Why Publishing Costs So Much: Part II

Today, following up yesterday's start of Why Publishing Costs So Much, we'll look at those fixed costs. Dave has outlined the details nicely.

Costs of Publishing: Fixed Costs...by Dave Young

Administrative Costs include reading manu­scripts and returning those not suited to the publisher's needs. When a good manuscript is identified by the first reader, it is passed to an editor who must read it and convince upper management, which controls the flow of cash, to allot the up-front money needed to publish the book. The editors need offices and salaries.

Assuming a go ahead, the editor must interact with the author while preparing the book for publication. All of this takes time and must be done in a facility that requires light, heat, rent, phones, etc. All of which costs money.

The editor must obtain ISBN and Copyright forms, complete them, and file them with the proper agencies. Eventually, the publisher will send copies of the finished work to the Library of Congress.

To be sure all the above happens on a rea­sonable schedule, while other books are also in process, the publisher must establish a job file to track progress and location of the elements (e.g., manuscript, data file, printing plates, approvals, etc.) during and subsequent to manufacture. Also, it will be necessary to establish procedures and paperwork to see that everyone gets paid for their contributions and that money owed the publish­er as a result of book sales is collected. All this costs money.

While the editor is at work, several things must be done, and each has associated costs. The book's cover must be designed. This involves preparing artwork, selecting appropriate typefac­es, and layout of the cover elements all of which affect eye-appeal and sales. Words must be written and illustrations prepared for the book jacket and inside-jacket flaps.

The text between the covers must also be designed. Have you ever picked up a book at a book store, flipped through the pages, and put it down because it didn't look inviting? Elements of text design involve choice of type face and size, page layout, and treatment of chapter head­ers. Some of these decisions affect more than eye appeal and ease of reading; type style and leading affect the number of pages in the book, and that affects the printing costs.

Graphics must be designed. Maps, charts, graphs, and photographs must be designed and rendered suitable for printing. Type styles and other artistic considerations, such as the relation­ship to the adjacent text, and stylistic consisten­cy, must be factored in.

Paper must be chosen for the text pages. Its color, weight, bulk and finish are important not only to look and feel of the text, line drawings, and photos that will be printed, but also affect the physical thickness and weight of the finished book and thus its space in the warehouse and its cost of packing and shipment to stores.

Editing is more than checking spelling and grammar. First off there's substantive editing. This is what the author-editor relationship usual­ly centers upon. Is the manuscript's content organized appropriately? Does each section follow logically from the previous section? Is the content correct historically, mathematically, chronologically, and technically? Do the charac­ters seem real and behave in believable ways? Will the reader be able to follow the sequence of events, including flashbacks?

Then there's copy editing. A copy editor reads the manuscript as the reader's advocate, checking format, style, consistency of layout, consistency of definitions, consistency of pat­terns, illustrations, emphasis, page design, ty­pography, visual impact, clarity, conciseness, order of presentation, indexing, accuracy, trans­literation, ease of translation to other languages, time orientation, completeness, usefulness, ethi­cality, discrimination, contractual appropriate­ness, physical appropriateness, copyrights, trade­marks, libel, jargon, word usage, hyphenation, punctuation, spelling, grammar, fads, and more. An editor may also mark up the elec­tronic file using a generalized publishing markup lan­guage so that the manuscript may be easily reformatted for hardbound or paperback publish­ing.

The compositor, who composes the pages, may need to manually keyboard text in if an elec­tronic file has not been provided. Then, follow­ing the text design, the compositor sets the type so that the text is ready for proofing.

At this point, copies of the text are printed. One copy may be sent to the author for approval that the text has been properly rendered. These gal­ley proofs show the text in the proper typeface and column width, but probably will not be in finished book form.

All the above steps are done by professionals in their fields. Editors, designers, compositors, and printers who spend years learning their trades. Many are college graduates in their specialties. They don't work cheap. Would you hire them if they did?

Tomorrow, we'll complete our review of Why Publishing Costs So Much. We'll look at the Variable Costs. Stay tuned.