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What to do when a production process for a book goes awry?

Brian Leiter

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.

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4 responses to “What to do when a production process for a book goes awry?”

  1. J. McKenzie Alexander

    I’d like to give the highest praise to the LSE Press, who published my book “The Open Society as an Enemy”. Previously I had very good experiences with Cambridge University Press, who published my two previous books, but the LSE Press reset my expectations for what I consider to be the gold standard for academic publishing.

    First, all of the staff were simply excellent – exceptionally competent, quick, and very responsive. The managing editor read the complete manuscript no fewer than three times (I’ll explain why below), and the post-production publicity team were incredibly helpful in getting the word out.

    Second, the level of investment in the book was surprising. After I submitted my final version of the manuscript, the managing editor read it a second time to ensure that all of my edits didn’t substantively change the book (I was asked to cut 30,000 words from the initial submission), and then sent it out to professional copyeditors who work in the UK. This required technical skill because the manuscript was written in LaTeX and they not only had to generate a print-ready PDF in their local house style, but they also had to convert it to an EPUB so it could be made available on Kindles and other e-book readers as it was published Open Access. After the copyeditors came back with all of their proposals, the managing editor went through the manuscript a third time to do an initial filter of the copy-editors proposals — places where their changes altered my tone and style too much — before giving me the chance to look over their proposals.

    Third, once we locked down the final version of the text, LSE Press paid for a professional indexer to generate the index of the print version. I’ve never had an academic press volunteer such a service. As a result, the index is much better than anything I would have done myself. (Although I suppose Claude would make constructing the index a lot easier, now.)

    So, I would highly recommend LSE Press.

    Reply
  2. New Author

    I recently published a book with a top publisher. My experience was similar to the English professor. However, happily, after I returned the corrected proofs, almost all of my corrections were properly implemented and I was given a second proof reading. I did notice a few stray characters (not of my own making) made their way into the second proofs, which I subsequently noted and corrected once again. Hopefully I did not miss any other typos that arose.

    My main complaint is how rushed everything felt. Maybe it was my inexperience, but I was told by both my acquisitions editor, their assistant, and the production manager that (a) my drafts were Final Final Final at every stage and no more changes would be permitted and (b) I needed to turn things around in two weeks tops or risk having my book pulled from production. (Again, this was a “top” press.) After the fact, I have come to the conclusion that neither of these things was true.

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  3. Textbook Author

    My colleague and I published a textbook with a major publisher several years ago, and the process was much like the English professor describes. We had to spend all of our time during the production process fixing errors that had been introduced by the outside proofreader and typesetter. For the second edition, we talked to our editor and very vividly raised our concerns about the prospect of having that happen again. The editor was very receptive and supportive and used an excellent in-house editor as the point person. They still use an outside service for production services (cheap AI-editing being the new vogue), so we put together an editing guide of things we did and didn’t want (which included: no AI used; all proofreading done without AI and by the in-house editor). That has made the process a dream so far. So, that’s what I’d recommend: raise a (respectful) stink, refuse AI, and make a style guide.

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  4. RMD

    I am a freelance editor that works entirely for major university presses. I’ve even been brought in when outsourced book production has gone awry. I just thought I’d chime in because I wasn’t sure in-house people would want to comment, for obvious reasons.

    The advice to go to the in-house production editor and the commissioning/acquisitions editor is the best way to go. If the book is that much of a mess, the press will want to fix it too. They want at least some quality control, and they will be able to figure out the best way to proceed. In my experience, they know the risks of using a book packager and realize they may have to fix problems like these occasionally. It would be fair to ask them to fix it themselves (if the manuscript is still available to do so) and then send you new proofs for review. Whether they do this or just work off of the existing proofs, definitely get new proofs that confirm all of the necessary changes have been made.

    In response to “New Author,” that schedule is rushed. In my experience, an author gets at least three weeks for proofs and longer if the book is long or there are extenuating circumstances. Plus, there is usually some cushion. So, you could probably request extra time, if the two weeks weren’t enough (but do so when the schedule for review is proposed). Sometimes there are rush jobs for various reasons, but usually the press would make that clear to you. About things being final, review of the copyedited manuscript is the last time that major edits should be made. They can be made later, but that adds to the expense of the book. It sounds like there was overkill in the press’s warning, but there are authors every so often who will just keep pushing to make sizeable changes as long as they think it is possible.

    In response to “Textbook Author,” at least some presses understand the problems of AI and act accordingly. One press I work for sent a message to all freelancers to tell them explicitly that AI should not be used at any point. It is definitely fair for an author to tell a press not to use AI for anything.

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