Iva Cheung, Author at Iva Cheung

Freelance Camp 2012—recap

This past Saturday, I attended Freelance Camp 2012, hosted by The Network Hub. The event was run in an unconference style rather than with a set program: those who wanted to present pitched their talks first thing, attendees voted on what they most wanted to see, and the schedule was defined from there. Topics included overcoming a fear of public speaking, accounting, mobile web design, intellectual property, video marketing, and Google Adwords, among others, and industries from publishing and graphic design to software development and business coaching were represented. Here are some highlights from the talks that I attended:

IP 4 you: Develop an Intellectual Property Portfolio

Chang Han, Canada’s Pay Per Click Experts (@changchatter on Twitter)

Chang Han introduced us to various forms of intellectual property and showed us how they can mean real value for your business. Ideas themselves, he noted, have zero commercial value. To harness the value derived from an original creative idea, you have to protect it with trademarks, brands, and other forms of intellectual property.

Intellectual property can be registered (e.g., registered trademarks, patents, copyright, etc.) or unregistered (e.g., passing off, trade secrets, etc.). Han introduced the idea of trade dress, which encapsulates a product’s or business’s distinctive physical appearance and packaging—including its colour palette, typographic treatment, ambiance, and so on—and allows that to be protected. Han suggests that in addition to copyright protection, trade dress may be a way that web designers can protect their or their clients’ websites.

Copyright comes into effect as soon as a work is created, but, Han, said, when push comes to shove, you still have to prove you created it first. “Poor man’s copyright”—where you’d write something you want to protect, stick it in an envelope and mail it to yourself, keeping it unopened until you had to offer proof in court—used to be a not uncommon practice but is not very effective in the digital age. Today, a better approach is to put the material online and archive screen shots. Han also notes that not only are your words and images protected under copyright, but so are any works derived from them.

A registered trademark (®) is stronger than an unregistered trademark (™), although the process of registering the trademark through a government office may demand a lot of your time, if you wish to do it yourself, or perhaps $5,000 to $10,000, if you pay someone to do it for you. The key advantage is that with a registered trademark, you don’t have to prove damages.

Those who work internationally must be aware that in some jurisdictions, such as Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, intellectual property is assigned to whoever created it first (common law); in others, such as most of Europe, China, and most of South America, it is assigned to whoever registered it first (civil law).

So how does a business build an intellectual property portfolio? For starters, the business plan is protected under copyright. If you can show that part of your business involves an innovative process, that process can be patented. Your customer list can be considered intellectual property if it’s part of your confidential trade secrets. If you’re ever in a business relationship with other entities, you can lay out the terms for protecting that information in a confidentiality agreement. Han warns that if you don’t protect your intellectual property, your partners, subcontractors, or even your clients may later take your ideas and become your competitors.

For anyone looking for a good primer on intellectual property, Han recommends Intellectual Property, Patents, Trademarks, and Copyright in a Nutshell.

My two cents: An interesting primer. Intellectual property is such a huge topic that a forty-five-minute talk can only barely scratch the surface. Since a lot of the audience members worked in the creative industries, I would have liked to hear a bit more of a discussion about the distinction between copyright and moral rights (i.e., how do you protect your moral rights if you’ve transferred the copyright to your work to someone else?). What are the effects, if any, of Bill C-11 on this issue? In the book Effective Onscreen Editing, author Geoff Hart says that until you get paid and transfer the copyright to your client, the copyright of the words that you have written as an editor belong to you, and you can use that as a tool to make sure you are paid—an interesting tip that would have fit well with this talk’s topic.

Contracts for people who hate contracts

Martin Ertl, Contractually

Martin Ertl, a lawyer, founded Contractually, which offers web software that allows you to fill in contracts, share them with clients, and get them signed. He noted that a lot of people don’t use written contracts, and in his talk he demystified what contracts are what they should include.

Everyone uses contracts, sometimes without realizing it; even verbal agreements can be legally binding contracts. However, a written contract is a more effective tool for communicating with your clients to make sure that you’re on the same page.

A contract can define, among other issues

the scope of your work
a timeline for your work, with major milestones
who owns the product of your work, in terms of intellectual property
what the client needs to provide you, and when, perhaps outlining a review process for your work
how much and how you will be paid
who can terminate the contract, when the contract can be terminated, and what happens if the contract is terminated
non-disclosure and confidentiality

Contracts, Ertl emphasized, are not about legal jargon—they’re about clear communication with your clients so that you can develop a solid working relationship. Some people are afraid to use written contracts because they’re concerned they might scare off clients; in fact, a good contract makes you appear more professional and inspires confidence in clients. If you encounter a potential client who’s turned off by the idea of a contract, that’s a red flag.

Ertl said to use plain English in your contracts; this is better than using legal-sounding language, which may not say what you intended. If something changes, make sure to spell out as early as possible what the changes are and how they affect payment and scheduling, and be sure the client indicates agreement. This can be done via email or, more formally, through a change order form.

Contractually is offering Freelance Camp attendees a discount on its services. Get more information here.

My two cents: This talk gave an excellent overview of the function of a contract and the importance of having one. Editors can start with the Editors’ Association of Canada’s Standard Freelance Editorial Agreement and modify it to suit their clients and projects.

Learn your client development priorities

Francis Waller, Steady Contractor

Francis Waller, a specialist in business marketing and communications, led us through a self-assessment checklist to determine our client development priorities. A lot of people talk about branding for small businesses, he said, but the focus should be different for service versus product marketing. When you are the product, it’s trust, not brand, that you must build. Once you’ve established trust, pricing becomes less of an issue for clients.

He divided his checklist into ten modules and asked us three questions per module. He told us to score ourselves based on our answers to those questions and determine which areas were our weaknesses. The modules were as follows (with one sample question from each):

Core message/value proposition: Can you describe the results of your offerings in simple, memorable, and conversational terms?
Target markets: Can you describe the ideal customers for each segment, using factors like location, age, business size, business type, needs, or other criteria?
Library of documents: Does your website clearly communicate to each target market?
Referral sources: Do you have a plan to train potential referral sources over time about your business?
Contact management: Do you have a way to organize all of your potential clients, past clients, suppliers, and referral sources, with a calendar of whom to contact and when?
Graphics/logo: Are your logo and graphic standards quickly recognizable and memorable?
Active selling: Can you list at least three ways you contact people or business in your target market who are not aware of you?
Networking: Do you record your networking interactions with people, so that you can prioritize them?
Buying cycle and information needs: Do you understand what customers do or discuss before contacting you?
Scoring and sorting: Do you have ways of prioritizing each potential client or referral source based on objective measurements?

The entire checklist is too long to reproduce here, but Waller did generously send it out to his talk’s audience members, for many of whom the exercise was clearly eye-opening. He polled the audience and discovered that, as a group, our weakest areas were in contact management, active selling, library of documents, and scoring and sorting.

For contact management, he suggests establishing some sort of a system—it could be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet—to track conversations and their dates, as well as the date of the next contact or next action. Create templates that can merge with your contact management system.

As for active selling, Waller suggests defining your probable buying cycle and to name two or three ways that you can approach new relationships and build them over time. Describe the different decision makers among your potential clients and how you will answer their needs.

Regarding the library of documents, he suggests using template documents for each step in the buying cycle and to learn your clients’ language and jargon. Because of your expertise, you are a teacher to your clients. If you have a set of business documents that you can readily pull out (and repurpose as needed), you’ll look organized and will be able to build trust.

Finally, for scoring and sorting, Waller suggests choosing two or three metrics for each target market; these can be objective (e.g., how much they’re willing to pay) or subjective (e.g., how you feel about them). Periodically sort your contacts to fine-tune your near-term priorities, and manage similar contacts together for more efficiency.

My two cents: Again, it’s too bad we had only forty-five minutes to go through this exercise, and I’m grateful to have a copy of the handout to repeat it at my own pace. Waller called his talk “Learn your client development priorities,” but to me, this process is so much broader than that. I’ve evangelized before that having well-thought-out systems, including templates, checklists, and records of recurring communications, allows you to streamline your work so that you can focus on what you do best. One question that particularly struck a chord was, under “active selling,” “Do you have an agenda and objective for each meeting or conversation?” Although the term “agenda” may sound formal, it drives home the point that you should go into every conversation with a goal and come out of it having accomplished something specific that will help move you forward. (Incidentally, my weakest area? Networking. Somehow, I came away from this event having given out exactly zero business cards.)

Supply Chain/Value Chain: It’s Your Business

Anthony Taylor, SME Strategy

Anthony Taylor works with small businesses to refine their business practices. He wanted audience members to look at all aspects of their value offering, from the beginning to end, to better understand their businesses. He also encouraged us to understand our clients’ businesses, which will ultimately help us sell more.

The foundation for your freelancing business is your core competencies, he said. Understand what you do well. Next, identify your competitive advantage: what do you do better than all of your competitors, and how do you harness that to your advantage? If your offering is valuable, that in itself can get your business started, but you need more to maintain it. If your offering is valuable and rare, you may have a short-term advantage, but ultimately competitors would be able to learn it to compete with you. However, an offering that is valuable, rare, and hard to imitate will result in a long-term advantage. Anyone, Taylor noted, can compete on price alone.

The goal, Taylor said, is not to get more customers—it’s to make more money. To define or refine your business plan, he suggested starting with the business model canvas. It compartmentalizes your plan into important areas of consideration, including key partners, key activities, key resources, value propositions, customer relationships, channels (how people find out about you), and customer segments. Finally, it asks you to look at your cost structure and revenue streams. Taylor emphasized that your competitors can’t copy your relationships, so those can serve as a competitive advantage if you handle them well. Understanding your business’s cost structure is also extremely important—know where the money is coming out of your business, since reducing costs is as important as increasing revenue. Taylor also pointed out that revenue streams were key: revenue should be constantly flowing in, not coming in sporadically.

Taylor encouraged audience members to go through this business model canvas and write down their ideas: “It’s not a plan until it’s written down!” He closed by noting that something is valuable only if it’s value to your customer. When you’ve clearly defined your offering, make it as easy as possible for people to buy from you. A confusing website or hidden contact information are barriers that could hurt your business.

The slides from Taylor’s presentation can be found here.

My two cents: “Understand what costs you money.” That makes complete sense, of course. But hearing that made me realize that I need to do a better job of tracking my time. I’ve been rather lazy about doing that on jobs where I’m paid a project fee rather than an hourly rate, but it’s the only way I can see whether they’re genuinely worth my while.

Top five mistakes freelancers make

Felicia Lee, Candeo Business Coaching

Felicia Lee is a business coach who helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses in a predictable way to reach their sales and revenue goals. She identified the top mistakes that freelancers make, within the five stages of business.

1. Lack of visibility

If people don’t know who you are, they can’t buy from you, which is why marketing and networking are so vital. Aim to always build visibility, regardless of how busy you are; you can dial it down, but never discontinue your efforts, because the visibility you establish today translates into your future business.

2. Lack of credibility

Visibility alone won’t increase your business; “sales vomit”—indiscriminate pitches to an ill-defined audience—isn’t effective. People have to trust that you are good at what you do before they’ll buy from you. Leverage your past clients’ experiences with you to build credibility. At the end of a project, have a standard survey or feedback form that solicits testimonials. Make sure the testimonials are individually specific but collectively address many facets of your offering (e.g., the quality of your work, your collegiality, your ability to meet deadlines, etc.). You may find that writing testimonials on your clients’ behalf and asking them to approve it is an effective approach.

3. Lack of profitability

Implement a system in which you can measure exactly what your costs look like. Consider different models: can you bill by results rather than by the hour? How can you become more efficient and lower your costs? Start tracking your time and tasks to find the answers to these questions and to make sure you have a business, not just a hobby.

4. Lack of sustainability

Being a business owner, says Lee, is a marathon, not a sprint. Proactively plan for rest periods when you can recharge. Rather than trying to achieve that mystical work–life balance, try to find a sustainable rhythm—a cycle in which you can rest, gently ramp up your work, work intensively, then cool down to another period of rest. Working full-tilt and then crashing for a day is akin to sprinting hard and suddenly stopping: your mind and body don’t have the opportunity to slow down enough to regenerate.

5. Lack of scalability

Is your goal, through self-employment, to simply have a job or to build a business? Identify your strengths—what you’re good at should be what you should focus on. Build yourself a support structure to take care of the other aspects of running your business so that you can scale what you do.

To figure out what to focus on, assess your performance in each of these five areas. Every business, said Lee, must master visibility and credibility. Next, think about what your sales goal is, and figure out how much business you’d have to bring in to meet your goal. Track and measure your progress.

Lee left us with one last bit of wisdom: it’s not your responsibility to pre-emptively filter your clients; show people what you have to offer and let them decide whether to buy from you.

My two cents: A succinct presentation, packed with sound advice, and once again we heard about the importance of ongoing objective tracking and self-assessment. Lee’s take on sustainability was particularly interesting; we hear so much about the concept of work–life balance that to see the issue from a different perspective was refreshing.

***

The sessions have given me a lot to consider. As a freelance publishing specialist, I know that my professional development so far has been heavily skewed towards the publishing aspect of my work, so I appreciated the opportunity to brush up on the freelance bit. I was impressed with how organized the unconference format turned out to be, and I’m amazed tickets were only $15, with all proceeds going to charity. Kudos to the event organizers and volunteers.

A few reasons to attend the September EAC-BC meeting

1. Catch up

After a long summer break, why not head down to the Y and see some familiar faces?

2. Learn from others’ mistakes (#LFMF)

Your fellow editors have erred so that you don’t have to. The EAC-BC’s Twitter feed will be on display, and members, attending or not, are encouraged to live-tweet their most memorable editorial mistakes to @EditorsBC so that we can all know what not to do.

3. Enter for a chance to win a free professional development seminar

We’ll be drawing the name of one lucky winner, but you have to be there to enter.

4. Score a free book

The books I’ve reviewed on this blog so far will be up for grabs in the same draw.

5. Wine. Cheese.

’Nuff said.

***

This first meeting of EAC-BC’s 2012–13 season happens Wednesday, September 19, 2012, from 7 to 9 pm on the fourth floor of the YWCA, 535 Hornby Street.

Book review: The Publishing Business

Until the last couple of decades, book publishing was a trade in which you learned on the job, under the guidance of mentors within the industry. In Canada, formal training in publishing didn’t really begin until the Banff Publishing Workshop in 1981, but today publishing programs are offered at a number of institutions. When I pursued my Master of Publishing degree at SFU, our class learned from material that our instructors produced themselves or existing trade books about various facets of publishing. What we didn’t have at the time was a textbook specifically for students looking to begin a career in book publishing. Today’s students are more fortunate, as they can now read The Publishing Business: From p-books to e-books by Kelvin Smith (published by Ava Academia).

The Publishing Business is the first book I’ve seen that takes a pedagogical approach to book publishing. It’s comprehensive, giving students a generalist’s overview to the industry and the publishing process, from acquisition and editing to design and production to sales and marketing. Far from considering each of these areas in isolation, the book emphasizes their interdependence, which is one of its many strengths. Another is that it gives attention not only to trade publishing but also to educational and scholarly publishing. Each chapter features discussion questions and illuminating sidebars and ends with a case study relevant to the chapter topic, drawing stark connections between the theory explained in the text and its practice at real organizations within the book chain. Throughout the text the foundational concepts of high standards, attention to detail, and respect for fellow professionals recur.

This book is a timely addition to literature about publishing. Taking into account the enormous changes that the industry has seen in the past decade, the book looks closely at not only printed books but also ebooks, digital workflows, and metadata in marketing. The introduction attempts to prepare readers for an exciting but also potentially tumultuous ride:

The effects of the digital revolution are creating major advances in ways that affect everyone in publishing, whether they are writers, agents, editors, designers, marketers, booksellers, journalists, librarians or researchers. Therefore, you need to be prepared for change. You need flexibility and imagination, willingness and adaptability if you are to prosper in the publishing future. You also need to understand the context in which publishing has developed and from which it must move forward into a future that will continue to be subject to technological, economic, social and political developments. (p. 6)

This context the introduction mentions is provided by a brief, enlightening history of publishing—from the development of movable type to the effects of copyright and the history of censorship and freedom of speech. The book follows the evolution of publishing to its present state, with the domination of major global players, the growing prominence of the Kindle and other e-readers, and recent developments in print-on-demand technologies.

Because The Publishing Business attempts broad coverage of book publishing, it doesn’t tackle any one topic in depth; however, it is far from superficial, addressing such issues as authors’ moral rights, the evolving landscape of territorial rights for ebooks, pricing pressures, the changing role of literary agents, children’s ebooks and ebook comics, the rise of self-publishing (and developments like Kirkus Indie), the renaissance of short forms of writing in ebooks, and the effect of digital rights management on a publisher’s bottom line. One appealing aspect of the book is that it discusses publishing practices in both the U.K. and the U.S., touching on other countries as well. The international flavour of the text will help students understand how to relate to foreign publishers, especially when discussing rights sales. It also highlights how remarkably similar publishing is the world over, thus reinforcing that the industry has, in a lot of respects, really nailed down a series of best practices, particularly for print books.

Some of these best practices are offered up in very tangible, practical ways, with sample profit-and-loss calculations and a sample author contract. Smith writes,

Editors don’t need to be legal experts, but they do need to understand the importance of having a clear, well-constructed contract that covers the agreement that they are making with an author. And they need to be able to explain this clearly to the author, so that the editor–author relationship develops in an atmosphere of trust. (p. 102)

And for editors who fear that self-publishing and the prevalence and acceptance of netspeak have rendered them irrelevant, Smith reassuringly says,

Readers may excuse some spelling and grammar mistakes on e-mails and tweets, but they don’t expect them in a book or an e-book. Copy-editing and proofreading remain a fundamental part of publishing in the digital age. (p. 134)

The book devotes a chapter to the editorial process, another to design and production, and a third to sales, marketing, and distribution. The importance of marketing is premised on the notion that “even the most beautifully written, designed and produced publication has not fulfilled its role if it does not reach its intended audience.” (p. 166) Among a publisher’s many sales and marketing challenges are retailers’ demand for deep discounts and growing rates of returns. Regarding ebook pricing, Smith writes,

Pricing of e-books… has been a major issue from the beginning. It soon became clear that readers of e-books were not willing to spend as much on an e-book as they were on a p-book… Having already bought an e-book reading device, consumers wanted cheaper books, recognizing that publishers were saving on printing, warehousing and fulfilment costs. What they didn’t recognize, and what publishers were slow to articulate, is that publishers are not just printers and distributors; they fulfil many other functions that continue to cost money in the digital age: most notably the development of authors and their projects, packaging and brand, marketing and promotion, and long-term customer relationships. (p. 159)

Ultimately, the book concludes, a career in publishing is driven by more than making money from making books:

Publishers are a vital part of society. They are often among the first to speak out for human rights and social justice, to insist that information is not suppressed and that a wide variety of opinion is heard. This responsibility is one that remains important in a world affected by political and social upheaval, climate change and ecological crisis. It is vital that publishers continue and enhance this role, while balancing the tension that sometimes exists between protecting human rights and preserving the right to freedom of expression.” (p. 189)

The Publishing Business is an excellent reference and will offer students a strong introduction to the opportunities and challenges within the current state of the industry. I certainly wish I could have read it before I started my MPub degree, if for no other reason than to get up to speed on the terminology. Because digital publishing is really just finding its legs and is changing quickly, however, this book may need to be revised within a year to remain relevant. Further, because it focuses largely on practices within the U.K. and U.S., publishing students in other English-speaking territories, including Canada and Australia and New Zealand, should supplement this text with material specific to their own countries, to better understand how such additional factors as colonial influences and American cultural hegemony may have shaped those smaller publishing industries.

My only real quibble with The Publishing Business has to do with the physical book itself. Although it’s printed in full colour on what feels like a sturdy stock, after only two days in my tote bag the spine has begun delaminating, and there is evidence of ink transfer and scuffing in the book’s interior. I’ve also had a hard time not leaving smudgy fingerprints all over the pages printed in reverse type. I can’t help wondering how well this book would hold up after a semester’s use in a student’s backpack.

That minor complaint is, of course, not enough to stop me from recommending this book. The Publishing Business is the first in Ava Academia’s Creative Careers series, and given its practical, comprehensive approach and clear, informative content, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for the series’ future titles.

Book review: The Art of Making Magazines

Each spring the Columbia School of Journalism invites heavyweights from the magazine industry to speak about magazine journalism at its George Delacorte Lecture Series. Victor S. Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation, and Evan Cornog, dean of the School of Communication at Hofstra University and former publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, pulled together a varied collection of the lecture series’ highlights in The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry (published by Columbia Journalism Review Books). The book offers up a variety of perspectives: we hear from the late John Gregory Dunne about writing for magazines; Roberta Myers about editing women’s magazines; Peter Canby about fact checking at The New Yorker; Tina Brown about her time heading Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk; John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s, about the balance between editorial content and advertising; and several others. This mosaic of viewpoints from industry insiders underscores the complexity of magazine publishing—the myriad considerations from the big picture to the minutiae that editors face with every issue.

Despite the speakers’ wide-ranging experiences and backgrounds, key themes recurred throughout the book; the primacy of the reader, for example, featured prominently. Ruth Reichl, who served as Gourmet’s editor before it closed up shop in 2009, said,

I learned that the only way to do a magazine… is not to underestimate your audience, ever… That the only way to have a really good magazine is to print the things you want to read and assume that it will find its own readership. (p. 34)

And Elle’s Roberta Myers told her audience,

You can’t edit a magazine to impress people; you can’t edit a magazine to show your friends how clever you are or what access you were able to get. You really have to edit to, and for, your reader. (p. 54)

Felix Dennis, owner of Dennis Publishing, devoted his entire talk to the importance of the reader, saying

What’s madness is thinking that you can publish on and on and on without putting out something that readers want to read. What’s madness is this: focusing on what advertisers want, not on what readers want. (p. 172)

Yet, of course, pragmatism dictates that magazines do have to consider advertisers to remain strong. In one of the most interesting essays in the book, John R. MacArthur addresses this slippery issue:

With the advent in the 1970s of so-called advertorials—that is, advertising promotion copy masquerading as real editorial material—the walls between advertising and editorial have weakened apace. Labeled advertorial has more and more been supplanted by unlabeled advertorial, where the editor is called upon to run articles complementary to adjacent advertising. (p. 149)

According to MacArthur, a large part of the problem stems from a devaluation of content in readers’ eyes; the glut of available information makes them less willing to pay for what a magazine has to offer:

There’s another important factor that’s made magazines more vulnerable to the demands and whims of advertisers, which is the continuing decline in the cost of subscriptions. Because magazines are so desperate for advertising, they view subscribers by and large as loss leaders whose principal function is to support the publication’s guaranteed advertising rate base. Since the advertising agencies get a flat percentage of whatever they buy—traditionally it’s 15 percent—the more the page costs, the more they make. Thus publishers and ad directors of magazines strain mightily and discount heavily to make their circulation as big as possible in order to please the ad agencies. (p. 151)

At the same time, the Internet—with its implied promise of free, free, free editorial content—encourages people to think that they shouldn’t have to pay for magazines and newspapers at all. To my mind, the Internet is just a gigantic, much-faster version of the photocopying machine. And as such, it’s a great enemy of periodicals, because so many library users and professors are happy to read a cheap Xerox of an article or distribute it to their students, rather than pay for a subscription. I’ve tried again and again to explain to the young Internet enthusiasts on my staff that the Web is actually driving down the perceived value of their work, which makes us even more dependent on advertising. (152)

And if publishers and editors-in-chief aren’t pitching to advertisers, they’re expected to build the brand and pitch to everyone else. Roberta Myers recounted her tenure as senior editor of InStyle, saying, “It was there that I… saw the necessity—and power—of marketing. Dollar for dollar, they spent as much marketing the magazine as they did making it.” (p. 55)

After she moved to Elle, Myers encountered the “brand wheel”:

In the middle of the wheel was the word Elle, and the spokes of the wheel were the magazine and the show Project Runway and the Web site, Elle.com. And one was a cell phone. Today the editor-in-chief of a big, successful, broad magazine like ours—1.1 million circulation, 6 million readers—is expected to oversee all of these “extensions.” (p. 59)

Ruth Reichl shared a similar experience, noting that her role as editor of Gourmet shifted dramatically since the explosion of online marketing and social media:

When I spoke to this group six years ago, the list of what I did today would have been completely and utterly different. In those days, I was editing a magazine, and everything I had to do was about editing the magazine. And today, almost nothing that I do has to do with editing a magazine. My role is now pretty much long-term planning, thinking about the issues, dealing with the art director… So it’s very much a changing role. (p. 46)

Interestingly, whereas Gourmet folded, Dennis Publishing’s offerings, including The Week and Men’s Fitness, among others, seem to be going strong, and this success may have something to do with Felix Dennis’s approach to emerging technologies:

We concluded that the Web should not be treated as merely an extension of our ink-on-paper brands and products. It was a beast of a different stripe. This was a counterintuitive conclusion back then… but we persevered and permitted our Web editors and journalists to break away early from the domination of the “mother ship” ink-on-paper brand and develop their own Internet identity. In retrospect, this was possibly the best decision made by my board in decades. (p. 168)

Perhaps this division has allowed editors to focus on editing, which was the subject of Robert Gottlieb’s terrific piece, “Editing Books Versus Editing Magazines.” Gottlieb had moved from a position at Alfred A. Knopf to The New Yorker, where he served as editor-in-chief from 1987 to 1992. About the differences between the two media, he had this to say:

Being the editor-in-chief of a book publishing house is a vastly different matter from being the editor-in-chief of a magazine. When you’re in a publishing house, you are in a strictly service job as an editor… To keep your good authors and to attract other good authors, you have to serve them. They have to feel protected, which means they have to believe that their editor, a specific personal editor, understands their work, sympathizes with their work, and is on their wavelength. They must believe that the editor can help them make the book not other than what it is, but better than what it is. (p. 157)

When you’re the editor-in-chief of a magazine, as I was of The New Yorker, it’s opposite. You are the living god. You are not there to please the writers, but the writers are there to satisfy you because they want to be in the magazine, and you are the one who says yes or no. (p. 158)

Another major contrast between book and magazine publishing, Gottlieb noted, relates to fact checking: whereas some magazines have dedicated fact-checking departments, that level of rigour simply isn’t possible in a book-publishing environment, where much of the onus is on the author to ensure factual accuracy. And his comment about Knopf’s editorial standards had me smiling and cringing at the same time:

I can say that although I’ve been embarrassed by some of the books we’ve published, on the whole we’ve done a good job. Certainly better than most publishing houses, and certainly better than any British publishing houses, since I don’t believe an editor or a copyeditor’s pencil has ever touched a piece of text in England. It’s really amazing what they do not do, but then they love amateurism. (p. 158)

And finally, from Gottlieb, a truism known widely to editors but not so much to others:

It’s always the books, by the way, that you spend the most time on and put the most editorial energy into that get reviews that say, “What this book needed was a good editor.” And that’s for a reason. Because when a book is really in trouble, there’s a point beyond which you can’t go. And some reviewers, not all, are slow to catch on to that. (p. 158)

Barbara Wallraff addressed the same problem, from the copy editor’s perspective:

Most [writers and supervising editors] look very sloppy. And sometimes so sloppy that I couldn’t do as good a job—I couldn’t do as much polishing, as much perfecting, as I really would have liked to do, because I was just too busy correcting stuff that was all garbled up. It makes you mad. Can’t they do any better than that?

And then, over the years, it occurs to you, no, they can’t. But the more the writer or the supervising editor can do to improve a piece, starting at the biggest level but on down into the smaller levels, the higher the level that everybody else—including the copyeditor—can work at.

If you don’t have to be just hacking your way, with a machete, through the jungle, you can pay closer attention to where the flowers are, and whether the leaves are neat and tidy. You can really go a much longer way toward making that piece its best self. (p. 93)

And details matter. Wallraff said in her talk, “A Magazine Needs Copyeditors Because…,” “Even a bunch of highly skilled writers won’t do things consistently. And consistency strengthens the identity of a magazine.” (p. 86) She continued, “I am not saying any particular style is inherently bad or good. I am just pointing out that they project different images.” (p. 87)

Being a stickler may not make you any friends:

The problem with copyediting—and the downside to the job—is that it is a relentlessly negative, critical job. I mean, you try correcting everybody’s spelling and grammar and logic and organization, and do that day in, day out, and see how popular that makes you. (p. 90)

but, according to Wallraff, remembering that the copy editor is a person will improve not only your professional relationship but also the project:

Have a human relationship with them. The way most organizations are set up, it won’t be part of the workflow ever to talk to the copyeditor. And you may have to go a little bit out of your way to do that. By try to anyway. (p. 95)

Although I can pluck any number of memorable quotes from The Art of Making Magazines, I don’t think the book quite succeeds as the “how-to and how-to-be guide” that its editors had perhaps envisioned. The anecdotes are colourful, but they lack the practical advice that readers or students hoping to break into magazines might be looking for in a book like this. A fundamental problem is that most of the lectures included in the book were delivered between 2002 and 2009, and a lot has changed in the magazine world in the past decade—even in the past couple of years. The most recent talk featured in the book was given in February 2010, which, I believe, just misses the surging growth in tablets. Both Ruth Reichl and Roberta Myers allude to the impact of online marketing and social media, but the tablet may be have as a large an impact on the magazine world as e-readers have had on the book world, and the book discusses none of that.

Further, because the book is tied to the Columbia School of Journalism, most of the speakers naturally represent the major New York–based magazines. Someone looking to start a career in magazine publishing, particularly outside of New York, probably won’t hit up The New Yorker from the outset. Most writers and editors would likely cut their teeth, and perhaps build a career, in niche publications—like magazines for cigar aficionados or antique teapot enthusiasts. That rather significant portion of the industry isn’t addressed at all in this book. Further, the book makes the prospect of upward mobility at the big glossies look rather bleak: Tina Brown and Robert Gottlieb were installed as heads of their magazines having come from elsewhere, and hiring budding talent from within a magazine to take over an editorial vacancy doesn’t appear to be a common practice, at least as far as this anthology implies.

The Art of Making Magazines is for readers who want to hear what the likes of Ruth Reichl and Tina Brown and Felix Dennis have to say because of who they are. Although it may be interesting reading for those hoping to make a career out of magazine publishing and editing, it won’t light the path to get there.

Procedural editorial checklists—and where they fit in

It occurred to me a while ago that in my eagerness to tout checklists, I neglected to give a broader picture of the framework into which they should fit. So let me push the reset button and start at the beginning.

Any organization that produces publications—whether they’re reports or magazines or books—should supply its editorial team members with three essential kinds of documents:

1) Editorial guidelines

These should not only define house style but also offer an overview of workflow, as well as such details as manuscript formatting and image specification requirements.

2) Editorial checklists

Guidelines can balloon over time to encyclopedic documents, and trainees and freelancers may find it challenging to identify the most important points. Use checklists to distill guidelines to the essentials. Checklists reinforce procedure, clearly define roles, and help editors prioritize their tasks. They ensure that production team members who follow an editor on a project have the material they need to do their jobs.

3) Transmittal sheets

A substantive editor and copy editor working on the same project may never have direct interaction with one another. Particularly conscientious editors will write a memo to the copy editor or designer, but many editors don’t. Transmittal sheets are a way of ensuring that critical communication about the project takes place. In essence, they give production team members who follow an editor on a project the information they need to do their jobs.

Editorial guidelines are fairly standard. That’s not to imply that all organizations that should have them do, but at least most publishers understand what they are and how they function. Transmittal sheets are relatively simple documents, and I’d be happy to write more about them in a later post if there’s enough interest. For now, I’ll bring my focus back to the checklist, and since I’ve already devoted a post to elemental editorial checklists, I’ll concentrate here on procedural checklists based on role. Copy-editing checklists, proofreading checklists, indexing checklists, and the like are all great training tools, because they explicitly codify procedure. Running through a checklist will quickly bring a person up to speed on how things are done and what tasks are most important.

Publishers should aim to have checklists for each stage of production. In particular, a team member should have to run through a checklist for every hand-off—so a copy editor would have one checklist before the hand-off to the author and one before the hand-off to the designer, for example.

Creating these checklists takes some commitment, but in the end (and even in the process, as I mention below) they can prove to be money and time savers. Here are some suggestions on how to get started:

Write down what you already do and know

Chances are each member of your editorial team already has a regimen of tasks that he or she performs—a mental checklist—for all projects. The first step is to commit that checklist to type and for staff members who perform the same function—all copy editors, say—to compare notes. Odds are high that these mental checklists are based on past mistakes that have changed the way you operate (like that time the title on the spine didn’t match the title on the front cover, for example). Getting this information out of your brain and onto a draft checklist, then conferring with your colleagues, allows everyone to learn from one another’s mistakes.

Consult external sources

The Chicago Manual of Style has an overview of publication production (Chapter 2), and the Editors’ Association of Canada’s Professional Editorial Standards define the basic tasks involved in structural editing, stylistic editing, copy editing, and proofreading. These are just a couple of external sources you may want to look at as you further develop your checklists. Although your workflow and division of responsibilities may not correspond to these references exactly, reading through them may give you ideas about streamlining your processes. Creating these checklists provides a fantastic impetus to do an informal audit of your production operations, during which you may discover better ways of getting things done.

Compare your checklist against your guidelines

These should correspond exactly; items that contradict only cause confusion and waste time. Don’t be afraid to change the guidelines to accommodate approaches you may have discovered in the previous step to achieve a more efficient workflow. If you’ve got your guidelines posted on a central online repository, making adjustments and, while you’re at it, getting rid of what Arnold Zwicky (and later Amy Einsohn, in Editors, Scholars, and the Social Text) calls “zombie rules” are simple.

Refine and revise

Use the checklist in a project and see what kinds of adjustments need to be made. The odds of producing a perfect checklist (whatever that means) on the first try are slim; it may take a few iterations before your checklist and workflow conform to one another. If you use freelancers, do a few runs of the checklist in house before releasing it to them so that you’ve worked out most of the bugs. And, of course, every time the editorial guidelines are changed, the checklists should be reviewed, and vice versa.

For freelancers

Since not all clients will have a system of checklists in place, get into the habit of making your own. I have a checklist for each of my regular clients, based on generic checklists for each type of publication I work on. If you’ve developed long-standing relationships with some of your clients, consider sharing your checklists with them. They may form the basis for a more substantial framework of production efficiencies that will not only make your job easier but also help other production team members.

Ultra Libris hot off the press

I got my comp copy of Ultra Libris (by Rowland Lorimer, published by ECW Press) in the mail today, meaning the book will officially pub in about a month. Although it’s exactly the kind of book I would ordinarily review, I’d feel a bit weird reviewing a book I worked on—especially one by a former MPub professor of mine—so here’s just a summary and some short excerpts that I found particularly interesting.

At 432 pages, Ultra Libris is a substantial volume, but it’s well worth reading—I found it far more interesting than I’d expected. (Being able to read it away from the demands of grad school probably helped significantly.) Lorimer offers a detailed look at the book publishing industry in Canada, beginning with some important historical context. Squeezed between the colonial influences of Britain (and, to a lesser extent, France) and the cultural dominance of the United States, Canada was, in the first part of the twentieth century, inundated with a literature not its own. Government-initiated commissions to study the state of Canadian culture and Canadian book publishing, along with lobbying by the Association of Canadian Publishers, led to a series of key policies designed to lend structural and cultural support to the industry—one that was then able to flourish in the 1970s and has produced Canadian books and authors renowned the world over. More recently, the concept of the “creative economy”—the notion that arts and culture contribute hugely to a nation’s economic health—has helped to cement the importance of encouraging cultural initiatives and supporting domestic cultural production.

Yet, as we’ve seen in these past few volatile years, Canadian-owned publishers seem always on the brink of financial collapse. The dominance of Chapters-Indigo is a major factor, as Lorimer shows with some incisive case studies, but perhaps it is time, as he proposes in the latter part of his book, to change our current publishing model, exploiting available technologies (and not just ebooks) to increase both production efficiencies and reach.

Put another way, if publishers don’t embrace evolving opportunities in every sphere of book publishing the already substantial gap between the contributions to limited economic growth made by the printing and publishing industries and the more robust contributions made by other industries of the creative sector… may increase. (p. 334)

Some of the alternative models he suggests include service publishing in both trade and scholarly environments and Canada Council–mandated set fees for publishing professionals. His argument for paying these professionals what they deserved had me cheering:

Even though book publishing employees will accept relatively low wages, it is wasteful of human resources to start a university graduate with a Master’s in publishing and a second Master’s degree at a salary equivalent to an entry-level clerical position, let alone to assign that person clerical work. This is doubly the case when the same graduates can earn up to twice that salary doing publishing work outside the industry. Low wages are sometimes justified as part and parcel of a lifestyle choice that a person is prepared to make. Such thinking encourages mediocrity, feeds off a culture of poverty, and buys into a false notion of the nobility of poverty. It is a disservice both to those who are underpaid and society as a whole. Moreover, it is indefensible that government should be subsidizing an industry that does not compensate its employees with a living wage. Paying low wages not only drives people out of the industry but also encourages an inefficient organization of work. (p. 192)

I also found intriguing Lorimer’s comparison of the reading public’s willingness to pay a premium for a Canadian-authored or Canadian-published book to the organic food movement:

Although this may be changing, the mindset (with regard to price) of the Canadian book buyer appears to be this: Why should a book by a Canadian author cost more than any other book, especially a book by a more famous foreign author? Only in very recent years, with increased emphasis on organic food products as well as economies of scale, have the realities of production costs—which, in the case of books, means the size of print runs—become persuasive. Prior to those developments, try as they might, Canadian publishers had not been able to persuade the book-buying public that Canadian-authored and Canadian-published books are the gold-riveted designer jeans of the market. (p. 215)

The reader who is willing to pay more to support an author for being Canadian, who recognizes that fostering Canadian talent simply costs more, is likely in a small—possibly insignificant—minority, but the analogy is an interesting one nonetheless.

One feature of the book—quite apart from its content—that caught my attention was at the very back:

Get the eBook free! At ECW Press, we want you to enjoy this book in whatever format you like, whenever you like. Leave your print book at home and take the eBook to go! Purchase the print edition and receive the eBook free.

All you have to do is email ECW and show proof of purchase; you’ll get your choice of a PDF or EPUB. I think this model is brilliant, and I wonder how many publishers have embraced it. Many publishers see the ebook as an additional revenue stream, and they view the print book and ebook as separate entities, whereas ECW’s approach really makes the reader value the content rather the method of delivery. I would be interested to know which strategy ultimately leads to more sales.

***

This post has been a bit of a hodgepodge, but, as I mentioned earlier, Ultra Libris is a tome, and its coverage is vast; I can’t hope to do it justice in such a short entry. What I will say is that anyone working within Canadian publishing, or looking to get into it, would glean something of value from this thorough—and surprisingly uplifting—book.

Elemental editorial checklists

Waaay the hell back, I posted this tribute to the dependable, indispensable checklist, and I promised to return with more posts about creating effective editorial checklists. A bunch of events and conferences and book reviews took priority, and the checklist got pushed to the back burner. So before it gets boiled dry, here’s the first of a few posts I have planned about simple editorial checklists that can save you time and, potentially, a lot of money.

In Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, a checklist expert in the aviation industry, Daniel Boorman, tells the author about the two main types of checklist:

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist… team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off. (pp. 122–23)

That distinction may work well for checklists designed for large teams of people performing complex tasks, but for editing and publishing, I find a different kind of division more practical: most editorial checklists will be either elemental or procedural, and it’s the former I’ll talk about here, because it’s the easiest to get started with.

Whereas procedural checklists give you a series of tasks to perform, elemental checklists tell you what elements to include. Publishers will find them useful for all of the constants across their publications; for example, cover copy on all of a trade publisher’s books will have the same components, the chapters within a textbook will have the same structure, and a market research firm’s reports will typically include the same sections each time.

Elemental checklists serve multiple functions:

The person who first drafts the copy can use them to make sure he or she has covered all bases.
The editor, designer, and proofreader—not to mention the person who checks the printer’s proofs—can use them to double, triple, and quadruple check that nothing critical has been left out or, in a more likely scenario, dropped out from one stage of production to the next.
They are a powerful, authoritative training tool for new editorial and production staff members, as well as freelancers.

That third function underscores why you would bother creating elemental checklists. When I first started out in trade publishing and had to write cover copy for the first time, I was told to look at another of the publisher’s books as a guide, yet I wasn’t sure if the book I had chosen was representative. Having a checklist would have saved me some second guessing. And if I had been a freelancer, I might not have had access to the publisher’s backlist from which to choose a sample.

Even for seasoned veterans in house, these checklists are invaluable. We’d all like to believe that once we’ve worked somewhere long enough, we’ll have internalized all of the details, such as what goes on a title page. But with everything that an editor has to do, having a reminder in the form of a checklist—”a kind of cognitive net [that] catch mental flaws inherent in all of us” as Gawande says (p. 47)—is extremely helpful. A checklist frees your mind from having to remember these details and allows you to focus your task.

And those “mental flaws” Gawande mentions can be costly to publishers. Forgetting to include the company URL on the back cover copy may not be a huge problem, but inadvertently dropping an acknowledgement clause could get your funding pulled, and missing a disclaimer could have legal repercussions. Every publisher has a war story about having a book rejacketed at the eleventh hour (or worse, pulped and reprinted) because it had left off a copublisher’s imprint information or having to get a shipment of books stickered because the barcode was missing.

For recurring items that use boilerplate text—for example, the copyright page, with its standard copyright and acknowledgement clauses—using a template rather than a checklist would save you a lot of rekeying, but the principle is the same: the template, like a checklist, ensures that the essential elements aren’t inadvertently omitted owing to a lapse of memory.

Developing elemental checklists is simple:

Suggestions for publishers

1. Pull out some representative publications

If you publish multiple genres or multiple formats, it’s helpful to have one of each in front of you.

2. Identify all of the constants

Some examples, for trade books, are the half-title page, title page, and all parts of a jacket (e.g., front flap, front cover, spine, back cover, back flap). Textbook chapters will often have recurring elements, structured in the same way (for example, introduction, lab activities, career profile, chapter summary, glossary), and each of those elements may in turn have a recurring structure (e.g., activity title, list of equipment, numbered method, analysis questions), so be sure to consider constants at both a macro and a micro level.

3. Identify required components and optional components

For example, a trade book’s front cover must have the title, subtitle, and author’s name, and it may have a short endorsement quote. (If you’re thinking, “Well, surely we don’t need a list for three items,” let me assure you that, yes, there have been publishers that have forgotten to include an author’s name on the front cover.)

4. Create generic elemental lists that apply to all of your publications

Start with broad lists that everyone will use, then…

5. Devise genre-specific sublists if necessary

For example, you may wish to have a disclaimer on all of your medically themed books or ensure that you include a co-publisher’s logo on the title page of co-published titles.

6. Share the checklists with all team members, including freelancers

Better yet, make them available for browsing or searching on an online tool like an editorial wiki.

7. Periodically revisit and revise your checklists

All checklists should be regularly revised for relevance, although elemental checklists generally tend to change less frequently than procedural checklists do. Still, those of us in publishing who saw the transition from 10- to 13-digit ISBNs, for example, will recall how much even small details matter to workflow. Make sure team members are aware of any changes. (An easy approach is to use an editorial wiki as the authoritative central repository for this kind of information. Editors and designers will always know that the material on the wiki is the most up to date.)

Suggestions for freelancers

Request checklists

If your publisher clients don’t voluntarily offer checklists, ask for them. If your clients don’t have checklists at all, your enquiry may well prompt them to think about developing some.

Editors’ Association of Canada certification news

As a member of the EAC’s Certification Steering Committee, I should publicize a couple of important certification-related items:

1) Pilot test takers needed

We’d like to recruit a few more EAC members to pilot the Proofreading and Structural Editing certification tests. If you’ve got at least five years’ editing experience and are willing to study for the test as if you were genuinely taking it, consider volunteering.

Pilot tests take place in Vancouver (at SFU Harbour Centre), Toronto (at the EAC National Office), and Ottawa (at the Travel Lodge Hotel on Carling Avenue) on Saturday, September 15. Proofreading runs from 10 am to 1 pm, and Structural Editing runs from 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm.

If you’re thinking about taking certification tests in the future, writing the pilot will give you a practice run, and you’ll get a free copy of the study guide (a $55 value) for whichever test you pilot. For those of you who are already certified but needing to maintain your credentials, studying for and writing a pilot test will count towards your credential maintenance points.

If you’re interested, please get in touch with Helena Aalto.

2) Registration open for proofreading and structural editing tests

The actual certification tests will be held Saturday, November 17, in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax. Proofreading runs from 10 am to 1 pm, and Structural Editing runs from 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm.

These tests are open to both EAC members and non-members. For more information about certification or to register online, visit the certification website.

Urvashi Butalia and The Other Side of Silence

On July 14, feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia sat down for a conversation with the Georgia Straight‘s Charlie Smith as part of the Indian Summer festival. They discussed her influential, award-winning book, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, as well as her illustrious publishing career. Butalia had co-founded India’s first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women, and today heads Zubaan Books, an imprint of Kali.

Introducing her was Rowland Lorimer, director of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, which was one of the event’s sponsors. Lorimer described how he and Butalia met a couple of decades ago, swapping stories about the publishing industries in Canada and India. Lorimer was fascinated to see the “trajectory of colonialism manifesting itself in two very different countries.” Butalia, he told us, is not only a feminist publisher but also a social historian and a social activist, and for her enormous contributions to the arts and humanities she was presented with the Padma Shree award—the closest Canadian analogue of which, according to Lorimer, is the prestigious Killam Prize.

Charlie Smith then set the stage for their conversation, which centred on the 1947 partition of British India that created the Dominion of Pakistan (later Pakistan and Bangladesh) and what became the Republic of India. Partition was hugely disruptive, displacing over 12 million people along religious lines and killing roughly a million as a result of violence or illness, yet for decades, nobody talked about it, and the stories of ordinary people who had experienced it were never told. The Other Side of Silence, Smith said, “shattered the taboo and started a conversation.”

Butalia’s family was from Lahore, and they were partition refugees. In school she studied only what she called partition’s “grand narrative of politics,” and although people listened to stories about partition within their own families, the discourse found no articulation in the outside world. She admitted to paying those family stories no attention (“I thought they were rubbish”) until two events changed her perspective.

First, in 1984, Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, after which there was a violent backlash against Sikhs. “Delhi was no longer a safe place,” Butalia said. For her it was a major shift from growing up in what she called “a position of middle-class privilege,” to living in fear as a member of a Sikh family, and at that point she felt as though she could begin to understand the turmoil and religious strife that her family and others had experienced during partition.

Second, she was hired on to work on a film about partition and conduct background research by interviewing people who had been through it. “I heard stories in a way I had never heard them before,” she said. They motivated her to look into an unfinished chapter in her own family’s partition story, and she set out to find her mother’s brother, who, along with his mother, had stayed behind in Lahore following partition. For forty years, between 1947 and 1987, nobody in her family had had any contact with him. The trip from Delhi to Lahore was only half an hour by air, said Butalia, but “the distance created by history was so great.”

She managed to track down her uncle, who had converted to Islam “out of convenience, not conviction,” Butalia said. In fact, although he had chosen to stay behind, he identified with his Indian roots and “had a deep notion of the loss of home,” choosing, for example, not to learn Urdu, which became Pakistan’s official language. Her uncle’s decision to stay in Lahore with his mother led to tremendous bitterness among other members of the family: refugees could seek compensation for the property that they lost when they were uprooted, but because Butalia’s uncle remained in Pakistan and kept the family home, the rest of the family wasn’t entitled to any compensation. What Butalia’s mother took the hardest, however, was not knowing when her own mother had died.

As it turned out, Butalia’s grandmother lived for nine years after partition. As Butalia prepared to go see her uncle, her mother said, “Ask him if he buried my mother or cremated her”—a question that surprised Urvashi, because her mother was a strong secular feminist. Later on her mother would join her on a trip to Pakistan and, despite the residual tension and resentment, was extremely pleased to be reunited with her brother after forty years of separation.

As Butalia began interviewing more and more people to discover how they experienced partition, she unearthed horrific tales of mass rape and honour killings. She chided herself for finding these a revelation: “They should not have come as a surprise,” she said, as violence against women has always happened in times of turmoil and disruption. Some women were abducted, raped, and forced to convert, while others committed suicide or were killed by family members to avoid the same fate.

One woman she interviewed was involved with rescuing abducted women and returning them to their “natural” homes, as identified by religion. Often their families didn’t take them back, as they were “polluted,” and there was no place for them. Many women—despite what they had been through—refused to be rescued, instead choosing to remain with their abductors, with whom some of them had had children. The family of Butalia’s interview subject never took her stories seriously; only after The Other Side of Silence came out did they realize the impact of her accomplishments. There is a “strange way in which families wipe out history,” Butalia remarked.

In the course of her research Butalia noted the inadequacy of the word “partition” to describe what people had lived through. It perhaps invokes the idea of a mechanical separation, but unlike the word “holocaust,” for example, it really fails to describe the violation that people experienced.

When Butalia set out to write her book, she believed that by telling these women’s stories, she could “liberate their voices.” Yet, “it was only when I began talking to women that I discovered how wrong I was,” she said. She encountered a number of women who didn’t want to be identified or who didn’t want their stories told. Some of them had never told their own children about their past. “When you tell other people’s stories, you have to ask yourself: to whom are you responsible? Some abstract notion of history? To the people you interview?”

“As a storyteller you’re in a position of power,” she cautioned, and as much as possible, you should try to show the your interview subject what you will write. Many people will agree to tell their story, but when they see it in print, it has a much different impact. Butalia learned that “breaking a silence doesn’t necessarily lead to the liberation of a voice.”

Charlie Smith invited questions from the audience. One attendee asked whether Butalia looked at the effect of differences in class on the experiences of partition. Butalia replied that she wanted to capture a range of women across class and caste and that these factors were central to her analysis. She noted that the rich largely travelled by air and the poor travelled by foot, and hence the poor were most vulnerable, but abductors often targeted rich women as prizes. Butalia also wanted to document the experiences of minority groups; for instance, in The Other Side of Silence, she introduces a Dalit story in the master narrative of the Hindu and Muslim story.

Another audience member asked about her publishing vision. Butalia started Kali for Women twenty-eight years ago and continues now with Zubaan to publish English books about women in the margins, “constantly balancing politics with survival and sustainability,” she said. She told the audience about the autobiography of Baby Halder, a woman who was forced into marriage at twelve and had her first child at fourteen, followed by two other children in quick succession. At her breaking point, she fled her abusive husband and found work as a domestic. Her employer noticed that she spent considerable time in his library and encouraged her to read, then gave her a pen and notebook to write her own story. Her book, originally published in Hindi, did well, but it found a huge audience when Butalia published it in English. “In the Indian market,” Butalia explained, “English is the language of privilege.” Halder’s success allowed her to bring her children to live with her, yet she remains with her employer out of a sense of gratitude and loyalty. And Butalia pointed out the irony that an impoverished woman could so enrich a book publishing house.

Prompted by another question, Butalia reflected on the story of partition as it is now being told in North America, where there is a renewed interest in the event among the diaspora. People are uncovering family archives, recording oral histories, and putting partition stories up on the Internet, and she finds that as people get older, they are more willing to talk about it. Although in India and Pakistan there is a desire to demystify one another and to hear one another’s stories, there are still barriers to interaction, whereas there are no such barriers in the diaspora, allowing for a freer flow of information and ideas.

When asked whether she felt that there was a sense of urgency to finish the story of partition as people who lived through it are now at the end of their lives, Butalia says that there does seem to be a feeling of urgency but that “the selection of voices cannot even begin to map the history of 1.2 million people. The bulk of that history will be lost.”

***

Urvashi Butalia is an astonishing confluence of passion and principled action, and there is no doubt about the immensity of her contributions to history and culture. She is so brilliantly articulate—her ideas and responses clearly thoughtfully conceived and considered. Her long list of accomplishments makes me feel as though I’ve done nothing with my life (but in an inspiring—rather than guilt-inducing—way). Her fervent concern for the plight (“There is a strong hold of patriarchy in societies around the world. The difference is in the form that violence against women takes.”) and belief in the power (“Women [in India] are the ones putting in the seeds to end poverty, such as schools and sanitation. Economists aren’t taking this movement into account.”) of women makes me wonder if dialing back my cynicism a bit might actually allow me to be more effective. I learned a tremendous amount from her talk, and I feel privileged to have heard her speak.

Not-so-lazy summer days

I’ve been meaning to post a write-up of a recent event I attended, but I just haven’t had the time (hence my silence for almost two weeks). Seasoned freelancers will laugh at my naïveté, but having worked in house for the past several years, I was used to having my work get just a wee bit lighter at this time of year—and I wasn’t at all prepared for the deluge of projects from clients trying to cover for vacationing editors. But I guess I’ve just discovered another perk of the flexibility that comes from freelancing: if you’re willing to take your holidays off season, the summer is, apparently, rife with opportunities.

Anyway, I’m hoping to get caught up this weekend. Check back soon, and thanks for your patience!