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Hello all, today's blog post speaks to how a textbook goes from an idea to a finished printable product. This will be a brief version, condensing all of the steps. I will expand on departments' jobs, and specific details in later blogs. Note: this blog stops at the printing process, and outside factors like marketing, sales, etc. are not expanded upon. I will endeavor to focus on those in a later post, as well.
First is an obvious step: the publisher needs to decide to either 1) develop a new textbook, or 2) make a new edition of a pre-existing textbook. These decisions come from higher-ups within the company, and they will set a budget for textbook(s) in question.
After the budget is in place, most textbook companies will look to textbook packagers and contract employees to bid on the work for them. In other words, the publishing company does not usually have enough in-house staff to get the job done themselves. The publisher will compose job bidding documents and send them to these smaller companies, who will then bid on the project. The company that shows the most promise, while keeping a reasonable rate, will likely get the job.
The publisher will work alongside the packager and/or subcontractor staff to come up with preliminary guidelines/blueprints, or prototypes. The work-for-hire staff will then start with creating the manuscript (MS) of a textbook.
NOTE: Depending on the needs of the publisher, they may keep design work, higher editorial, permissions, production work, etc. in-house. However, all of these steps need to be done in conjunction with the MS development.
After the MS is written, edited, and then sent on to the composition team, any art that is required for the textbook is sent to artists to begin development. Graphic designers may be required for more complex tables or graphs. Other artwork not being created needs photographic research, and then will require someone to buy the art and permission it within the end matter contents.
The first round of pages will come back to the editors after it is "poured" or transferred into the layout approved by the publisher. This layout is developed alongside the design staff and is completed before the MS goes to the production staff. These pages will oftentimes have overset text (text that runs longer than the page it is supposed to fit on), and additional extensive editorial work is usually needed. These edits will go back to the production team.
In a second round of pages, the production team is usually able to place unfinished art (sketches) and placeholder images for those that are being researched. The design staff and editorial will make their corrections to the pages again. In this round, there is usually an editorial services component. This department will deal with copyediting, fact-checking, and more. These types of changes will be suggested in this round.
Depending on how much of a budget the project has, the pages will sometimes go into a third round of pours. Otherwise, the pages will start being poured for final pages. These final pages include full art and images. This is the final chance for large corrections to be made.
After final pages, confirming pages come in. These are the pages that have hi-resolution images. By this point, very few changes, if any, are being sent back to production by editorial or design. At the end of this round, the pages go to the printer.
Printers, which are usually outsourced as well, compile a digital round of proofs for the publisher to confirm before they are printed. This is to make sure there are no duplicates, or that all images are hi-resolution before hitting the print button. Once these pages are confirmed, the book will print!
I hope you enjoyed this little post about the textbook publishing process. Please let me know if you have any feedback on social media, or through the site itself!
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