What Happens When

I don’t have a good internal sense of time. I tend not to know what day it is, can’t guess the hour with any accuracy, forget to eat lunch until 3 p.m., often let my tea steep for far too long, never leave the office at 5:00 unless I have to be somewhere else (in which case I’m typically late), stay up til 1:00 almost every night even if I’m having to hold my eyelids up with toothpicks, and tend to underestimate how long it will take me to do things. I try to counter this deficiency by setting my watch and all the clocks in my house at least five minutes fast, always setting a timer when I make tea at home, and making vigorous use of the alarms in Entourage and Google Calendar.

At my last two jobs, the problem was compounded by the fact that there were no schedules—or, at least, none that were posted or that anybody paid attention to. At the latter place in particular, the work plan was a mystery served with warm enigma glaze and an invisible cherry on top. I started to write you a timeline for a typical day, but then I thought I might get arrested and put in one of the CIA’s secret—but empty, honest!—prisons. Such opacity and evasion as I and my fellow “production artists” witnessed when trying to figure out what was really due when could only mean that our schedule was a matter of national security, and that we were being left out of the loop for our own protection.

So instead, I will focus on the positive, which is that I now work in a place where the schedules are explicit, universally distributed, and continually updated. I usually receive the necessary piles of manuscript or proofs well in advance of their due dates, and I even have time to file papers, eat lunch outside the building, study my predecessors’ work, chat by the water cooler, and once in a while turn things in before they’re due. Crazy.

So, what’s on these magnificent schedules? Here’s the typical order of operations for designing a book interior, as seen from my (heptagonal!) office:

1. File the schedule.

   I’m still new here, and I was hella busy on the day when the last sales meeting occurred, so I didn’t attend. Therefore, the first time I learn that a book exists is usually when the managing editor brings me a schedule for it. My fellow designer and I get one or two of these each week, and unless there’s a crash title, we just hang onto them until we’ve got a sizeable pile. Then we meet to divvy the jobs up, trying to get an even distribution of due dates, pickups versus new titles, and yucky projects.

   Various things can make a project yucky—sometimes it’s a rush, sometimes there’s a lot of art to commission, sometimes it’s elves. My teammate doesn’t like elves. I’ve got nothing against elves but have discovered that I disrelish chatty telepathic animals.

   Each of us has a loose-leaf binder in which we file all our schedules alphabetically by title. I also enter all my deadlines in Entourage’s Tasks window, so that I can easily see what’s due next. Once a week we meet with the managing editors, production managers, and production editors (PEs) to fill in the dates things actually happened, and to revise deadlines as necessary. Some doodling occurs during these meetings. When the schedule gets a substantial update, we receive a new printout, which we staple to the old one. When a book is done, we all tear its page(s) out of our binders simultaneously, with great satisfaction.

2. File the dupe.

   The first line on the schedule that mentions me is “Dup Manuscript to design.” This is the date when someone brings me a “dupe” of the manuscript (MS) that was sent to the copy editor (CE). Some structural elements have usually been coded by the PE, but the text hasn’t been corrected or thoroughly checked for consistency. It’s raw material, for reference only, and the first couple of pages usually have a big slash and “do not set” scrawled across them so that nobody gets confused.

   I stick a paper flag with the due date into this pile of dead tree and file it on a shelf. Usually I’ve got at least a month before the design approval is due, so unless it’s something tricky, I let it ripen. If there’s a map to be drawn, I might assign it to an illustrator at this stage. Meanwhile, the copy editor picks over the MS, and then the author picks over what the CE did.

3. Design the book and get it approved by the editor and managing editor.

   This you’ve heard about already. I’ve been trying to get design samples to the editors before the day approval is due, but it’s not a real deadline, so it often gets bumped (never by more than a day, though, so far). Approval’s usually quick—sometimes instantaneous. This week, though, I got the unpleasant news that one of our authors dislikes—okay, hates—the design I did for his book. It’s already been typeset and proofed, and the editor likes the design, so we’re only making one minor (though global, and therefore several-hundred-dollar) change; but it still makes me sad. :(

4. Receive the final manuscript.

   Theoretically, the final, corrected manuscript is transmitted to me on the day that design approval is due. In reality, eh, sometimes. Our schedules are actually reasonable where I work, for a wonderfully fantabulously delightful change (at my previous job I did once actually receive a transmittal that gave the due date as “Yesterday”; oh, how we laughed), so most people hit or beat their dates most of the time. Stuff really does get lost in the mail, though, and other things go awry every now and then. When that happens, I flag the task as “Waiting” in Entourage and go on to the next item.*

5. Mark up the manuscript for the compositor.

   Since I last saw the manuscript, the copy editor may have simplified or broken out headings, identified new things that need to be designed, or otherwise made some part of my approved layout obsolete. The author may then have stetted (i.e., let stand) some of the text that the CE changed. He or she may also have made big, hairy changes, inserting, deleting, or replacing large chunks of text. So my next task is to check the MS for structural changes that will affect the design or castoff.

   The PE or CE will have coded the manuscript with style markers—“CN” for chapter number, “CT” for chapter title, “EXT” for extract, etc. I feel that they’re sometimes too granular in marking styles, e.g., they’ll mark separate codes for “FAX” versus “LETTER,” or “SONG” versus “POEM.” In most cases, I don’t think that kind of distinction is useful to the reader, so I tend to simplify, either by recoding the text or defining my styles as “SONG: Same as POEM” or whatever.

   Coding deserves its own post, but for now those of you who are Web jockeys might want to know that we don’t use open and close tags; we just write the name of the style in the margin and circle it, with a big bracket or line to show the extent. Anything not otherwise marked is assumed to be normal body text with an indent on the first paragraph. Quirks mode is way, way on.

6. Write the composition order.

   This is the hard part, as far as I’m concerned. Here I have to go through every element in my weeks-old Quark layout, which I probably no longer remember at all, and describe the design in words, measurements, and a profusion of jargony abbreviations. I do this twice—once on the layout itself, in a narrow column along the outside of the page, and once in a separate document that contains only the composition specs. I cut and paste the text from the layout into the comp order, but the separate document is formatted differently, and I try to use this process of reformatting as a way of checking my work.

   It’s difficult for me to remember all the things I’m supposed to tell the compositor (I keep a cheat sheet stuck to my monitor), and I’m sometimes unsure what’s the best way to describe what I want. For some things, such as the title page, it’s common to instruct the comp to “pick up from disk and match position,” but I prefer not to do that as (1) it’s a cop-out, and (2) my layouts are always on a baseline grid, and sometimes the compositor has to change the grid to make castoff. I want everything to stick to the grid, even if the increment changes, so I have to at least describe to the compositor how it should change.

   Writing specs, like coding, will get a separate post. For now, though, just note that it takes me hours to write up even a very simple design. The first time I had to do this, it took a day and a half, no shit. If anybody’s got any tips or tricks, I’d appreciate ’em greatly.

7. Write up the “Form 5” and transmit to production.

   The Form 5 is peculiar to our company, and maybe just to our department. There’s no Form 1, 2, 3, or 4, as far as I know. The Form 5 is a job ticket with some key details about the book—which production staff are working on it, what the trim and margins are, what the pagination is expected to be, whether there are illustrations, and more. It goes back and forth with the job at every pass, and the compositor and designer initial it for each new version, noting at the bottom any changed specs. I create this document and submit it with the comp specs, the sample layout, and the marked-up manuscript to the production manager, who sends it along to the compositor. I file copies of all the paperwork in my own office and CC them to the PE and the production manager.

8. Approve castoff.

   A week or two later, the compositor’s rep e-mails to say either that the book hit the desired castoff (with four or fewer blanks in the back) or that it missed. If it missed, she sends suggestions for how to fix it—change the type size, leading, or measure; open chapters new right or run them in, whatever. I grit my teeth, open the layout file again, and try to figure out what to do. Sometimes a shorter or longer book is okay. If not, we go back and forth fiddling with the specs until we get an acceptable page count.

9. Check first pass.

   The typeset pages come back to the production manager, who routes them somehow to the author, the proofreader, and the PE. I suspect that the editor gets them, too, at some point. I don’t know or care where they are, frankly, until they show up on my desk, at the very end of this loop. Separate post on checking proofs TK (“TK” in publishing means “to come,” becos as evryone nows, peepul in publishing kant spel). Back it goes to the production manager.

10. Rinse, repeat.

    The text goes back to the comp -> prod man -> PE -> designer -> prod man until it’s clean. Usually we get two more full sets of proofs, and then the last set is just odd pages. The final (usually third) full set is called “repro,” which I’m guessing is a term from the days when they sent camera-ready copy for the printer to shoot. Everything’s digital now, but we still call it “repro.” Change is scary. Anyway, with that last set I have to create another form, called the manufacturing form, which repeats a subset of data from the Form 5.

    Sometimes, because a book is being rushed, or because the first pass was relatively error-free, the PE announces that we will skip the third pass and convert second pass to repro. When that happens, theoretically all the final deadlines on my schedule move a week earlier. In practice, it appears that they often drift much later. Again, unless I receive an updated written schedule, I just flag the task as “Waiting” in Entourage and forget about it.

11. Design the case.

    I don’t track this on the schedule (there’s probably a line for it on there; if so, I’ve never noticed), but around the time repro is due I also design the spine of the book and get it approved by the PE. At some point—could be as early as first pass—the production manager gives me a sample or proof of the jacket, and I choose the case color, foil, headbands, and, if applicable, endpapers. It takes about five minutes. The production manager tells me what colors are available, as these depend on where the book is being printed. (Different printers keep different colors in stock.) He also tells me if I have the option of designing a blind stamp for the front of the case. This occasion may be the first time I see the jacket.

    Once I’ve dealt with the case and the last round of text corrections has been approved, my work on that title is done. We may not see actual books for several weeks, and I’ll keep the schedule page in my binder until the jackets are received from the printer, but there’s nothing else I have to do. It’s dead to me. We’re through.

So. Are you still with me? Any questions? I know I’m always saying I’m going to write about this or that in a separate post, but I really am going to write about coding and comp orders and checking proofs, all separatelike, and soon. I just didn’t want to make this one post fifty thousand words long. Ha!

• If there’s really nothing pressing to do on a given day, and if my teammate is not swamped (she’s usually trying to take work off my hands, which baffles me), I continue my ongoing project of inspecting each book in the two overflowing bookcases that came with my office. I write down who did the design, if it’s credited (most aren’t, and I haven’t been putting my name in any books I’ve done there, since it doesn’t seem to be the Done Thing); who did the illustrations, especially maps (one artist appears to do about 80 percent of our maps; she’s clearly very talented, organized, and professional, but I don’t like her calligraphy, so I’m trying to get to know the less prolific cartographers in our pool); and what design gimmicks solutions I might want to try on future projects. As I do this, I also realphabetize the books and try to distribute the overflow more evenly. Compulsion. Former bookstore clerk. Eventually, when I get faster at writing comp orders and have finished surveying all the books in my office, I’ll try to pick up some work from the more general trade side of my publishing house. I’ve heard that they do craft books over there! And cookbooks!