An English professor elsewhere writes:

I have a book forthcoming from a major press that has outsourced all of its production. The experience has been awful, and communication with my production editor has been a major problem. I just received my page proofs, and they are riddled with errors: a badly mangled bibliography, duplicated index terms, nonsensical figure captions, incorrect figures, and various and sundry errors in the text itself too numerous to enumerate.

I am terrified that even with my careful intervention, some of these errors will follow the book into print. (I have no faith in the people handling production.) I recognize that there is always a certain risk with publication, but some mistakes are so egregious they would seriously undermine the scholarly merits of my work. I’m wondering whether readers who have found themselves in similar situations might offer suggestions for protecting against such outcomes.

I should note that my several recent book production experiences with OUP (for From a Realist Point of View, and volumes of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law) have been great–the in-house OUP production editors have been highly professional and responsive, and the outsourced production team has also been very responsive. In the event of a problem, I would have reached out to the in-house production editor. If there is no such person, then an author should probably reach out to the commissioning editor. What do readers think? If you want to name a particular press with which you have had a bad (or good) experience, you must use your full name. No anonymous praise or blame of particular presses.