bookpublishing

Tomorrow I attend my first BookExpo America (BEA) at the Javits Center in New York, NY. I’m super psyched because most of the year I spent assuming I wouldn’t be invited to attend. But last minute some tickets freed up and so to BEA I go. I’m not entirely sure what to expect except for a lot of freebies. I’m looking forward to checking out what my company’s competitors are doing in sports and outdoor recreation in particular. But mostly I just want to get a general feel of the current publishing atmosphere, and hopefully check out some of the talks. Anything about social media and new media sounds pretty interesting to me right now.

If you do plan on being at BEA and want to meet up, I’ve got a pretty free schedule! DM me at twitter.com/jesshaberman and I’ll do my best to coordinate. I’ll be live Tweeting as much as I can, so keep an eye out for my updates. You can also search for the #bea09 hashtag for a constant stream of BEA updates from tweeters all over.

It’s a very important part of the book process: making initial contact with the author. As a project manager, I get in touch with an author after I’ve seen her book and read 3-5 chapters to get a general feel for what its about and her style of writing. The author has already worked with the acquisitions editor (or several) so occasionally the author wonders what I’m doing in this whole process. But she quickly figures it out. If all the materials is in and the manuscript is the right length, we’re off to a good start. If it doesn’t fill her contractual obligations, that’s a fun little situation I prefer to deal with after it’s been copyedited, if possible. Authors need a chance to understand the process and they should be aware that they must answer queries after copyediting. Many times they have a payment coming to them when it’s successfully completed, so it’s helpful to have that incentive.

Here is an example of an introductory email to an author:

Hi Jane,*

My name is Jess Haberman and I’ll be the project editor for your book, The Best Book You’ll Ever Read.* I’m very excited about your book and after reviewing it, I’m confident that this will be a very enjoyable project.

Your manuscript is currently with a copyeditor and I expect to be able to send it to you to respond to queries within 2 weeks. You’ll have about a week to respond to those queries.

Please let me know if you any questions or concerns arise as we work together on this book. You can reach me via email or by phone (see contact information below). If you know of vacation time or time you will be unavailable, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know so I can plan around it.

Thanks and I look forward to working with you!
Jess

* Names and titles above other than my own are completely fictional.

If the book is already back from the copyeditor, I will include instructions for how to answer queries, usually in MS Word using the Track Changes feature.

Then I typically get a return email. Sometimes it is difficult to tell right away what kind of author I’m dealing with. Usually the truth comes out after the book has been copyedited. However, there are some red flags that typically appear early in the process that make it clear I might be dealing with a difficult author: immediate disagreements about the book process or expectations; no response; when the author feels personally affronted by the copyeditor’s change; missed deadlines; excuses for late work or few responses.

Here’s an example of an email from an author that indicated to me right off the bat that she’ll be a pleasure to work with (and so far, so good!). In this case, she received the copyedited text with my introductory email.

Hi Jess,

Wow! I’m amazed to have this so quickly, and with so few queries to answer! Maybe I was exceptionally sloppy with my previous book, but there was a lot more flagged in it during the copyediting stage.

After quickly looking through the ms, I have a couple of questions before I get to work.
1. If I disagree with a change that the copyeditor has made, should I simply change it again, or mark it for you? I noticed two words that he consistently changed, but they’re actually correct the other way.
2. For the recipes, your recipe style sheet said to number the steps, though I prefer them without the numbers for the sake of consistency, since the yogurt recipe was tricky to number. Is it okay to omit the numbers on all of them?
3. Corrections from my tech reviewer arrived over the weekend, and I’d like to incorporate them. Most are simply a phrase here and there, but a couple will require the addition of a paragraph. Is there any problem with making those changes at this stage?

Thanks so much for getting this back to me so quickly. I’m delighted to be working with you, and I can’t wait for the next round, with all the lovely photos incorporated!

Best,
Marsha

Here’s an author who is certainly not as easy to work with. She writes while reviewing the copyedited manuscript (copyedited by Jason). Can you count the red flags?

I’m a little confused about who does what in this book revision process. What is your job, and what is Jason’s?

Jason has made some comments that I take issue with. He wants to omit the Rainforest Restaurant, which is in the Mall of America, his reason being that it isn’t Minnesota specific. That’s bogus and picky.

He also questioned whether outdoor stores should be included with the other businesses listed at the end of the chapters, commenting that they might not be in business any longer. That also is bogus. Seems his comment would also apply to restaurants and motels. Any business can quit operating or change management at any time. I spent much time last winter and spring checking all these phone numbers and updating them. All our revisions were due June 1. We can’t possibly check them again in the short window before you want our corrections returned to you, never mind the holiday thrown into next week. And never mind that our book has been out of date since it was published in 2002. None of it makes sense to us.

Jason also made fun of our description of the falls in the Minnehaha Falls section. If he takes issue with our writing, he should write his own book. I don’t think much of him as an editor.

Just thought you’d like to know. And by the way, what will the revised edition be called? And with the photos, there were a few that were mine.

Betty Ann

She’s just a gem, isn’t she?

There are, of course, the authors who sit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum and typically I’m just fine with that! For some reason, I tend to find that I work very well with male authors and I have very few problems with them. Female authors can go either way. First-time authors are almost always easy to work with. Authors who have published many books with us tend to be the most demanding and have the hardest times adjusting to changes in our process. This is overgeneralizing in all cases, and every editor has a different experience. I can tell you one thing for sure: It doesn’t get boring no matter who your authors are.

It isn’t all that uncommon to have one our (my company’s) books featured on the Today Show. But it’s not every day. So today we tried a company-wide experiment: Let’s see what happens to the Amazon.com ranking.

The book, Broadway Tales by Bill Berloni, began with a rank near 93,000. The current best is #89, and it may still move! Just the fact that it’s in the top 100 is fantastic. Once we saw the huge jump, many of us who are connected to many people via Facebook and Twitter decided to publicize the Amazon page. The “trimmed” link on Twitter had received 16 hits about an hour ago and it’s steadily climbing. (Btw, I didn’t know that http://tr.im let you track hits!) If you want to join in and watch what happens to Amazon rank, you can follow it here: http://tr.im/esan. The Today Show video is also posted below.

As a side note, there’s a lot going on in the book world and the blog world that I haven’t discussed yet. I’ll be thanking my loyal Entrecard droppers, discussing my new blog layout, and introducing a guest blogger all in the near future!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In case you’re interested, I’ve changed up my “About” page a bit (there’s a link on the upper right hand corner of my blog page, and can also be found at http://bookpublishing.today.com/about). It will feature books I’ve edited. It won’t feature all the books I’ve worked on, but the ones that I think would be most interesting to my readers and ones that I did a significant amount of work with. Right now it features mostly sports books, but those will be less and less common as I move more into local interest books. But local interest is still a lot of fun–definitely the case with Massachusetts Troublemakers by Paul Della Valle, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post.

This is a short piece I wrote for to be distributed in my department–it was the featured book at my company for the week of Monday, December 29.

Paul Della Valle, the author of Massachusetts Troublemakers, and I got along right off the bat. My family is from just outside of Boston so I was familiar with many of the sites mentioned in his book. I could tell I was on his good side when I told him I had spent my weekend watching the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots win their respective games. He replied that he was a Sox fan too and had named his dog Yaz after the famous Carl Yastrzemski (I even spelled the name right on the first try this time).

The book process, too, went very smoothly. The only major issue was that some of the photos we thought were okay actually weren’t okay. The replacements would show up fine on my computer, but would not appear the same way on Ann’s [Sr. Pre-Press Associate] machine. How that was resolved, I’m not totally sure, but I think Lori [Prep-Press Team Leader] stepped in and waved a magic wand. Thanks to Ann and Lori for their help on that! Josh [Copyeditor] did some excellent copyediting as well, finding many errors that the author and I had both missed.

There’s a lot to enjoy about this book. I learned that the picture that appears on the bottle of my favorite beer is not actually Samuel Adams—it’s a likeness of Paul Revere (because, apparently, he was more attractive… in a manly, colonial way, I suppose). The author was even nice enough to send me copies of CDs featuring music from the bluegrass band he started. If only every book went this way, with the author acknowledging that I’m a “wicked smaht editah.”

Massachusetts Troublemakers is available at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, independent bookstores, and wherever books are sold.

First, let me apologize for not blogging in so long. I’ve taken some much-needed time off and am back on track. I’m also curious about what else you’d like to see on this blog. I’m hoping to start some book reviews, but I have to find time to read some books first!

Some recent updates: A book I worked really hard to edit, Massachusetts Troublemakers by Paul Della Valle, is pubbing 1/13 and is available for preorder everywhere. It was such a fun book and a fantastic author with a lot of heart and humor. It was one of the first ones that acknowledged my work and made a great gift to my family, who were very enthusiastic about it, especially because they’re all Massachusetts natives. If you check it out, let me know how you like it!

I was also really pleased to receive some editing work from the company I interned with when I graduated college. They need some freelance editing done on one of the books in their For Beginners series–a series I’m already familiar with from my work with them–and I’m hopeful that if I do well on this first project, I’ll continue to get work from them. Here’s hoping!

Now on to the subject of this blog post. I know a lot of people got books for Christmas, which is great news! What books did you get and which ones are you most excited to read? I only received one, if you can believe it, J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and it’s one I already had–so I gave it to my mother. I did get a gift card to Barnes and Noble, so I’m thinking about starting the Sookie Stackhouse novels, picking up The Anglo Files, or picking up one of the new Gordon Dahlquist novels and canceling my Amazon order. I really need to get back to reading (and writing!)… soon I’ll have finished watching West Wing and I can get back to it!