A Day at the Office Part V: Production

The final team we met with was production. Though there is a stereotype about editors and how they are all introverts and enjoy individual work; aside from the fact that it’s not true, production is an extrovert’s dream.

Kasey McCabe and Katie Hubbard are two production coordinators at Hachette Book Group, and my internal extrovert was so happy to meet fellow extroverts in a typically introverted environment. Within the Boulder office there are 14 people in the production department. If you’ve been keeping score that is the largest team, which means there’s a lot going on. Kasey described their team as an “organized busybody” and from what they told me, I think that description is fitting.

Though this department has no interaction with authors, similar to the designers, they are the key communicators with everyone from the in-house designers, marketing, production editors, to the printers, vendors, and book stores. There are two different sides of production, frontlist and backlist; though they have similar day-to-day responsibilities they tend to remain separate and don’t cross over. Production managers in both departments print proofs of the final versions of the books, put together purchase orders, run cost estimates, schedule with the printers, and act as a liaison between the publishing house and vendors.

Frontlist titles are new or current titles for the year and tend to be the most popular. This department runs production for 150 titles a year and up to 20 books at one time. After the designers put together the first pass of a book, they then have six to eight weeks to get the book ready for release. The first thing production does is look at hundreds of samples. There are samples for everything, from paper type, including size and weight, color pallets, cover finishes, and more. They then print a dummy, a bound sample of the book without text to show what the finished product will look like. The rest of the process, in a simple explanation, is a series of estimates and costs, getting quotes from printers, printing proofs, and scheduling the final print for distribution.

Backlist titles, on the other hand, are a publisher’s older titles that are still in print. This includes recurring novelty books or mini kits, special editions such as anniversary releases, as well as corrected reprints. For those of you who are not familiar, mini kits are miniature editions of titles with trinkets to go along with the book that are perfect stocking stuffers and innovate a wide range of engaging titles for readers of all ages. This side of production has a five to ten business day turnaround. Most of their job consists of ordering more copies from printers, communicating with editors and designers to update info, fix errors, and add anything to the book, and downgrading specs to save money. For instance if the first edition of a book had a gold leaf cover and colored images inside, they would simplify the design.

(All these images can be found at https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/imprint/perseus/running-press/running-press-mini-editions/page/miniature-editions/)

Backlist coordinators have to put in holiday orders in nine months in advance to be able to fulfill all the vendor orders. In one year backlist run production for close to 360 titles a year; that’s twice as many titles as frontlist coordinators. In the production world there is a saying: “fast, good, and cheap, you get two of the three, can’t have it all.” There are always sacrifices that have to be made when it comes to production with any product and there’s no difference in the publishing industry.

When talking with Kasey and Katie, they said there are many challenges that come with their job. Kasey said they never really know how something is going to sell, so it’s hard to guess how many copies of a title to print especially for new releases. Have any of you heard that the paper business is shutting down? Well that contributes to another problem; books are made of paper and when the supply doesn’t meet the demand costs rise, which causes difficulty for the production coordinators who are trying to save money.

Despite the challenges that they face, Kasey and Katie love their job, especially all the people they meet and get to connect with. They appreciate that their part of the industry is so hands-on and that each imprint has its own personality. Both of them wanted to clarify that though they have a ton of info and communicate with many other departments, they aren’t the decision makers, they just have the responsibility to carry out what decisions are made.

Over all, I loved my tour of Hachette Book Group and learning so much about different jobs in the industry. Everyone was so nice and at the end of the tour they had hundreds of books that we could have, FOR FREE. Oh, I’m sorry did I not mention that before? Yeah, so if you work in the publishing industry you get books for free. How glorious is that?!

Now that I’ve (attempted) to give you more insight on what the publishing industry looks like from the inside and tempt you with free books, do you have any questions? Are you interested in learning more, gaining info and tricks for your toolbox?

~M