Frankfurt Book Fair - first impressions

No sleep on the redeye out of JFK, lucked out on getting into the hotel early, 3-hour nap, 90 minutes at the book fair.

Frankfurter Buchmesse, first impressions:

1. Service providers are trying to be all things to all publishers, so none of them are specific in their claims. There's lots of "entire workflow, from authoring to marketing!" stuff going on, and it gets even more vague from there. It all reminds me of the moment Word made the leap from great word processor to vast noncorporeal bloat (which I can pinpoint exactly: Word 5.1a, we barely knew ye): They want to be able to say "Yes, we do that" to absolutely everything.

So either I simply can't compete with these providers – because I'm not interested in doing absolutely everything – or there's still a place for a service that does one thing really well. (I have some ideas about where that might be an advantage, but I'm not saying what they are yet – because either it would be dumb to tip my hand at this point or the ideas themselves are dumb. Either way, there's dumbness involved and I try not to be dumb about that.)

2. Bring a powerbank tomorrow so my time there isn't limited by my phone charge, which was eaten up more quickly than usual today by Uber, in-show navigation, and sending my kids bakfiets videos. (See below. That's a bakfiets. Now I want to move to Frankfurt.)

3. Not so tight with the final lace on these new Pumas. Ow.

(If you’re at the show and want to connect, I’m in the Matchmaker section on the app!)

That’s a bakfiets. There used to be a video here, but between Squarespace acting wonky, my laptop crossing international borders, and the delights of hotel wi-fi… you get a pic instead, sorry. But aren’t they cool?

Dear Publishing Person Dealing with a Pandemic

Dear publishing person dealing with a pandemic:

I am also a publishing person dealing with a pandemic.

Typeflow — my company — provides all kinds of print/ebook services. Can we help you with some of your things during the pandemic?

We’ve recently done about 150 ebooks — redesigns and new layouts, conversions and interactivity enhancements — for Scholastic's major ebook platforms: BookFlix, TrueFlix, Pre-K On My Way, and their flagship pandemic home-learning website, Scholastic Learn At Home — not just delivering files, but helping the designers, managers, and IT people figure out what they need in the first place and cheerfully solving the kinds of problems that go along with those things.

All of the contracts with Scholastic Books were won in direct competition with offshore ebook companies. Typeflow is in a US time zone (Metro NY), competitive on price, innovative, reliable, and better at communicating. We act like a partner, not a vendor.

It's hard to tell what anybody's needs are right now, which makes it hard to know what’s best to offer. We do print and ebook design for smaller publishers, too, not just huge backlist redesigns for big ones. All kinds of books: Novels, reference books, business books, children’s books… Also directories and manuals. Also ebook conversions for book designers who don't need the aggravation. Also print design overflow. Also workflow improvements and training for publishing and corporate clients.

Got a few minutes to talk? What challenges are you facing?

Email or call: keith@typeflownyc.com, 917-370-8219

Best regards,


Keith Snyder
Typeflow

How to waste money on your book: Episode 2, GOING BACKWARDS

As I mentioned in Episode 1, this notice appears at the top of Typeflow's rate sheet:

I was going to talk about the second one, Changes to design after it's underway, but then it occurred to me that the principle underlying both of these common money-wasters is worth talking about. That principle is:

Don't go backwards in the standard workflow.

The standard book workflow goes through these stages, in this order:

1. Write

2. Edit

3. Design

4. Production

5. Publish

A book gets more complicated as it passes through these stages, so any time you reverse direction in this workflow, it means the same fix is now a bigger deal.

ASIDE: There's some looping that happens naturally to accomplish handover at some of the stages—an author and editor, for example, might have a few go-rounds to get something just right before Editorial takes it completely out of the author's hands, or Design might need a few rounds of collaboration with an editor on a few test pages before they agree on the basic look and feel of the whole book and it's taken fully out of Editorial's hands—but these are transitional phases, as each department ensures it has what it needs to fully take over.

But just as Editorial won't let the author get their fingers into the Editorial department's Word file (and, for that matter, just as the author doesn't allow their first readers to type stuff in the manuscript), Design won't let an Editor do a single thing in the layout file. Production won't let Design touch the production file. The printer won't let Production into the print file. Every stage requires specialized skills that take years to fully master, and people at each stage will absolutely screw up the next stage's file.

It's easy to see how my warning about inadequate proofing (read it here if you haven't already) is an example of going backwards. For the Editorial department, a typo fix is as easy as changing something in a Word file. For the Design department, any change—including a little text change—is a layout issue, not a language issue. Design doesn't care what the word means. It cares how much space it takes up, whether it's got the right size/spacing/color for the type of text it is (body, subhead, etc.), and what else on the page has to be adjusted because the correction changed those things. Adding as little as a single comma can reflow an entire chapter.

Is this a tragedy of epic proportion? No, it's just Tuesday in the Design department. But it takes more time, experience, and skill for someone in the Design department to add that comma in a facing-pages layout with sidebars and tables and photos with captions than someone in Editorial who can just type a comma and go get lunch.

Now multiply that by the total number of changes in the change list the designer has been given. If an outstanding job was done by everyone at the Editorial stage, there may only be half a dozen. (It's never zero.) If an outstanding job was not done at the Editorial stage . . . I've sometimes made four figures on just typo fixes. My rent has been paid, on more than one occasion, by the text-change invoice line-item alone.

•••

But Editorial changes aren't just proofing changes.

They're also "Chapter 6 needs a full rewrite," or "We can't use these photos/song lyrics/excerpts after all." (These are real examples.)

When these things happen at the Editorial stage, fixing them might involve time and aggravation, but the only monetary expense is the cost of the alcohol—and the publication date isn't usually threatened that early in the workflow. At the Design stage, the rewritten Chapter 6 takes a few hours or a week to lay in, depending on whether it's a novel or a big complicated coffee tome with sidenotes and footnotes and tabs. Plus, if there's a drop-dead pub date that's now in jeopardy because this decision wasn't made until the book was almost done, all that rework might be not just expensive, but expensive plus rush fees.

•••

One more example. Indexes.

If you don't index it until it's at the end of the Production stage, which used to be the practice, back in the Cretaceous period because page numbers couldn't be known until then, you're wasting money. Hire your indexer during Editorial. The indexer will insert invisible tags in your Word file. These tags will flow into the layout program and the designer can generate an index from them.

Why'd I bring up indexes here? Because if you flow in a new Chapter 6 at the Design stage instead of Editorial, you just invalidated the index in the design file. It has to be done over. (Plus you had to bring the indexer back in at the Editorial phase, to index the rewritten chapter.)

If you want to be a free spirit throughout the entire workflow, you're free to do that. But not for free.

•••

Plus there's the complication of the ebook. Was it already exported from the print book and revised (because the initial export is not a finished ebook, just a starting point)? Double all of the above expenses, because now every single one of those changes has to be made twice: Once to the print book, and once to the ebook.

•••

Compare ALL OF THAT to:

Make the change for free at the Editorial stage.

•••

Okay, okay, we get it. What about other backwards moves, not just the ones between Design and Editorial?

Glad you asked. I'll tell you about going backwards from Production to Design (and what "Production" means) in Episode 3: How To Waste Money On Your book: Changing the design.

How to waste money on your book: Episode 1, PROOFING

This notice appears at the top of Typeflow's rate sheet:

This could be seen as working against myself, since when money's wasted on a book, I'm often the one who gets richer—but I hate seeing my clients spend more than they need to. I was a writer before I was a book designer (it's why I'm a book designer), and that's where my sympathies lie.

But I'll still charge for these things if they happen on your book, so listen up. Today we're talking about…

Inadequate proofing

"Yes, it's being proofed now. My friend was an English major. She catches everything."

This red flag is so big, it can be seen from space:

Your cousin who knows everything about grammar and your fellow writing group member who's really picky are first readers, or beta readers, or—to put it more simply—friends. They're not proofers, and they don't do what a proofer does. They're going to read the book and mark up anything they notice, but they're not trained to notice the things that are going to cost you money later—and, for the most part, they're not as right as they think they are about grammar and punctuation. (No, not even the English lit professor.) They probably also aren't solid on when to use small caps instead of italics or rigorous about en dashes, em dashes, 2-em dashes, 3-em dashes, and hyphens. And then there are all the differences between narrative and dialogue, fiction and collateral, essays and poetry.

People who don't proof for a living are as good at proofing as people who don't rebuild transmissions all the time are good at rebuilding a transmission.

I asked my favorite proofer, Chesley Hicks, for some examples for this blog entry. She said:

Do they know the difference between open, closed, and hyphenated compounds or how those change as modifiers and nouns? Can they spot a stack or a river? Do they have the whom/who thing down pat? Do they know how to style a program vs a series vs an episode title? According to AP? According to CMoS? Can they really tell when to not follow grammar and style rules? You gotta know the rules before you can break them.

To which I'll add: Are they going to go over every proof your designer sends, make sure every change was made correctly, catch where the changes introduced new stacks, rivers, or short chapter ends, and mark it up for the next round? Will they catch where prime marks were used instead of quotation marks—or vice versa? Do they have the habits of an experienced proofer, like making sure when you catch an error in one word, you don't immediately miss the error in the word next to it? (That's really common among non-pros.)

There's only one really excellent reason to use your friends: They're free.

Keep that really excellent reason in mind as you read this:

• I charge $1.50 per correction. That's if we're still working on the print book, which comes before the ebook. If a correction isn't made until I'm working on the ebook, it's $3, because now I'm making it twice: once in the print book, once in the ebook.

• 350 correx at the ebook stage = $1,050.

But 350 corrections is way more than you could possibly be looking at, right?

Maybe, maybe not. In a 350-page book, if each page has just one little misplaced comma, or mistyped space after a hyphen, or misspelled name, or misused word, and now that it looks like a book instead of a Word file, these things are really popping out at you, the result is that you just added a thousand dollars to your design invoice—which may only have been a thousand dollars to start with. Your free proofer wasn't free.

And that's assuming all the changes are little ones. If you decide to rewrite a chapter, or there are so many little changes that the text reflows and messes up the pagination, now we're into hourly rates.

Does this mean you must have your manuscript proofed by a professional proofer?

The answer is yes if you want a professional product. That's why publishers do it. It's not because they have some abstract love of perfection and higher callings; it's that everything in a book's production budget is pure, pragmatic business. If they didn't have to do it, they wouldn't.

The answer may be no if:

1. you're sure your friend will do a truly professional proofing job or

2. you're fine with a not entirely professional book—for example, because you know how many units you're going to move from tables at the backs of seminars, regardless of errors, and you don't want to eat into your profit by spending money that won't have any effect on the bottom line.

If you're thinking like a publisher (see "pure, pragmatic business" above), return on investment is your main priority, so (2) might be the right choice for you. However, if you're thinking like an author, every single tiny error will drive you nuts until you fix it. Plus, if there's more than just a couple of typos, that fact will start showing up in your Amazon reviews, which will probably affect your bottom line—and possibly the reputation of your brand and product line. (Whether that effect will be large enough to justify the expense of proofing, only you can decide.)

Depending on your goals, either approach can be the smart one.

Whatever you decide, go into it with your eyes open. If your friend isn't a professional proofreader, the results will not be as professional. Period. They just won't.

I say this as a guy who's spent years watching his invoices go up because of that very fact.