Annotations

How Long Will It Take to Make My Book? A Book Producer's Notes

When discussing a new project with a client, right after “How much is this book going to cost?” the second most frequently asked question is “How long is this going to take?” We’ve learned not to respond “It depends....” But it does—on all sorts of variables:

• The manuscript (“MS”)—has it been written? If so, how well? And if not, who’s going to write it? When will she begin? How soon does she expect to deliver the first draft?
• The art program—how many and what kind of pictures—photos, info graphics (“charts/tables/graphs”), etc.—are involved? Is it assembled? If not, who will put it all together? Are its sources spread far and wide or contained in a smaller, more circumscribed context? How extensive will permissions clearance be? (Therein lies the subject of a blog for the not-too-distant future, by the way.)
• Design—do you want a fairly straightforward tradelike design, or did you have something more elaborate in mind? Just how elaborate? And, by the way, just how long is this book? What is its trim size? Will you review most stages electronically (as pdfs, for example), or do you require hard copy (i.e., printed pages on paper) at each stage?
• Production and printing—does the budget permit printing domestically, or does it necessitate overseas printing? Will you deliver printer-ready image scans, or is VAI or the printer expected to create them from your reflective (that is, non-digital) art? Does a hard-and-fast due date apply, or can delivery of bound books be somewhat open ended?

These are just a few of the most cogent questions we need to answer in order to determine how long we project the gestation period needed for top-quality illustrated books. Let’s look at the first item above to get an idea of how broadly the manuscript variables can be interpreted:

Has the MS been written?
Yes: we can begin editing as soon as the project is contracted.
No: we will need to wait anywhere from five months to a couple of years before editing can begin, and rush jobs almost always result in more complex, time-consuming editorial phases.

What shape is the MS in?
Professional-quality prose written by an expert on the subject is apt to require much less time for editing, fact checking, and authorial handholding (say, a month or so) than a MS by a copywriter with no experience with book-length material. (We’d probably add another month or two in that case.) As for a first-time author just starting to feel his way into the topic, a conservative estimate of the time devoted to the editorial component is five to six months.

Of course, none of this is hard and fast. Books develop organically. Each has its own strengths and difficulties, both of which will have direct, unavoidable effects on the book’s growth to maturity. For example, I have breezed through editing text in half the time I initially allotted. Conversely, a few books written by established scholars have kept me busy four, even five times as long as I had projected at the outset.

So, what kind of ballpark estimate can we (do we) offer? Our rule of thumb for a fairly standard illustrated book is nine months to one year from delivery of first-draft MS, and for the most part that guesstimate has turned out to be pretty much on the money.

We can always suggest ways to reduce it if need be. Printing domestically, for example, cuts down on the back-and-forth shipping time during the proof-approval stage, which can end up shaving off a week or two. Domestic binderies can also ship books by truck, for delivery in a day or two, as opposed to four to eight weeks sea freight can require.

My partner has been known to kick my shin under the conference table for mentioning the time it took to produce and deliver a 128-page, 120-picture book from start—i.e., having no author, much less MS; no pictures; not even an archive—to finish (delivery of bound books printed in Hong Kong). The 27 weeks was possible and successful only because the specific individuals (client, writer, VAI participants, printer’s rep, printer, binder) in the team we assembled were all at their best during that period of late nights and long hours. Clearly, this was neither optimal nor foregone.

Because each new book is its own organic entity, it has its own bottom line for how much care it will need for development and production. Shortchange that time and you’ll suffer the consequences; overdo it and you’ll find a whole new set of not necessarily happy results.

Do yourself a favor up front: rather than rely on some sort of template-driven, hard-and-fast “rule,” take time to determine what variables apply. Once the ducks are in their row, you can base your book’s production schedule on a realistic understanding of its actual requirements.

Photo credits: (top) Tom Woodward; (bottom) Brandon Schauer

(Don't) Get Me Rewrite! or, The Book Producer's Dominos

Some publishing people dread a book's final pre-press phase—especially those book packagers who produce illustrated publications. While every book follows its own organic process step by step, it's this last phase where the carefully arranged dominos seem just to tremble in anticipation of tumbling into each other. A glance at the book development process helps understand why this phase can become frantic, and when late-stage rewriting enters the picture, all bets are off.

When we embark on a new project, the first step is the careful preparation of a timeline that entails each step of the process. Everything we can predict, we do—holidays, blocks of author downtime, the printer's availability, and lead time for ordering paper are just a few elements we consider. Because nearly every project begins with a fixed endpoint, we work backward to find the start date. With any luck, it is pretty close to when the author plans to complete the first-pass manuscript (MS).

A production schedule diagram resembles a funnel: The wider top develops because more time is needed up front (writing, MS development, editing, and creating the design concept). Once the editorial phase is complete, however, everything starts to speed up, and here's where compression usually occurs (i.e., the funnel tapers sharply). The ultimate deadline hasn't changed, but if the book is now two months behind where it needs to be, something's gotta give.

Typically, a book develops from idea to manuscript to layout before being transmitted to the printer. The writer's gestation and research period can last years. Once she begins writing, a minimum of several months and usually a year or more of intense work lay ahead of her. Next, the newborn first-draft receives editorial attention for anywhere from one or two months to half a year or longer.

Chances are the design concept is in progress during the editorial phase so the edited MS, once reviewed by its author, can quickly move along to typesetting. By this point, what began as a deceptively "leisurely" process has gained its own pace and inexorable momentum.

Production events occur fast and furious: The MS is typeset, then conveyed to the layout artist, who prepares each page, incorporating images in synch with design specs and complying with the panoply of standard publication requirements. The author and others review the layout while the proofreader reads it. Everyone's eagle eyes search for different problems and issues—typos, style points, factual and/or grammatical errors, accuracy of running heads and page numbers, consecutive page numbering, etc.

Then the author returns her marked-up layouts, and lo and behold they've sprouted all kinds of emendations: "move two ¶s from page 49 to page 37"; "insert these 3 new ¶s here"; "wrong picture, new one in mail"; "couldn't find reference, so cut entire passage." And on and on.

An editor sets about compiling all the participants' changes into a single set of proofs, making certain that no change skews the content or goes against style. The layout person uses the editor's compilation to make type changes, and the (now 40-percent new) layout goes off to the indexer, who has a ridiculously short time to whip together what must become the "authority" for locating names and subjects in the final book.

Gasp! Pant, pant.... Whew!

So, it should be quite evident why rewriting at laid-out-page stage is a bad idea. Not only does it mean more work for all involved, this is a crucial domino in the array, and its tipping causes a nasty chain reaction. Moving two paragraphs here or inserting a new picture there result in repagination for the balance of the chapter, if not the rest of the book. Cross references directing the reader elsewhere must be located and their page numbers corrected. A variant spelling requires global searches of each electronic layout file. A "simple" style-point revision can lead to changes in numerous passages throughout the book, not all of which are evident or easily located. It is particularly important to remember that each substantive change—the dreaded "aa," or author's alteration—racks up an additional charge for the client (as opposed to the author). This is never a "good thing."

Don't get me wrong! This by no means is a recommendation to do away with layout review, which is crucial for catching typos and errors and generally cleaning up unforeseen troubles. Scrutinizing the layout allows reconsideration of facts and figures; problems missed earlier during the MS work can be remedied. And I am the first to acknowledge that seeing laid-out type for the first time can completely change a person's perception of the text. But every contributor should understand that the time and place for reconsidering the book's broader strokes fell away a while ago, during the writing, editing, and reviewing phases.

 (Photo of dominos © 2010 Sean Gwizdak. All rights reserved.)

 

Fine Art Reproduction: Why (and How) We Look at Pictures Today

For three weeks now, I've been working on a blog about color correction for digital and print publications. I think I've developed decent skills in this area during my many years of work in graphic design and production, so I thought I could provide some tips readers might appreciate when left to fend for themselves while producing a publication.

I began by wrestling with ways to describe how to attain accurate reproduction of original artworks and display their images consistently across a variety of media. This brought me to consider the astonishing range of displays on which people can presently view the same, single image, and how widely color and contrast is likely to shift with each of those displays. Always developing printing capabilities skew things even further.

Then I considered how millions of people, like me, spend hours in front of computers, being deluged by countless images. When you contend with that kind of visual saturation on a daily basis, the only chance an image has to grab your attention is if there is something really wrong with it. Even then, I expect that such an egregious error would also need to be engaging enough to keep the viewer from scrolling and clicking.

As you can see, color correction had taken a back seat to a consideration of what it presently means to look at art.

On the print side, my company produces catalogs for museum exhibitions and collections as well as other kinds of books that deal with fine art and architecture. We share with our photographers, production managers, prepress techs, and printers the responsibility for controlling consistency and delivering accurate reproduction. While there is much room for error, the variables are manageable, and we all have the common goal of producing an accurate printed page. At every step along the way, we spend a great deal of time comparing and adjusting each piece in order to provide readers with a collection of images with which they will also want to spend time.

Lately, we have been considering how the great shift from print to digital publishing will affect our niche market of fine art publishing, and how best to utilize these new, always evolving technologies. We've met with  firms that adapt picture-driven books to e-book format. To date, the most successful of these are instructional titles (e.g., cooking, craft, and DIY books and magazines). But, chances are that the reader who spends time studying specific images or text in such books is doing so to clear up confusion about the subject rather than out of appreciation for the pictures.

I'd really like to know if some people would prefer to study a fine art reproduction on a monitor rather than on the printed page. I expect there are many who do, and no doubt I will find their reasons surprising.

I recently talked with a gallery owner who specializes in contemporary and vintage silver print photographs. We talked about how the tiny, rarified market for fine art photography books continues to shrink. He  suggested that the flood of digital images that has become available to everyone, everywhere could cause people to forget the pleasures of viewing photographic prints "in the flesh," which could easily lead to a wholesale loss of interest in attending photography exhibits at galleries or museums. An excessively gloomy forecast, perhaps, but it does cause me to wonder if we are all progressively losing our capacity for sustained visual attention.

Book development: Challenging content for a general audience

Part of the bedrock of the publishing industry's business model has always included the realization that, to stay afloat, sufficiently healthy sales are required to underwrite the cost of operation and reap profit. Meeting requisite sales levels entails publishing titles that enough people find sufficiently appealing (or necessary) to move them to fork over the cover price.

So how do publishers—and the book producers who work with them—arrive at the attitudes and approaches that define and satisfy audiences? How does one go about determining who will want to read a given title? And what will they expect to accomplish by reading the book? Enter the "general audience"—the nonfiction gold standard for a majority of trade publishers (as well as numerous university and academic presses).

This entity admits of no one definition, of course. Different houses understand general audience to mean different things, but a broad-based consideration leads to something along the lines of "readers who share a sufficiently serious interest in a topic to want to read about it, but may not be equipped and/or willing to take on the technical or difficult prose used to address it."

What do the author's, or manuscript editor's, or publisher's toolboxes need to hold in order to prepare intelligent, challenging works of nonfiction that will satisfy both Everyreader and the Scholar? (Surprisingly, this is a fairly recent distinction that seems to have sprung, in large part, from the technologically driven entertainment culture in which most of us now live. But that's a springboard to a totally different blog.) Numerous notches in my editorial belt have been carved by books intended to span the specialist-generalist divide, and they have given rise to a few ideas.

First, a healthy sense of humility. This applies to both sides of the table—author and reader alike. The scholar is called upon to recognize that few share her/his depth of knowledge and understanding of the material. If reaching out to readers other than initiates in the field is at all desirable to the author, s/he should step back far enough to gain perspective about what needs to be discussed, and how it needs to be presented. Including a bibliography, glossary, and similar reader's aids can go a long way toward helping the less-than-expert grasp the material. That said, the interested reader, whether generalist or specialist, must be willing to take on some of the burden of getting up to speed by becoming versed in those resources that will help answer questions that may arise or flesh out information that is only glancingly mentioned. It should be no surprise that jargon fits neither bill.

Next there is clarity. The writing and, in particular, substantive editing must be called into service to establish and work from an ideal overall vantage point for the subject matter. With that point of departure adopted, the content is more likely to fall into place. If it does not, however, the editor should be prepared to work carefully with the author and provide the needed perspective in order to hone the text appropriately. This is no place for inflated egos (on either contributor's part), nor does it call for infantilization of the audience. The editor should be well versed in the generalist's requirements and able to make unobtrusive suggestions that will assist generalist readers with filling in their own particular blanks.

Finally, acuity and realism. Here is where the book producer and publisher need to contribute accurate comprehension of the book's audience, understanding who these readers are and how best to let them know that the book is intended for them, too. Again, talking down is a sure way to alienate everyone, regardless of background. But overreaching can be just as disastrous. And remember, the sales and marketing functions are apt to take their cue from publisher and editor—rather than the author—so presenting the book in an accurate, realistic light will go a long way toward appropriate and well-targeted representation to the media, academia, and booksellers.

Anniversary books and design firms: Resolve these five issues first

My March 24th post concerned hiring a design or marketing firm or an advertising agency to develop and produce a book about an organization's history. As I mentioned then, anniversary books are often longer and editorially more complex than the projects typically produced by such firms.

I also noted that the manuscript and art for such an anniversary book might not have received the necessary shaping, trimming, and focusing that a strong editorial hand can supply. So, even if you are confident in your completed manuscript, here are five crucial points to cover before commissioning a creative team.     

1. Previous experience
Requesting information as specific as possible on this point always works to your advantage. If the potential vendor assures you that there is no difference between the work he has produced and what you require, ask him why — specifically and in detail. You know much more and about your organization and are likely to have a clearer picture of the end product you want than he does. Once, when bidding to produce the history of an executive recruitment firm, we were summarily discounted because we did not have another executive recruitment firm's history in our portfolio. The client spent fifteen very illuminating minutes outlining why they required such particular experience.

2. Communication vs. intimidation
Do the prospective firms understand your business, your organization, your story? Do they effectively present to you your story — in terms related to your business — rather than explain how they approach their own work? I've attended design presentations, both as a designer and a client, at which I have seen too many design professionals rely heavily on design-speak. They seemed to use it as an effective means of intimidation, assuming that the best defense is a good offense. Resist these obvious tactics, and keep in mind that the presenter needs to prepare for the meeting by familiarizing himself with your work, not the other way around.

3. Samples of their work
If you want a cloth-bound, hardcover book with a French-fold* dust jacket and five-color, printed endpapers, the firm you hire needs to show you a sample of exactly that. Your vendor should be working with a printer who specializes in printing and binding illustrated, hardbound books. If not, you run a significant risk of cost over-runs, schedule delays, and compromises to the overall quality of the finished book.

4. Schedule, front-end and back end
Does the design firm you are interviewing understand the time frame your anniversary history requires? Imagine you have a total of 14 months in which to complete the project, but your designer doesn't realize it may take more than 12 of those months to complete the text and art research, interviews, writing, and editing. Such inexperience will turn into significant rush fees for production and printing, not to mention the chance of a missed deadline.

5. Will it last?
You expect the beautifully printed and bound book you have worked so hard to produce — this volume that commemorates the last however-many years of your organization — to have a shelf life of more than a few months. Many print publications incorporate very expensive techniques and materials, but are not expected to have the long and useful life of a well-made book. Printers and binders specializing in fine-quality illustrated books have the resources to offer the best prices on paper, printing, and binding materials that endure. Find out if the firm you are interviewing knows how to provide you with a beautiful book that will also last decades, not just years. Note, too, that the same kind of longevity should be expected from the book's look, feel and design. Trendy seldom equals lasting.

*A "french fold" dust-jacket is one with folded, double-thick edges along the book's perimeter, which assures greater durability and resistance to tearing.

A book packager's cost estimate: Beyond the ballpark

"Just so I can talk to my boss about it,
give me a ballpark figure for what this is going to cost us."

This problematic request is probably endemic to service-based businesses, and I sympathize with the people who ask it. If they have no notion of what it will cost, how can they move ahead with their book-production exploration? But, because each publication has its own personality and peculiarities, expenses and time requirements vary widely from project to project, which makes it nearly impossible to arrive at a preliminary, or ballpark, estimate worth the email it's "printed" on.

Here's the "ideal" process we try to follow in order to provide a reliable estimate. Right off the bat, project demands are divided into two categories: (1) cost of service (called "cost of goods sold" in other industries); and (2) manufacturing.

First Base: Cost of service for publications
Let's assume our client wants the soup-to-nuts package: project management, development, editorial (line and copy editing, proofreading, and indexing), design, art preparation, pre-press, and production. Every line item requires evaluation. A few questions we consider include:

• Has the writer ever completed a manuscript this complex?
• Is fact checking required?
• Are we expected to clear permissions to reprint text or pictures? How many? In what language(s)?
• Is a one-color (or a four-color or a six-color) design desired?
• Is the art in digital form, or must transparencies and hard copy be scanned and color corrected?
• What about the 27 charts and graphs—will they need to be redrawn?
• Do you want us to be present at the press check?

Questions such as these lead to broader considerations:

• Will we assign some of the work to freelance colleagues, or must our in-house staff do everything?
• How much time will be devoted to in-house editing or design or production?
• What about the schedule? Does the client want bound books yesterday?

We prefer to meet with our client to explore every requirement as well as any special procedures that may need to be implemented. During this meeting, we complete a page-long requisition of services. This needn't be a long or onerous process—it can be accomplished in as few as 15 minutes—and once that discussion is complete, the services needed for us to deliver a top-notch publication are understood by everyone involved.

Caveat: While this exploration takes a little more time up front, beware of the publication service provider who is ready and willing to reel off costs without first gaining a clear understanding of the project's intricacies and peculiarities. That way lies, if not madness, a sizable roster of added charges after the fact and severe headaches during the publication's gestation period.

Second Base: Manufacturing costs
Truth be told, it is usually easier to handicap the service requirements than the cost of printing, paper, and binding (PPB) and shipping, which we commission a printer and binder to provide. Here, too, we complete a page-long questionnaire, which sketches in a full, accurate description of the end product's specifications—trim size, page count, type of binding, weight and quality of paper, quantity for first printing, etc. We submit these specs to at least three vendors, and it takes at least a week, usually longer, for us to receive their bids.

Rounding Third: Putting it all together
Now we deposit all the estimates, considerations, and perceived elements into our hopper to determine what the publication will cost to produce, when we will need the raw materials, and when the project can be completed and delivered. Over the years, we have developed reliable spreadsheets to estimate costs and schedules, but they assume accuracy in the data entered.
 

 

Home Plate! We issue the proposal
Thousands cheer. General good feeling abounds.

So, you can see why off-the-cuff estimates tend to be unreliable, hence unwise. Nonetheless, clients' urgent pleas have prompted us to suggest ballpark figures based on similar past projects. Doing so always warrants a disclaimer—"this is not an estimate...,"—but the ballpark figure usually sees our client through an imminent committee meeting or budget projection.

Then why don't we do that more often? Frankly, because it just isn't sufficiently reliable. For example, take a book based on one we produced six years earlier. Today, editorial fees are, say, $5/hour higher; the previous project took eleven months, but the new one needs only nine; the paper is more expensive; and the quantity to be printed is twice as high. Any one of these considerations can skew the figures; taken together, the overall result can be fouled right out of the ballpark.

We continually improve our itemized cost-projection system, which we are honing to permit issuing reliable on-the-spot estimates. But, as with so many project-planning tasks, it still relies on best guesses and assumptions, and the umpire has yet to rule on that.

 

Anniversary books: "creative" and "content" are not oxymoronic.

The last thing any organization's harried communications director needs is to go through the complicated process of hiring a design firm/marketing firm/advertising agency to produce their history only to be met with: "We are ready to start, when will you send us the text, art, research, interviews, manuscript, and everything else?"

An annual report, for example, can easily reach book-length proportions. However, it's reasonable to expect that an annual report will begin with an overview of the previous year and end with lists of officers and board members. Moreover, altering the report's form would do little to enhance the content within and is even likely to make it more difficult to use.

A history that includes pictures, while nonfiction, is still a story, and integrating the ways both pictures and text drive that story is integral to creating an engaging illustrated book. 

The design of an illustrated history benefits from a close relationship between author, editor, and designer. Even a history as rudimentary as a chronological time-line will do more to engage the reader if each benchmark is carefully considered, reflecting the preceding entry and informing the subsequent.

As an illustrated-book producer, I have had the good fortune to be involved in the "building" of an illustrated book. The editor and I met with the book's two authors and its photographer (who documented the entire project) for a series of weekly brainstorming meetings on how to portray the way architect Frank Gehry's astonishing Stata Center came to be, from concept through design, execution, construction, and implementation.

Each week we would meet and discuss the many issues that needed to be addressed. The following week we returned with our various contributions, such as rough manuscript or rough layouts (sometimes both). These inspired further discussion of how to expand and develop the story.

I've experienced very few projects that have developed as organically as this one. It confirmed my concern that when a designer is handed all the components of a history and told to put them together, he or she could easily miss any number of opportunities to bring the story to life. For example, I have seen countless designers roll their eyes at the art they receive for a project, never considering what they could do to improve both the art and the project overall.

 

My partner, the editorial "wing" of our company, and I provide our clients with a simple, unique service that seems to be little known outside of the publishing world. When we receive a manuscript, we can furnish the client with an "art manuscript": we simply annotate the text with suggestions for photographs, art, or artifacts that enhance the story's progression. We offer this service whether we are developing a new manuscript with the author, editing a client's completed manuscript, or have received both edited manuscript and art program from a client. Our suggestions are always well received, but never more so than when a client's "photo research staff" is actually an overworked manager who had too much to do before the project landed on her desk. Such circumstances rarely foster inspiration. In fact, our art manuscripts have often inspired researchers to track down illustrations above and beyond our suggestions.

I have never considered the elements of graphic design as a collection of discrete components that need to be balanced and arranged. When words and pictures work side by side, they elevate even the most unlikely subject and bring its story to life. A client need never apologize for bringing what others might consider a "prosaic" topic to the table. Our goal is to reinvigorate the client—and the ultimate reader— to consider a familiar story with their own fresh, excited eyes.

Illustrated books or books with videos?

I am very fortunate to be able to design and produce wonderful illustrated books on painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and architecture for museums as well as university and commercial publishers. I also take great pleasure in perusing a thoughtfully designed book-with-pictures, appreciating the pacing and rhythm of its layout and how text and art refer to and enhance each other.

In my work I strive to provide the viewer with text that is both easy to read and scan for specific information, as well as presenting pictures that one can scan with ease; taking in its surface or boundaries or finding its compositional (or metaphoric) focus.

Of course, all this suggests my preference for holding a book in my hands, scanning spreads from left to right, and turning pages. This experience may be destined for obsolescence, and at Vern Associates we are cautiously adapting our work to accommodate the insistent shift from print-on-paper to digital books.

One seldom visits a site or reads a blog that doesn't supplement its text with video. This is what most people have come to expect from an interactive medium, and video can convey a great deal of information effectively and persuasively. It is a boon for those looking for information on how to do something, because you can watch someone demonstrate the task. I'm more skeptical of sites that combine text with talking heads who instruct, coach, sell, or what have you.

I recently visited two publishing sites that sell hybrid book-and-video titles and found that they to relate to each other in unexpected ways.

Vook is a web-based application that partners with magazine and book publishers to produce highly interactive digital books that you can access on PCs, digital readers, or mobile phones. These vooks include both text and video, along with links to social media sites. Some titles, such as those about cooking and fitness are a good fit for this format. Fiction titles often include dramatized versions of the story, alongside the text. Another discovery was the children's and Y-A author Patrick Carman's Skeleton Creek series (Scholastic). Carman wrote an interesting piece in Publisher's Weekly about his successful series that gets kids really interested in reading.

These stories are presented as text followed by video and so on. This video carrot works really well in making the written word much less of a stick. In the Skeleton Creek books, kids must finish reading before they get to the movie. I don't think that would fly with customers downloading novels from Vook.

The voices in my head

I've never mentioned this to anyone—nor had reason to, until now—but when I read, I "hear" the words in my own voice. My voice is modulated depending on the topic. It is very nondescript when I am calculating figures in a math text, and can get quite dramatic for fiction, a higher pitch for female characters, an appropriate accent for English or French or Bostonian characters. It seems to me that these sounds become an integral part of how I comprehend the written word, make it part of my memory, and classify its value. More important, my internal voice is my first step to visualizing the images and situation being described. I'd like to think that other people share this experience while reading. If not, they must have other means of processing words and internalizing stories. I don't understand how the same degree of comprehension is possible from watching a scripted, filmed, and edited version of that same story, but would love to know if other people share my opinion.

Editorial Services: The Index Hidden Among the Pixels?

As I delve more deeply into editorial- and book-related listservs, blogs, and social media sites, I find very little discussion of back-of-the-book indexes. Some inveterate indexers keep in touch with each other, and a few endeavor to keep in touch with other editorial service providers, but almost no one attempts to reach out to what I’ll call “mainstream” readers, writers, and word-folks. The result, of course, is an increasingly common devaluation of this important aspect of written communication. Why?

Having devoted several of my earlier editorial years to compiling indexes, I have my own suspicions. I know a bit about indexes and what kind of people engage in that manner of making a living. So, it’ probably true that certain personality traits common to many index compilers count for something.
Just who does take up the banner of “indexer” and persevere in providing for him/herself and family by compiling these vital tools? I can only base this estimation on myself and the dozen or so other indexers I have known well, and none of us tend toward extroversion. Many have backgrounds in library cataloguing, and both professions have similar attributes: they demand quiet, are concentration-intensive, and seldom are effectively done unless in solitude. One must keep hundreds or thousands of names, terms, and ideas in play for the duration of an index’s preparation. Otherwise, the final product winds up including too many separate terms for the same things.

Such constraints don’t necessarily translate well into social contact. I remember more than one bout of intensive indexing after which quite a bit of time elapsed before I was able to speak intelliglbly. After one such indexing foray, I unconsciously continued to transpose names in conversation:

“Hey, Brian, what was the name of that women you introduced me to last week? You know, with the shoes?”

“Oh,” I answered. “That was 'Marcos comma Imelda'.”

Then, too, a sizable portion of educated, intelligent readers, who habitually rely on indexes for study and research, haven’t a clue about how an index comes into being. They assume that text is simply “plugged in” to some software application, which then magically separates out the concepts, names, and ideas that need to be indexed and appends appropriate page numbers. In my experience, however, a good, reliable—dare I say responsible?—index has yet to be made by a machine. While software certainly is a boon to information management as well as to automating many rote tasks an indexer until fairly recently did by hand (think alphabetizing, sequencing page numbers, manuscript preparation, etc.), a computer does not interpret text in ways that will make the contents of a document readily available to a human reader. Not that long ago, in fact, I too often indulged in self-amusement by reviewing the “terms” that arose from electronically “indexing” brief passages with Microsoft Word. Anything for a laugh!

But finally, I think the principal reason so little attention is paid to indexes and their composition currently stems from the present nature and perception of information (or, call it text, if you prefer). Why use a compiled index when you can perform a quick electronic search for the name or term you need? I frequently make use of Safari Books Online, a virtual library of (mostly) technical books—software manuals, technical specifications, business guides, and the like. When trying to size up the usefulness of any given publication before deciding to add it to my “bookshelf,” I head to the index to look up specific concepts or terms. Lately, however, almost none of the books I have reviewed have had indexes. Well no wonder, you must think; it’s simpler to perform a search. Not really. If my search is very tightly targeted (e.g., “Marcos, Imelda”), perhaps this is true. But what about something more generic, which could appear in a number of contexts and mean many things (let’s say, “shoes”)? Suddenly, I am wading through dozens upon dozens of hits, of which one or two may be on target. Very frustrating, and a real waste of time.

As the person who commissions editorial service providers to contribute to the production of books, I am very particular about the index. Potential indexers must have the right sort of experience and temperament to work for me. There is no point in launching almost any nonfiction book upon its sea of readers—who will need to be able to use it in myriad ways—without backing them up with a useful index. This is a crucial element, even for books destined for electronic versions. Of course, now it is among the first expenses publishers seem to feel free to cut, often shunting the work off to underpaid (and ill-equipped) editorial assistants. And a poor index is almost as detrimental to a book as none at all, but that’s a subject for another blog.

Darnton Weighs in on Print Publication

No sooner had I posted my first blog on print publication vs. ebooks, than I came across "On the Ropes?" a terrific article in PW by Robert Darnton, historian of the book, erudite writer, and director of the Harvard Library system. The tagline reads, in part: "Darnton says reports of the book's death are greatly exaggerated." Had I seen this prior to titling my previous blog, I would have found some other way to introduce it. But, I didn't, and on reconsidering, I am just as glad. If someone whose opinion I admire so much is connected with these musings, who am I to object? I can't wait to read his new book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (soon to be published by PublicAffairs).