Experimenting with workflow: an extract from Jane Morrow’s Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship report

Editor Jane Morrow travelled to New York and San Francisco earlier this year as part of her Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship, where she researched digital developments in US publishing, in particular, illustrated publishing. In the following extract from her report, Morrow observes some of the different ways in which publishers’ editorial and digital teams are working together, from a digital steering committee at Random House to a digital consultancy service for editors and publishers at Penguin.

For at least five years most publishers in the US have had in place some kind of text- only (or ‘mono’) ebook conversion team. In the early years, and certainly after the Kindle was released to an eager market in 2007, publishers operated something of a triage system to determine which books should be rushed through the conversion process. And it pretty quickly became policy to produce ebooks at the end of the traditional print process for all mono frontlist titles. The conversion teams used to be out of house—far‐flung coders that editors had little to do with. Now for the larger publishers, these roles are inhouse, with their own divisions, quite separate from the print production department. I found it interesting that the person who heads this team at Penguin in the Adult division reports to an associate publisher, so it’s all looped back into the creative process. At the other houses I heard that these conversion teams report to a dedicated digital director.

For most publishers this ebook conversion stage—whether it’s a text‐only or illustrated book turned into fixed-layout or reflowable layout—is still pretty much just an extra step at the end of a linear production process. Ebook files go back to editors for quality control, but it seems an endless job for editors to check ebook files on all possible devices and by that stage they’ve really mentally moved on to other projects anyway. Honestly, I doubt many publishers or editorial directors ever look at the ebook files—and certainly not in the way they scrutinise pages before print. That’s such a problem when, for some imprints, ebooks make up more than 50 per cent of sales.

But what if files were prepared for ebooks first, as one digital director is considering? Only after the digital version of the book was final and signed off, would the print pages be prepared. It would mean a big shift in workflow, but this director is hoping it might save money down the line and embed digital thinking at the heart of how editors and designers work. And of course make them care—a lot—about the quality of the digital product.

At Crown (Random House), they are considering a concurrent workflow for illustrated print and ebooks. The workflow of the future might look something like:

• pool the assets for the title (text, images for print, extra images for digital, video etc)
• editor and print designer develop look-and‐feel for all editions of the work
• editor and print designer work on print
• editor and digital designer/developer work on digital products from the same asset pool and look-and‐feel, referring from print to digital products and back again frequently to ensure they don’t diverge too significantly.

But what about more complex digital projects? Everyone seems to be doing it a bit differently. Katherine McCahill, senior manager of digital product development at Penguin, told me that a lot of New York publishers have a strong digital group whose remit encompasses websites and digital publishing. Until recently these departments had an executive who took over a lot of control of individual projects. Now the trend is to push projects much more into publishers’ hands.

One solution has been quickly to bring in a team of multimedia developers—to ‘buy’ digital talent to work as a digital‐product factory. In 2011 Random House bought a digital marketing and development company, Smashing Ideas, based in Seattle. Now the issue is integrating what editors in New York do with the techs in Seattle, when both groups have vastly different creative backgrounds. In many cases the kind of personality attracted to book publishing is the exact opposite of the start-up tech mentality. Mucking around with XML is not what editors signed up for when they started in publishing 20 years ago. Diplomacy issues can be rife.

At Crown, they are implementing a digital steering committee, where interested people across departments can bounce around ideas for digital projects, report in and learn from each other. The aim is to empower people, to ‘calm editors down’ so that they can be content-led and not feel that they must be working on digital projects.

At Penguin the concern is that hiring a team of people with multimedia expertise might be a quick way to get digital products to market but would allow editors to keep digital projects at arm’s length—digital would simply become someone else’s job. So the structure now is to provide a kind of digital development and consultancy service to editors and publishers, who themselves drive the projects. A small team with a variety of publishing and multimedia backgrounds works across imprints to act as a sounding board, to advise, handhold where necessary, and provide a kind of translation service and ‘buffer’ between editorial and outside vendors such as app developers. They regularly meet to discuss and decide on new enhanced ebook or app (read high-cost) digital projects, and editors are welcome to pitch ideas. I admired this structure, but it did seem that these few people were overburdened with work and perhaps not afforded the space, time and funding that might foster the most innovative digital projects.

One of the only commonalities among the people I met who work specifically on digital projects is that, five years ago, they couldn’t have imagined what they are doing now. They worked as editors, marketing execs, an art director and now they have jobs that sound like something from The Jetsons. The other commonality I noticed: without exception these people are all utterly overworked. They fight an uphill battle each day. I wondered how long they might remain in the publishing industry.

This is an edited extract from Jane Morrow’s Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship report. View the full report online here.

Category: Features