NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #20/NN_1992_20.iso/spool/misc/writing/2847

Text File | 1992-09-11 | 2.4 KB | 51 lines

Newsgroups: misc.writing
Path: sparky!uunet!gatech!concert!sas!mozart.unx.sas.com!sasafw
From: [e-mail] (Fred Welden)
Subject: Re: Publisher production times
Originator: [e-mail]
Sender: [e-mail] (Noter of Newsworthy Events)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 18:44:11 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
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Organization: Dobonia
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
|That's the key reason why things
|seem to take forever in publishing: there are 200 other titles that also
|need to be put through the production process in a given year, and the
|editor's primary job is to juggle all of them around so that the proper ones
|hit the back door at the proper time, because the truck doesn't wait if
|you're late, and the truck won't load you up early. It's a massive,
|semi-controlled chaos that somehow works in total, but looks really bizarre
|if you look at any single title or element.

Amen.  One of my primary duties when I worked in the biz was scheduling
435 titles a year through production.  The real art was in knowing
when to let something sit on the shelf--I invented something I called
the "circular calendar" for scheduling the workflow, a calendar that
seems to be intelligible only to me, my wife, and one friend of mine
who is an advanced mathematician used to some TRULY bizarre concepts.

My supervisees never understood why they had to leave title A alone
while they did line corrections on title B, when title A was supposed to
come out in March and title B was supposed to come out in September.  In
the end, most of them learned to take it on faith, and we got the books
out just in time.  The ones who couldn't take it on faith ended up
screwing up the schedule every time they tried to work on the next task
in intuitive order.

So another explanation for the increasing lead times occurs to me: a
loss of faith among Production Department employees throughout the
industry.  Hardly surprising, considering, for example, the apparent
evaporation of Macmillan's retirement funds, and a general uncertainty
as to what corporate logo will head your next paycheck.  [Sorry, only
partially sarcastic here, so no smiley.]


--
--Fred, or another blind 8th-century BC  |  [e-mail]
        Hellenic poet of the same name.  |