Rob Barrett

How Not to Typeset a Book

Posted on October 28, 2008 at 8:35pm

I’ve just submitted the PDF files of my latest client project to the publishers, and I’m breathing a big sigh of relief! ‘Ich Bin Der Mitternachts-Spezialist’ is only the second book I’ve typeset, though more accurately it was an extension of ‘I’m the Midnight Specialist’ which was published last year. I kind of threw myself in the deep end with this project, only ever having typeset and used InDesign on various 30-odd page eBooks in the past, and I definitely could have improved the working process…

Don’t start work until the manuscript is 99% complete

Or as near to that as you can get, anyway. Really, this is the really big one. It doesn’t have to be polished and perfect, a few bits can be added or dropped, but make sure that the vast majority of the content that you’ll be typesetting is complete before you start work on it. The sheer amount of back and forth between myself, the author, and the translator to complete various sections of the book in stages was mind-boggling, not to mention at times extremely morale-sapping.

Had I insisted that I would not begin work until the author input stage was complete, I could have saved on so much hassle, and really, a lot of the following points are born of this one oversight.

Don’t have more than one point of contact (unless absolutely necessary)

With this particular book having both an author and a translator working on it, wires inevitably ended up crossed at times. The translator should have dealt solely with the author, and he should have been the sole liaison with me (save for any possible urgent contact that could be needed with the translator). Fewer points of contact = fewer possibilities for confusion.

Don’t keep your To Do list on scraps of paper

On such a large project as a book (this ended up as a 718-page novel, plus covers), there is of course a very large To Do list to keep track of. I’ve finally found a system that works for me, although it had a process of evolution throughout the project.

First of all, there was the Excel route, listing out the various tasks and marking them off in grey as each was completed. This worked fairly well, except that on a system as I’ve currently got, having yet another memory-hungry programme open when you’re already running Adobe apps isn’t desirable. Things eventually progressed to be written down on scraps of paper to be entered into Excel at some later date, and in the end not everything made it into the spreadsheet.

The next stage was to ditch the PC altogether and move onto print-outs and paper notes. The tactile approach certainly improved the satisfaction of a job well done when you’re able to scribble out a task, but without being able to group related, completed and outstanding tasks, it proved to be a downfall for me. Things would get forgotten until the last minute when I found them tucked into the work folder, and then the project’s turned into a rush job.

I’m using Basecamp now (and hoping that the free ProjectPier will prove a suitable alternative once I’ve had a chance to explore it), and it feels like I’ve finally found the perfect fit for how I work — I can create a task checklist, clear off tasks when completed, and track milestone deadlines all from one place… and as my internet browser is near enough always open, it’s not a drain on performance either.

Don’t lose track of feedback

For years, I’ve been using CPanel’s Horde webmail for my work email — it’s stored on the same server as my website, and I’m used to how it works. Its downfall, though, is that it’s got a rather poor search facility. I just recently (in the past week) set up all my work email to forward to a new Gmail account. This is so far working ideally, as everything is in one place, I can tag emails from different clients, I can easily see which have attachments, email conversations are tracked, and of course there’s Gmail’s fantastic Google search, making it a second’s work to find the email I’m after.

A couple of other points that were far from ideal on this were that the author would often call or text (SMS) me with feedback. The problem with this is that information isn’t stored together. The sensible thing to do is to always follow up a call with a confirmation email, and (in my opinion) ban feedback by SMS altogether (generally, messages are too short to get the point across clearly enough).

Don’t go in blind — learn the software (or RTFM)!

When I first started the first book project (from which this latest one evolved), I barely knew InDesign at all. There are so many features that I could have used from the beginning to make my work process so, so much easier, but because I wasn’t familiar with the software, I just didn’t know about them, let alone how to use them. For instance, I only recently realised that you can set a language for a paragraph style — in this particular case of having a split language book, this is invaluable! Set one style to English and another to German, and you’ve got automatically correct punctuation, and the Spell Checker automatically switches language when you want it to!

Now that I’ve finally got a breather from InDesign work, I think now’s the perfect time to expand my knowledge with some tutorial blitzing!

Does anyone know of any must-follow tuts on book production (or even just essential general InDesign tips)? How about additions to the list of ideal practices above?

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