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Editorial Services: Outlook Stormy, or Just Unsettled?

  

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Up here in northeastern Massachusetts, a nor'easter snowstorm just bestowed upon our area 18 inches of the white stuff, which is still whisking about on 30+ mph winds.

What does the weather have to do with publishing? Not much, I suppose, except that both have a way changing in erratic, often inexplicable ways at a moment's notice. In fact, with today's minute-by-minute technological modifications/improvements, predicting whither the weather is probably the easier, or at least the more accurate, pursuit. And yesterday's quiet led me to muse about the changes I've witnessed in trade publishing in general and book editing services in particular.

My involvement with the editorial components of trade publishing passed the 30-year mark a couple of years ago. That's not much time when you consider the sea changes that have buffeted the industry and completely altered the ways things get done.

In 1978, I landed my first publishing job: editorial assistant (EA) for AMACOM, the publishing division of the American Management Association. Back then, an average day might have consisted of:

• retyping (remember typewriters?) 40 pages of edited manuscript ("MS") [2 1/2 hours];
• photocopying a 400-page MS x 5 and delivering the copies to members of the editorial team [45 minutes];
• proofreading/editing a (hand-typed, again) index MS and marking it for typesetting [2 hours];
• mailing a couple of batches of printed material to freelancers [30 minutes];
• conferring about rescue operations with a freelance proofreader whose dog ate her work [25 minutes];
• collating an author's and editor's changes onto one set of galley proofs [1 1/2 hours]; and
• distributing hot-off-the press copies of the latest book to in-house staff [10 minutes].

Publishers still employ EAs, whose job descriptions are probably significantly different, but for the sake of comparison, here's what those same tasks would be likely to entail in 2011:

• revising 40 pages of a word-processing file [45 minutes];
• distributing an electronic version of the MS to five recipients via email [10 minutes];
• revising an rtf index MS [2 hours];
• sending those two batches of material via email or ftp [20 minutes];
• conferring about electronic methods for recovering what remains after Fido finished his work as critic...some things never change [20 minutes];
• making author's and editor's changes in an InDesign layout file [30 minutes]; and
• distributing hot-off-the-press copies of the latest book to in-house staff [10 minutes].

Nearly eight hours' work now accomplished in roughly half the time. Clearly, productivity has increased markedly. How about quality? That's more dicey. In some ways, technological advances have made editorial work simpler and more effective. In others, they have made it much too easy for authors, editors, EAs, layout people, and numerous others to miss or ignore those inconvenient editorial issues and elements that continue to have a way of creeping in.

In the right hands, database software created specifically for indexing books increases thoroughness and concision. When queried appropriately, the Internet provides a quick, relatively reliable means for fact checking. Word-processing and DTP programs' global-change capabilities assist editors in assuring their books' continuity.

But left to themselves, each of those technological "advancements" can wreak havoc and result in the kind of shoddy product that readers increasingly often decry:

• "Indexes" prepared by amateurs who think MSWord's Index function will "read" the text are typically so peppered with howlers that many a professional indexer dines out on stories about last-minute triage sessions to which they've been summoned.
• Inaccurate "facts" or no-longer-current figures are perpetuated in print thanks to inept—or worse,  insufficiently thorough—Google searches.
• And erroneous terms and nonwords continually rear their unwanted heads in text thanks to ill-framed W-P and/or DTP global find/change commands.

I have no intention of entering the fray that arises whenever people argue about the computer's innate capabilities vs. its need for human guidance. My opinion is based solely on my experience and reading on the subject, both of which make my notions woefully inadequate. (I'm well aware that nine-year-olds and geeks use software and hardware to remarkable ends that far exceed my Boomer's imagination as readily as they find reasons not to brush their teeth.)

But it is clear to me that, purely at the level of editorial work, the second decade of this no longer new (or brave) century represents only a whisper of the changes we will witness by 2020. And those just apply to the editorial side. Arguably, book design and production have benefited/suffered even more, to say nothing of the storm surge of business-altering developments continually affecting the publishing industry on an hourly basis.

All that said, I remain optimistic that what are sure to be enhancements in text delivery will lead to greater literacy worldwide rather than erode it further.

Photo credit: IBM Selectric II: Garnet Hertz, conceptlab.com/