19 Dec 2023

Editorial Production Director A Job To Know

1/ What does your job as editorial production director within a publishing house like Brandon & Compan

The editorial manager (we sometimes speak of “publishing manager”, merging a technical function and a legal function, which refers to legal responsibility) is the person who makes the final decision. For Brandon Editions, Caroline Nicolas decides: acceptance or refusal of the manuscripts received. He is more commonly called the editor.

The person responsible for editorial production is the relay between the author and the printer, once the manuscript has been accepted and reworked by our editor, once our author, therefore , completed his text: it involves moving from a text file (prepared using a word processor, the best known being Word) to the file ready to be printed (the BAT, Good to to pull). This is the heart of my work.

For any text, the first step in the process is typographical cleaning: tracking down, above all, spaces (the noun is feminine, in the edition) and capital letters (we say "capitals", in the edition) so that they conform to centuries-old rules of French-speaking publishing. The second step is spelling and grammatical correction: hunting for typos and mistakes still nestled in the text. This careful proofreading is carried out by eye (we speak of “human proofreading”) with, sometimes, the help of professional software.

Then it’s the layout! At Brandon, as with most publishing houses, each collection has its own graphic model: the Brandillon, the Brandebourg and the Square Brandon. Time saved, consistency assured (typography is the color and scent of a publishing house). Depending on the content (dialogues, quotes, verses), the work is more or less rapid, but always captivating.

The layout work leads to the first proof, specifically a PDF file which respects the model of the collection. Reviewed jointly by Caroline Nicolas and myself, the document is then submitted to the author. Be careful, these are, at this stage, only final typos that we are correcting! Adding or removing words may change the entire layout. Too late.

On the basis of this first test, the author gives his BAT, a contractual commitment. The text is now fixed: the author will not be able to turn against the publisher, once the book is printed, if what has been published no longer suits him.

Let's not talk about conflict, which is rare, but about the legitimate, I would say natural, temptation of authors to modify their texts again and again. The editor and proofreader sense when a text finds its balance. The author doubts and hesitates. Probably, the fear of revealing one's text, of exposing oneself to the world while hoping to find readers. This tension, inherent to writing, relaxes somewhat when we submit it to the first test. The way we look at our text is transformed. One day, an author told me: “I understand my text better. »

Composition —the other name for layout—, is giving a form to a text so that the meaning is expressed better.

And then, once the proof has been approved by the author?
To start manufacturing, I send the printer a special PDF file (PDF/X, a format specific to publishing, commonly called “printer PDF”). My mission is not completed, I remain on the lookout: deadlines, possible technical problems (color rendering, for example), delivery.

The number of copies printed (the print run) depends on the format of the work, the expected reception, the technique used (offset does not allow small series). For digital presses, non-offset in short, we want to favor printing on demand, in limited series.

Caroline Nicolas and I work without a distributor or broadcaster in order to significantly reduce distribution costs and dependence on players who impose their management methods< a i=2>. Which requires even more involvement in the promotion of published works.

Any published book is visible on professional databases (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Electre, etc.). From then on, in addition to one-off orders placed by bookstores – indirect sales, therefore – other distribution channels are used: direct sales to individuals via the Brandon & Company, our parent company, but also the development of partnerships with booksellers wishing to order lots from us.

2/ What is your vision of the publishing sector? What would you like to improve?

Above all, an industry like any other, to use the title of one of the posts from your blog. A publishing house has expenses, accounting, legal and, dare I say, health obligations; she transfers the copyright royalties that she received during the sale. For around thirty years, the publishing sector has been experiencing unoriginal developments: a concentration that borders on oligopoly and, at the same time, an extreme atomization of publishing houses —the overwhelming majority of French publishing houses are microstructures.

A small but key clarification on production: few houses produce in-house, including the largest and most visible . Most use independents and freelancers for editorial production, or a few composition studios.

In fact, the specificities of the sector refer to the classic industrial management problem: where is the economic margin? Not at all with the author except in the case of a star, not always with the publisher, the composer or the bookseller but, most often, at distributors and broadcasters. The imbalance is glaring.

Consequently, like authors, many publishers carry out a dual activity : the book pays its producers poorly. The author is the worst off ; the publisher and its partners have, at least, the choice of professional status (corporate officer, employee, trader, micro-entrepreneur).

What should be improved? I would rather speak, for publishing houses, of choices to defend: self-broadcasting and self-distribution, as we do let's tie up, at Brandon & Compagnie, for Brandon editions and, more recently, for Esperle editions. Other avenues: intermediary models, such as cooperation, associations of small publishing players who bring together networks of booksellers? The construction site is vast.

3/ What is your vision of the publishing profession and its challenges? What should authors know about it?

In principle, an author does not have to know these subjects. He may be excellent, but know almost nothing about publishing.

In reality, if the author works better with an editor who understands him, the symmetry is unmistakable: an editor works better with an author who has some ideas on the chain of book. Open the black box of publishing to know what is there, to understand that a book is not produced only with time, money and passion, but, concretely, with tools ( software, presses), codes, contacts, online databases, etc.

Any advice? It is my business that the author does not try to refine the formatting of his text… An almost raw manuscript is easier to work with : I am satisfied with visible chapter breaks and semantic “enrichments” (words or passages in italics, which mean something).

4/ How do you view the profession of author? What does it mean to be an author today in your opinion?

At the risk of provoking, I consider that being an author is not a profession, or in a very fragmented way. It’s a job that feeds very few people, an activity that offers very little social recognition. Undoubtedly, an author develops expertise, know-how, skills, but, with some exceptions, does he have a career?

Being an author is no less a very serious practice. To be an author is to be part of an ecosystem, they say today. Producing a book takes time and money.

Let's be precise. An author does not produce a book but a text. And a book is more than a text, it is a text-formatted, carried: “published”. Nobody reads a novel on word processing software (Word, LibreOffice), to put it schematically.

By the way, should we talk about author or writer? I am not sure that I am always in agreement with myself when I claim, urbi et orbi, that the person who lives in the world is a writer. through words, who breathes through writing, while the author is the one who sees his text published. We could say that there are many authors and few writers. Ultimately, the important thing is to distinguish the act of writing for yourself, or even those close to you, from that for a third party, your true reader. And the reader of readers, who can read by decentering himself, by imagining other receptions of the text than his own, has a name: the editor.

Is being an author today worth it, when more than 80,000 new titles appear every year, when the world goes wrong, when a text appears very fragile in the face of at peril? I answer with a pugnacious “yes”! We do not write to save the world but to confront it, to understand it. To clarify : it’s not much, it’s a lot.