It’s all in the presentation

Textbook editors can learn from what we expect our authors to do: provide complex information in an accessible form. Giving clear direction to our colleagues — production editors, cover and interior designers, and others — is a critical part of every editor’s job. We’ve all seen examples of misunderstanding due to poor, incomplete or overly complex communication. Getting the right outcome is dependent on how we present things — with clarity, simplicity, synthesized into digestible bites. Here are some thoughts on what we can do right — and a few things to avoid.

1. Provide accurate, complete information. Many organizations develop templated forms to insure that all the information is included in one place. Ignore them at your peril!
2. Keep it simple. In our enthusiasm, we sometimes overshare. Warning: irrelevant information muddies your message. Avoid brain dumps or cutting and pasting from another source. For example, the sales and marketing department needs to know about the course market and your book’s unique features, but don’t need a list of chapter word counts. Keeping the format simple — bulleted lists of key points rather than paragraphs of prose — contributes to clarity. They can function as a sort of checklist.
3. Keep roles and responsibilities in mind.  It sounds bureaucratic, but one good way to decide how much to expect from colleagues sounds is to rely on job descriptions and job titles. If a cover designer’s responsibilities don’t include researching images, you’ll need to provide the image yourself, or agree on  type-only treatment.
4. Communicate fully. Those templated forms usually include a field for notes and comments. Withholding important information is even more problematic than including too much. For example, if your author is not available to review copyediting during a 3-week period, be sure to flag that prominently so your production editor can plan around those dates.
5. Don’t assume too much. We might think a colleague or vendor is familiar with industry standards, institutional memory, or everyday knowledge, and not realize that expertise in one area doesn’t guarantee competence in another. A designer with lots of experience working on trade books can’t be expected to know the basics of textbook design. And, in a time when outsourcing is so common, you never know when a task is being outsourced.
6. Check your work. Read through your instructions, looking for areas that are unclear or inconsistent, and where unnecessary verbiage that can be reduced.

Even with the best of intentions, things can go wrong. Patience and forbearance are often required. Things to avoid:

• Finger pointing. If you’re unhappy with the outcome, give your colleague the benefit of the doubt. Might there be a misunderstanding? (Re-read your correspondence and ask yourself how you might have been clearer.)
• Being too directive. It’s tempting to “fix” the problem yourself by rewriting, re-editing, re-designing, or by telling the colleague exactly what to do. You’ll often get a more satisfactory result if you discuss the problem and let the expert find a solution. Granted, some ‘experts’ are happier with a directive approach, preferring to take the path of least resistance by giving us what we ask for. Unfortunately, it’s not until we see it that we sometimes realize that what we asked for is not what we wanted. A collaborative approach works better.
• Vagueness or abstraction. Criticism should be constructive and specific. “I don’t like it” or “It’s bad” doesn’t tell your colleague how to proceed. Just as you provide constructive feedback to an author, feedback to colleagues needs to include information about how to proceed. As much as possible, your comments should be grounded in market considerations e.g. “our audience uses different language in this context” or “the title font suggests a more sophisticated book.”
  

  Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons knows about presentation. Neither too much nor too little . . .

  

  although in this case, a little complexity adds interest. Note the lack of symmetry in the lacing, both front and back.

  

  As with any well-made garment, the interior reveals important details. This nylon textile has a rough outer side but the inside is cushiony like an insulated sports jacket.

Name that classic author/editor issue

The Met’s China show is a stunning curatorial achievement, featuring 300 years of Chinese fashion and European and American designers’ appropriation of it. The show spills over from the costume gallery into the Asian galleries — including one of my favorite Met spaces, the Astor court, a replica of a classic Chinese scholar garden. Here’s, it’s transformed by a gargantuan moon, a reflective floor and the sound of rain. The temperature was just a few degrees cooler than the rest of the exhibit, perfecting the illusion that I had stepped into a night-time garden — tho this one was filled with Peking opera costumes reinvented by John Galliano and Maison Martin Margiela.

Too lazy to write a post on a holiday weekend, I pulled out a stash of carbon-copy letters written by my twice-removed predecessor in the 1970s and 80s. Thirty or forty years later, editors encounter the same issues with authors — but most of us don’t write about them quite so eloquently. Can you match this list of classic author / publisher issues with the excerpts below? Answer key at bottom, along with a few more great pics of Chinese-inspired couture.

• a. Is the publisher doing enough to market the book?
• b. Complaint about unfulfilled publisher obligations (in this case, when royalty is due).
• c. Incomplete manuscript — text with no art.
• d. Investment in color production and printing.
• e. Errors in the instructor’s guide / answer manual.
• f. Need to stick to budget on illustrations.
• g. Yes, we really do need a coherent, complete instructor’s guide.
• h. No more book ideas before the first one is finished.
• i. Manuscript is too brief.
• j. Project is terminated due to late manuscript.
• k. Correcting errors at proof stage.
• l. Why royalty reverts to the original rate at revision.
• m. Sloppy manuscript.
• n. Manuscript should be written one chapter at a time, not “all at once.”
• o. Manuscript is too difficult and academic.
• p. Manuscript is late — again.
• q. Author alteration charges from changes during production.

1. We intend to make every correction we can pinpoint in terms of factual error, in terms of wrong captioning, in terms of misleading layouts which defeat the purpose of the book. We will not at this time confuse improvements, nuances or unattractiveness with error. Those irritations will have to await the next edition….It will no doubt require all your restraint to help us in this current endeavor.

2. We cannot give an incomplete manuscript to a designer. We have had every intention of bringing in a designer once we have 100% of the manuscript. That would mean we would need all the illustrative material. If some material is unavailable and cannot be obtained, then we either must replace it or drop it from the book. One of the key areas of confusion, I believe, has to do with the definition of the complete manuscript. Particularly in the case of a book heavily dependent on artwork, the manuscript must include all of the artwork to be used in the finished product. For the purpose of book design, the art selection must not only be complete, but it also must be keyed to the section of the book in which it is to appear. In short, the book designer has to know which pieces of art go where.

3. From a practical point of view, color was not originally considered for this book, and should not now be introduced — for two reasons: it is very expensive and will have a profound impact on our pricing structure. Secondly, at this juncture, it would seriously delay the project, which is what none of us want to do.

4. Regretfully, I must selfishly maintain that our promo budget has to stretch over an entire year and cover a barrelful of titles. Yours does get preference because we feel it’s a winner.

5. The publisher’s cost commitment on a new edition is precisely the same as prevails for a new book. We must make an investment in editorial and production staff time. We need new artwork, a new design, new composition and a new cover. All of these items only come into play when we do a new book, and not when we simply do a reprint. So, with all our authors . . . we have followed the same contractual arrangement as reflected in our missive of September 6.

6. Apparently you haven’t read the contract carefully or recently. It’s very clear. For your convenience I’ve indicated the operative clause in this case.

7. We all know the book is terrific, but that’s the way teachers are; the guide helps get adoptions. The guide was supposed to be here no later than September 15. Instead, we have in-house 25 pages which XXX has much difficulty understanding. I would settle — in fact, I would prefer — a tightly written guide of 50-60 pages that we could quickly produce and distribute almost immediately.

8. I’ve come to the sad conclusion that the answer book situation has lost us quite a few adoptions. We have around 500 answer books in inventory. We could replace these with a corrected version at a cost in the neighborhood of $450. I believe that the book division shouldn’t be held responsible for the answer book dilemma, that this responsibility belongs to the authors. What I propose is that we charge off costs for production of 500 corrected answer books against author royalties. That, at least, would be a painless way at your end, and would no doubt be covered by the next royalty period at latest.

9. I respect you as a professional, and since this is probably not the last project we will work on together, I know I can be honest with you. It’s been a long time since I received  manuscript in this condition (single spacing, different color inks, illegible handwriting, no indication where captions begin and end, etc.) No publisher, or editor, should have to accept this . . . other publishers would have had authors pay to have this retyped so that it is suitable to send to the typesetter. . . . The manuscript pages were not numbered consecutively. What if the manuscript had been dropped on the floor?

10. We are willing to make an investment in illustrations as required so long as we work these costs out up front and have control over the total investment. Our aim is to maintain a cap on costs so that we are not forced to price the book so high that we price ourselves out of the market.

11. Given your hectic schedule, we had all thought a monthly chapter submission schedule would be in order if we were to hit our deadline next February. I have to be from Missouri [editor’s note: Missouri is known as the “show-me state”] on your current approach. Our experience with very busy people is that across-the-board efforts never result in on-time delivery.

12. The text appears thin. At times it seems more an outline than a full-fledged book. Maybe you’ve consciously decided on a thin book. By thin, I mean a book that looks like about 130 pages, about half or more in illustrations. That’s lopsided, by traditional textbook standards. . . . One final, personal point about educators in the nation. Most expect everything to be explicit in the text they’re using. No doubt, you could use this [text] as a framework for classroom activity and weave a lot into the sessions. But we can’t assume that kind of creative teaching in our potential audience.

13. While this strikes me as a “heavy” book in the sense that it’s very high-level, management-serious and strictly no-nonsense, I can’t help but feel that a small amount of relief in the form of some charts or prototype documentation might help break up the narrative. It helps sometimes, particularly with readers, practitioners, and librarians.

14. I have it from our production staff that, on at least six occasions, our mutual friend was advised that extra costs would result in a day of reckoning. The screws are really on here and we will have to provide details to author and to management and work out something that will be fair, albeit painful, to all concerned parties. The carefree spending days, I’m afraid, are over.

15. XXX has forwarded to my attention your letter on the proposed book project or projects and I’m responding promptly to avoid any misunderstanding or confusion . . . The collective wisdom supports our original judgement that we give priority to a text on XXXX . . . From our point of view, we feel the truism of first things first remains valid. We agreed on an XXXX book, and we would hope that both parties would honor that agreement: the author to deliver a completed manuscript at the agreed upon date, and the publisher to publish within a reasonable period of time.

16. We’re only bystanders until we get a manuscript. We have now unfortunately moved your project into the gray area; that is, a project about which there is question about its completion. I hope you can tell why I’m pessimistic. What I really need is some form of realistic projection so I can allocate editorial and design time.

17. [Letter dated August 29, 1990] With much regret, we’ve decided we will have to terminate the Agreement dated January 6, 1986, the manuscript for which was due by Jan 15, 1987… You have, of course, an important reputation in your field, and we would welcome having a book from you in our catalog. But, unfortunately, first we need a completed manuscript. Again, good luck in all your endeavors. Cordially, XXX ANSWER KEY

• 4 – a. Is the publisher doing enough to market the book?
• 6 – b. Complaint about allegedly unfulfilled publisher’s obligations (in this case, when royalty is due)
• 2 – c. Incomplete manuscript submitted — text with no art.
• 3 – d. Investment in color production and printing
• 8 – e. Errors in the instructor’s guide / answer manual.
• 10 – f. Need to stick to budget on illustrations.
• 7 – g. Yes, we really do need a coherent, complete instructor’s guide.
• 15 – h. No more book ideas before the first one is finished.
• 12 – i. Manuscript is too brief.
• 17 – j. Project is terminated due to late manuscript.
• 1 – k. Correcting errors at proof stage.
• 5 – l. Why royalty reverts to original rate at revision.
• 9 – m. Sloppy manuscript.
• 11- n. Manuscript should be written one chapter at a time, not “all at once.”
• 13 – o. Manuscript is too difficult and academic.
• 16 – p. Manuscript is late — again.
• 14 – q. Author alteration charges from changes during production.

Lots of designers appropriated Chinese styles, but no one did it like Yves St. Laurent in 1977, who modernized the classic looks for late 20th century women.

John Galliano has re-invented traditional Chinese styles. The influence is clear but they’ve been transformed into something wholly new.

This image from the Pentagram-designed exhibition catalog shows one of the radical new shapes Galliano brought to the traditional Peking Opera costume.

Craig Green’s work, which I hadn’t seen in person before, was also a revelation.

Re: Decent Treatment of a Publisher (a memo from the archives)

For editors who feel they are getting the runaround from authors who fail to produce manuscript, sample correspondence from the vault:

June 5, 1974

To: N.A., L.K., S.P, A.A.W.

Allowing for all the Job-like calamities that befell the trio–now quartet–during the past few years, it does seem to me that contractual commitment made in regard to “Fashion Buying and Merchandising” continues to receive absolute bottom priority from all of you. I get the following monologues from a number of your colleagues in the field, and from the quartet itself:

From N.–We’ll have a sampling of chapters for you in mid-May. And we hope to have a manuscript in the fall.”

From L.–“We had a meeting and we’ve updated the Table of Contents to meet curriculum requirements. S.’s done some of his chapters and I don’t know why he can’t get them to you. A. is very serious now, and he should be producing.”

From a friend of L’s–“Well, she’s a real catalyst. The guys are a little complacent, but she’ll whip them into line.”

From a friend of FIT’s–“Boy do we need that textbook! The stuff still around is so bad, it’s really a shame to make students buy it. You’ve got a terrific combination of people to do the job.”

From a fashion teacher–“Gee, with four of them working on it, you really ought to get it pretty quickly.”

From an old friend of N.’s–“You know, he’s had a rough time. But this is duck’s soup for him. After all, he’s been teaching this for a long time. I mean, he’s really got this well-structured, based on all his experience.”

Another friend of N.’s–“One trouble you have is N. really wants to take it easy. And he’s got that nice place down in Florida….”

A cynical friend of the group–“You’ll eat your heart out, E. These people have made it. McGraw-Hill will get a good book in the field before you do.”

So that’s where we stand at the moment. No one has delivered anything since our initial meeting more than two years ago. Meanwhile, I’ve had to produce a catalog about our upcoming product. And on the basis of information given me early this year by N., I’ve given the book a big blurb and a ten-dollar price. If you had students handling their term papers the way you four handle contractual commitments, you’d flunk them.

So please, have a small consideration for a struggling publisher. Scores of teachers have asked us about the book you’re supposed to be writing. We all know it’s needed. Now, all we need is a manuscript.

With humility,

E.B.G

Manager

Editors are Turkeys, Too: A Call for Submissions

A couple of my author friends have suggested that my posts make them seem like stooges, mere puppets of an editor’s will. I strongly deny that is the intent! We have different expertise than our authors, and I don’t expect an author to be expert in our business any more than they would expect me to know the ins and outs of their research.

I openly admit that editors are turkeys, too. Authors, I invite you to tell the other side of the story. I’ll start the conversation with a few examples:

1) Editors take forever to respond to a request for any more than the most mundane request (and even those can take days for us to answer.) You’d think our English degrees would be good for something–if so, communication isn’t it.

2) When we do communicate, we are often vague and obscure. This may be due to uncertainty: despite our apparent omniscience, we may be trying to hide our ignorance or unpreparedness. (“Yikes! I was hoping she wouldn’t ask me that!”) Vagueness may also be masking our inability to deliver bad news (“Well, it still needs further analysis, but….”).

3) Editors are the real puppets–of the vagaries of corporate capitalism or a university press’s non-profit status. Concerns about budgets and revenue often occupy us more than the content of our books. Who knew when we signed up for this job that we’d spend so much time working with spreadsheets?

4) There is also, of course, just plain incompetence. Please don’t confuse it with evil intent. Truly, we are much too busy to engineer a conspiracy against you.

OK authors, here’s your chance: what are your pet peeves about editors you’ve worked with?

To illustrate today’s theme, I considered a photo of something revealing (get it?) but settled instead on a classic item my friends from my first editorial job will remember: a pink feather Krizia skirt I got  deeply discounted at Saks one summer–marked down to a mere $99 from the original $2,400. Don’t I look like a designer turkey?

Turkeys are flightless fowl, but at least I’m a well-dressed bird.

The Comfort of Commonplace Change

Adapting easily to change is an acquired skill–one that academic authors don’t have much practice in (think tenure.) The most reassuring thing an editor can do is to show that this frightening “new” situation isn’t new at all. And I’m not talking about transformational changes — I mean the small, everyday changes that are part and parcel of our jobs. For example:

Need to bring a new co-author on to share the workload, or because the original author is nearing retirement? The standard contract anticipates this common occurrence by proposing how royalties would be shared.

Being asked to revise your book more quickly than you expected? Look around: most textbooks are revised on a 2-, 3- or 4-year basis.

Seeing your editor move on to a new opportunity? Been there, done that. Altho it’s unusual in academia, in commercial publishing, editors frequently change jobs within a company, or go to another company. The only thing that’s uncommon is job security!

How can an editor help ease the transition? Give examples and use phrases like “I’ve seen it happen in a few different ways” or “It may seem strange because you haven’t thought about it before, but it’s quite common; you may have heard about …” or “We had a similar situation recently…” or “I always find the best way to handle it is….”

And since we all find comfort in the commonplace,here we are on a typical Sunday afternoon in our everyday clothing. And there’s nothing more everyday than wearing black!

Delivering Bad News

When I was a young editor, I’d get restless and roam around the office looking for distraction and conversation. I remember seeing a friend in her office with her hand on the phone, obviously thinking about what to do next. “What’s up?” I asked. She was hesitating before calling an author to deliver some bad news: The publisher had decided to postpone publication the book for a whole year to give another book some a better platform to launch, and she was dreading having to tell her author, whom she’d pushed to make deadlines.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “Maybe it will be good news to your author—you never know.” A half hour later, she was in my office and said “You were right; he was relieved because he was having trouble making those deadlines.”

Delivering bad news is one of the hardest parts of an editor’s (or a manager’s) job. How many times have I written out and practiced a script, fearing the wrong phrase would burst out of my mouth, or I’d freeze up entirely? The actual conversations were almost never as bad as the dread I felt leading up to them.

A few tips for delivering bad news:

Be prepared. A verbatim script may not be needed, but do write out the major points you want to cover, and check your notes as the conversation proceeds.

Be calm. Help the author understand this is a business decision, not a personal rejection.

Keep it short and simple. No need to list all ten reasons why the book is being rejected or the project needs to be overhauled. The most important reasons–usually market-based–is enough, at least for that first conversation.

Be straightforward, but sympathetic. Keep phrases like “I understand why you’re upset” and “I feel very bad about this, but I know it’s harder for you” on the tip of our tongue.

Set the tone up front with an opening along the lines of “I’m afraid I have some bad news” or “Based on our previous conversations, you may not be surprised to learn….”

No photo today: great clothes are always good news!