bookpublishing

So here’s one of the unpleasant parts of my job: When you’re the last person to see a book before it’s sent to the printer, you’re the first one to blame when things are wrong. In this case, though, I was able to hold up a book that had errors before it went to the printer. But, as it turns out, I get blamed for that too.

Picture this: It’s 9:00am on Tuesday morning after a long weekend (which you spend mostly packing for your move in two weeks and calling people to make arrangements, set up utilities, hire a U-haul, get renter’s insurance, etc.) to have an angry lady ready to bite your head off because suddenly the book she spent months on missed its printer date. It’s actually not uncommon for books to miss their date, but when it’s a book being printed in China (which is the case for nearly all our color books, including this one), you really need to be on time because nobody in China is going to help you meet your deadlines.

What went wrong with this book exactly? Not much. The map legend was messy. I asked the cartographer to fix it and he did. I was satisfied and I sent it to the printer. A few days later the cartographer lets me know that there was another error: He had mixed up road icons on the legend. I called a woman in Manufacturing, who told me the book “hadn’t gone yet” although the angry lady editor mentioned above said it had gone four days earlier. I told the woman in Manufacturing that there would be a correction. Apparently when she said it hadn’t gone yet, she meant that the printer hadn’t started work on it, although it was on the way. So she notified them their copy was wrong and they’d get a new copy. This is bad because we didn’t need to fix the whole book–just one page. I wouldn’t have called it back from China for a small error like this and didn’t realize that was how my request was interpreted. I learned of all this when the angry lady let me have it this morning before I had even sat down to read my email (which, by the way, had filled so much space on the server that I was getting error messages all over the place and wasn’t allowed to send any email out).

There was an easy solution: The legend had already been corrected so we simply needed to send China the corrected page. That’s all. Why then does the angry lady have to berate me on three separate occasions this morning? If she had noticed the errors before, we wouldn’t have had these problems. Naturally I apologized, explained that there was some miscommunication, and told her I was under the impression that the book hadn’t been sent to the printer yet. The angry lady didn’t seem comforted by any of this and was annoyed that she had spent all weekend worrying about her book due to the email I sent her on Friday to keep her updated on the situation–I will certainly never do THAT again. At a department meeting later in the morning, it was clear that the problem had been handled and it clearly wasn’t putting anyone else out. It’s what happens when editors get really attached to their books, I suppose.

Suddenly, it’s 3:00pm and I’ve barely gotten any work done. And I’m in a funk. Guh.

In other news, it’s nearly official that Meredith will be taking my job at the Copy Desk and I can officially move on to my job as Assistant Project Manager for Outdoor Recreation, Sports, Local Interest, and Nature titles. Woot! Meredith will be able to continue acquiring titles–best of both worlds (for her anyway!). Best of luck Meredith!

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