post.

Editing

Whichever format you settle on, there is editorial work to be done first of all. Anything that you put effort, money and your name into demands respectful treatment. This means that the work you eventually publish – whether in printed or in electronic form – is a coherent piece of scholarship, written tautly and without typos (though in my experience completely avoiding typos is probably impossible).

Therefore, once you have finished revising the text to your satisfaction, it needs to be scrutinized, to be sweated in an editorial purgatory, so that what actually is published is to the satisfaction of your readers as well. This is vital to the success of your work.

There are two kinds of editing involved: substantive editing of your text, focusing on its structure and argumentation, and copy-editing of your finalized (maybe restructured) text, focusing on its language – e.g. finding any typos and inconsistencies – and ensuring that it complies with accepted conventions. (You may find it useful consulting a publisher’s house style; many – like that for NIAS Press – are freely available on the publisher’s website).

Doing this editing yourself requires superhuman detachment from your text; most of us lack this. As a substitute for substantive editing, revisit the readers reports commissioned by the publisher(s) who rejected your work, if you have them, and seek feedback from colleagues capable of commenting fairly and fearlessly on your work (they are often hard to find). And, as for copy-editing, try to recruit your life partner or best friend – or, better still, one of those special people (often your departmental secretary or a maiden aunt) with the uncanny gift of spotting other people’s errors at fifty paces; sadly, all too often, such geniuses only spot these errors after publication.

Doing it yourself is free, though you will be wise to reward the help of Auntie Mame with serious chocolate or other forms of sincere appreciation. A freelance editor will cost you $1,500-$5,000 depending on rigour and how much substantive editing is included in the copy-editing. (I have not heard of any freelancers only offering substantive editing.)

Layout/typesetting

Most scholars using Microsoft Word or another word processor think that this is all that is required to lay out the final pages for printing. This work is definitely something they can do themselves. Think again. The design (or layout) of your book and the typesetting of the actual pages is skilled work that only really succeeds if it is invisible.

Laying out a book using a word processor is a particularly vicious form of torture. Word, for instance, may be full of features but things like the subtle adjustment of line and letter spacing are beyond its abilities.

Laying out the book yourself might cost you nothing but you would be wise to have the following things:

• a reasonably powerful computer with a large monitor
• a scanner (if there are illustrations to be digitized)
• a laser printer (printing hundreds of pages on an ink-jet printer invites bankruptcy)
• desktop publishing software including a typesetting program like InDesign, an image processor like Photoshop, and a PDF generator
• manuals/courses on how to use this
• fonts that you are licensed to embed in high-resolution PDF files

In addition, you will need to:

• ensure that all of the elements of a book are present and organized correctly (e.g. the copyright page is on page iv).
• ensure that these include all mandatory information (e.g. an ISBN)
• adopt a standard book size (anything else is horribly expensive)
• determine the likely extent of your book (so as to avoid unpleasant surprises – see my later post for a detailed explanation and instructions on how to calculate book length).
• use a layout and graphical format that is printable (e.g. nothing too close to spine or edges, any images at high resolution, any colour in CMYK format)
• carefully consider if colour is to be used (and if so where)

Alternatively, you can hire a freelance typesetter to worry about all of these and many other issues. It is common to pay either a flat fee for the entire job or on a  per-page basis (typically $6-$10 per page but inclusion of illustrations, colour, non-Latin text and other potential hassles will undoubtedly drive the price up).

Proofing

Text corruptions can happen when a Word file is converted for typesetting, without this being picked up by the typesetter. For example, recently I converted a Word file to plain text, then brought it into a web page that I was making. Only at the last moment did I discover that all of the superscript ‘th’ letters (in usages like ‘19th century’, which Word automatically converts to superscripts) had vanished.

Here, sharp eyes are needed. Yours are free but have they already looked at the text far too often to notice all the errors and last remaining typos? A proof-reader will cost you $2-$5 per page.

Indexing

No scholarly book expecting to be taken seriously (and bought by libraries) can omit an index (though it is another matter how ambitious your index is).

Good indexes are tricky to prepare. Please feel free to consult our indexing guidelines on the NIAS Press website.

The rates quoted to me by professional indexers have varied wildly – $2-$20 per typeset page.

Cover

Many publishers won’t let their authors get anywhere near the cover design, so crucial is it regarded to a book’s commercial success. Now you are responsible for producing something that doesn’t immediately scream ‘amateur’ to every bookshop you approach; what is needed is a cover that whispers ‘pick me up’. It must also meet certain technical and legal requirements (e.g. meet printers specifications and include a bar code).

The problem is that you can get a cover designer to do a proper job for about $500. But, if your book is to overcome its self-published origins in the nasty book world out there, then your cover needs to be inspired.

Printing

This is not something that you can do yourself; you are going to have to pay someone else to print your book.

Printing used to be the big barrier to self-publishing because with lithographic printing a minimum of about 1,000 copies of a book had to be printed. This required a huge investment (and a lot of spare space to store the books). Nowadays, however, the digital printing revolution has brought numbers down to single-copy printing at acceptable prices (and of an acceptable quality); self-publication of printed books is now within the reach of most budgets.

If you use an internet-based POD printer like Lightning Source, then you will be guided through the complexities of printing but will need to rigidly conform to their specifications. Set-up charges may be $75 and then you must pay for each printing order, each page printed and shipping (with a 300-page book costing you about $7 per copy), and often an annual file storage charge of $10-$20 charged.

If printing quality is an issue (because of the importance of your illustrations, for instance) and you have the belief and budget to print a minimum of 400 copies, then you are likely to get a better deal, better quality and much more human treatment by approaching a short-run printer. But be warned. ‘Real’ printers can be funny blokes; theirs is an utterly different world than yours. Many of the things that you find crucially important, they will find incomprehensible – and vice versa.

E-Book

You can of course avoid the perils (and costs) of printed publication by going down the e-route. (This option was discussed in my previous post.) However, I would suggest that you will still need to typeset your e-book and, while you avoid dealing with printers marks, bleeds and all such arcane stuff, instead you will need to meet the requirements of e-books (introducing hyperlinks, for instance). Be aware that PDF is not the only game in town (there are over 20 competing and incompatible e-book formats) nor is a computer screen necessarily the only display medium (the Amazon Kindle and iPhone being two other major destinations for e-books).

If you would rather have a professional guide you through the e-jungle, the journey may cost you thousands and thousands of dollars.

Website

An alternative to a proper e-book is to self-publish your work on a website (or even as a blog, wiki or via another Web 2.0 channel like Twitter). Though feasible, the divergence in form of a ‘proper book’ is now so wide that increasingly you will find it hard to gain any recognition for this work.

If you can do all the work yourself and have free access to/use of your institutional website, then web publishing can be almost cost free. If you set up your own website, of course, then you will have to pay small but ongoing charges for the URL registration/maintenance and for a web hosting service. Bare-bones blogs like this one are free to set up and run.

Marketing and promotion

It is not enough to produce your book; you also need to bring it to the attention of its potential readers. Many books have been written on this subject and this blog post is already much too long. Suffice to say, you will need to draw upon all of your hustling skills to bear. By all means produce a flyer, issue a press release, buy advertising space in and send review copies to appropriate journals, and cold-call different bookshops – all the sorts of things that publishers do. But the best use of your time will be to exploit your own connections, to reach out directly to other scholars in your field – via notices to mailing lists and attendance at conferences, for instance.

None of this is easy and I seriously doubt you can afford the services of a publicist.

Sales and distribution

Traditionally, getting copies of your book into the hands of readers and getting them to pay for it has been a huge problem with self-published books. This remains so if you are only looking at the old sales channels – bookshops, library suppliers, etc. – who remain suspicious of book trade outsiders. Likewise, it is difficult to sell directly to libraries as these prefer to order and pay in bulk via a library supplier and try to avoid dealing with individual publishers.

But the internet revolution has opened up whole new possibilities to reach the individual reader, your prime target. Today, it is possible to sell your book directly via Amazon Marketplace, eBay, Abe Books, etc. or indirectly via one of the above-mentioned author-pays presses. And, while it is still not cost-efficient to accept credit card payments directly from individual customers, nowadays internet-based financial services like PayPal make this relatively easy. Amazon, PayPal and the others will charge you for their services but the commission is not a lot.

Note that all of these companies help you process any sales but the actual sending of copies sold to the customer is still something that you will have to do unless your book is being printed and shipped on demand by an author-pays press. (While the business of book trade warehouses is to hold stock and process and orders, I cannot imagine that it would ever make financial sense you to use such a warehouse or for them to take you on.)

It is even possible for you to handle all aspects of sales, not just the dispatching of orders. This would be by having a website with an inbuilt retail module (shopping cart, payment processing, etc.). However, such an advanced website would not be cheap to develop; it would also be a bit of an overkill for the sake of a single book.

Legal requirements

Be aware that as a (self-) publisher selling to a public audience, you will be obliged to comply with various commercial regulations. These vary from country to country but you should expect to:

• register an ISBN for your book (normally, a small charge)
• deliver gratis copies of your book to your local legal deposit office(s)
• register for sales tax

For many countries, this list is much longer.

And there’s more

This has been a very long post to write and yet the above points are not the only ones you need to consider. Moreover, space requirements – and a crass desire to sell more copies of our book (which includes perhaps twenty times as much information as found here) – have limited how much detail is included in the information presented here.

But now, decision time is looming. There is just one more thing to ponder, just who is to do all this work: you, a freelancer or a author-pays press? This is the subject of my next post.