At the beginning of the publishing process it’s decided whether an author’s manuscript needs a development edit. This kind of edit is geared towards making sure the manuscript is of the best quality it can be, ready to be released to book-buyers. In
Copy-editors are wonderful people. They’re the people who specialise in making sure all the grammar and punctuation in a manuscript are pristine. Often they are the people who comb through nitty gritty things like Bibliographies and Footnotes to make
Typesetting varies hugely between books and publishers – just walk into a bookshop’s fiction section and start opening up books to see this in action. It’s one of those age-old arts whose devotees range hugely in their working styles. For fiction and
A proofreader checks through the first proofs and marks up anything which is wonky, missing, wrongly formatted or just plain incorrect. Then they send this corrected set of proofs back to the production department, who collate them all and send them
By the time the interior of the book is finalised, the cover design will be finished and ready to go, with all the files exported to be suitable to send to the printer and prepared for what is, for no clear reason, ominously named ‘the rip’. This is
The cover design involves discussions in-house with the editorial, marketing and art departments about how we’re going to position a book in the market; comparisons to other titles in the same genre to analyse what we can do to make it clear to a boo