Category: Books

Helena Aalto and Laurel Boone—Good Reads: Fiction for adult literacy and ESL learners (EAC conference 2013)

Good Reads is a project spearheaded by ABC Life Literacy Canada and funded by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) to address a shortage of pleasure reading books for adult literacy and ESL learners. Over the past three years, Good Reads has worked with Edmonton-based Grass Roots Press to publish nineteen short, easy-reading books by well-known Canadian authors; the aim of this series was to increase reading engagement and reading confidence, turning learners into lifelong readers. With the project just wrapping up, project manager Helena Aalto and editor Laurel Boone spoke at the EAC conference about their work.

Good Reads was inspired by a similar initiative in the UK, known as Quick Reads, which launched in 2006. Aalto told us that Good Reads sought out established Canadian authors with an adaptable writing style who were interested in the challenge of writing compelling stories using accessible language. Among those who accepted the challenge were Tish Cohen, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Joy Fielding, Rabindranath Maharaj, Frances Itani, and Robert Hough—names that librarians and literacy educators would know well and would be enthusiastic in promoting to readers. Robert Hough documented his experiences as a Good Reads author in a Quill & Quire article, “Not as Easy as It Looks.” Although the books were short, they often went through many revisions to meet the guidelines for adult literacy learners.

These books, around 12,000 words each, had to be adult-interest stories—these were not kids’ books—with plots that would encourage readers to continue reading, using devices such as cliff-hanger chapter endings. As Boone told us, they had to have adult frames of reference and adult complexities. Authors were encouraged to minimize changes in perspective and time; to introduce only a few characters, each with a distinct name; and to identify speakers in dialogue. Boone, who described Good Reads as “the best project of my life,” edited the books with the understanding that “readers deserve our very best. These readers are adults, and they know a lot.” Her secret intention was for no one to notice the text’s low reading level. Boone’s description of her editorial process was fascinating.

Structural editing

Boone started by assessing the structure of the whole book. Each book had to be suitable for individuals, individuals with tutors, classes, and ESL learners. As such, the chapters had to be approximately equal in length, and they had to stand alone but also work together as a whole. Paragraphs had to be short but varied.

The plot had to be absolutely tight, with no loose ends. Continuity had to be perfect, because, as Boone explained, non-readers’ memories are better than the memories of most readers. Authors had to make any changes in time or place perfectly clear, using devices such as line spaces, changes in verb tense, or changes in person as clues for the reader.

Characters had to have distinct, easy-to-read names. More importantly, they had to be true to life, and through the stories, their motives and personal growth had to be clear. Boone encouraged the authors to make most of the main characters fairly agreeable, because beginning readers are more likely to identify with likeable characters.

Finally, the setting and context had to be familiar.

Stylistic editing

Boone edited toward the goal of a certain reading level (Microsoft Word allows you to check a document’s readability statistics). Literacy learners read word by word or in very small gulps, and the meaning of each of these gulps must be clear. No word could be out of place. Boone gave an example of dangling modifiers: as seasoned readers, we’d laugh, but we’d understand the intent of the sentence; beginning readers, however, would not. While performing a stylistic edit, Boone focused on the following areas:

Information

Boone developed strategies to offer readers complete information without explicitly explaining. “I don’t wish to be told that there’s something I don’t know when I’m in the middle of a story,” she said, and phrases like “that is” or “meaning,” followed by an explanation, can come off as patronizing. She encouraged authors to bury descriptions in the context (e.g., “Victor would know where he could sell his million-dollar Picasso painting to pay off his debts”), and keep terminology consistent.

Fact checking, explained Boone, was essential, because adult readers are very knowledgeable, and errors breed mistrust. For example, she learned the difference between a pipe wrench and a monkey wrench and was careful to make sure the right term was used. Otherwise, readers could too easily dismiss the story as stupid and stop reading altogether.

Boone also looked out for situations where there was too much non-essential information. For example, an author had written out a series of American cities as train destinations, but the names of the cities themselves weren’t important to the story. Names can be hard to read and confusing, so she recommended simplifying the sentence simply to refer to “cities across the United States.”

Sentences

Sentences in Good Reads books had to be short—typically fewer than fifteen words long, and certainly no more than twenty words long. They had to be simply constructed but still varied, with superior transitions. The end of one sentence must lead on to the next one. Parallelism was paramount, and she tried to eliminate passive voice, weak uses of “to be,” and adverbs ending in “-ly.” “Everything ought to be in the context and characters,” Boone explained.

Dialogue

It’s easy to lose track of the speakers in dialogue, Boone told us, but saying “he said, she said, he said, etc.” can get tedious. She encouraged authors to use frequent attributions but to vary the style.

Vocabulary

Boone encouraged authors to use common words of one or two syllables (not counting -ed or -ing) in general, but there are some longer words (e.g., university) that are familiar and some short words that may not be. Any substitutions of terminology, then, had to be precise and sensitive to adult experiences, and technical words had to be correct. Swearing and sex are part of adult experiences, of course, so Boone found ways of including these themes while making sure they were not so explicit that they would make readers or their tutors uncomfortable.

Copy editing

The copy editing was handled by an editor working for Grass Roots Press, but Boone did offer some guidelines, including a style sheet for each project. In particular, she encouraged using commas for absolute clarity (e.g., around “too” and even short clauses), explaining that commas give the eye and the mind a break. Speakers’ individual voices were respected in dialogue, but standard grammar, punctuation, and spelling were enforced in the narrative.

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Supporting the text, Aalto told us, were clear page layouts with a readable typeface and a lot of white space . The books were given eye-catching covers. Beyond the books, the Good Reads website features further resources for readers and instructors, including videos of interviews with the authors, text of the first chapter of each book, and audio of the authors reading from their books. Teachers could also download a free guide for each title. The series has done quite well, Aalto was proud to say, although she added that there’s no way HRSDC would fund such a series today; all literacy efforts are going into workplace training, leaving little room for pleasure reading. However, Orca Books has started a similar series called Rapid Reads, and Grass Roots has committed to distributing those titles.

As for Boone, she found the project extremely rewarding, explaining that the usual pleasure and intimacy of working with authors was increased by working together toward an altruistic objective. She said that the ordinary principles of effective writing are easily forgotten by fluent, university-level readers, writers, and editors but that simpler is always better, even for complex ideas. Practising simple expression can help sharpen thought.

Marjorie Simmins—The editor and the memoirist: creating your best working relationship (EAC conference 2013)

“Between every line of a memoir is a pounding heart,” said Marjorie Simmins. In her presentation at the EAC conference in Halifax, Simmins, an award-winning writer who makes her living as a journalist, editor, and instructor, shared some of her wisdom about how an editor can make the most out of the sometimes intimate, sometimes delicate, and often rewarding relationship with a memoirist.

“Memoir is impossible to define,” said Simmins. “It’s a bit like a pool of mercury.” Memoirs can be poetry; they can be prose; they can be hybrid of genres. They can be illustrated; they can be literary. They can be about a regular person, a celebrity, or even a family. “Memoir,” Simmins explained, “is a chapter in someone’s life,” in contrast to an autobiography, which is a look at the whole life. “Memoir is supposed to be a piece of time, and it often relates to a particular event.”

Simmins brought along a selection of her favourite memoirs, from Linden MacIntyre’s Causeway to Laura Beatrice Berton’s I Married the Klondike to Joanna Claire Wong’s Wong Family Feast, to show us the vast range that memoirs can cover. Common to all good memoirs, however, is an affecting story, said Simmins, and it takes a skilled writer to achieve just the right balance of sentiment.

Editors can make a meaningful difference in the life of a memoirist, Simmins explained, but not every memoirist–editor pair will work. Luck, and chemistry, also factor into the relationship. “Trust your first impressions,” she advised, when considering whether to take on a project, and define the limits of the relationship through clear communication. “I try to avoid the phone,” she told us, “because people don’t think it takes you any time.” When she agrees to work on a memoir, Simmins first evaluates the manuscript, offering the author a candid overview of her response to the writing and detailing the sections that work well and those that don’t. Candour doesn’t mean insensitivity, of course, especially since memoirists often find it hard to separate themselves from the text and may take umbrage at what they perceive as criticism. After her evaluation, she performs careful line and copy editing to polish the text.

She’ll do her best to fact check, confirming names, dates, and historical references. Some manuscripts require a lot of fact checking, said Simmins, and you’ll generally know how intensive it will be from the first page. Some facts simply can’t be checked, however, and although truth and accuracy are important, so is imagination, Simmins emphasized: “No one can truly remember being three years old,” and even real people, when they are characters in a memoir, still need to be engaging and believable.

Making sure someone gets published, she said, is not her job. Having a work published may not even be a priority for some memoirists, who might write simply to unburden their souls. Memoirs are “truly written in heart’s blood,” said Simmins, and a memoirist might produce only one work in a lifetime, and so it’s particularly important for an editor to be diplomatic and open minded. She warned us that, especially for editors who work as writers, the work lines can get blurred. Occasionally she’ll catch herself thinking, “Oh, I can fix this!” but before she does, she has to remind herself to pull back and instead offer the author guidance and suggestions on what could improve the text.

Memoirists can take things very personally, and Simmins suggested that editors “learn to fend off bullies. They’re out there. Some people just want to criticize everything you do. But you know when you’ve done a good job, and you can beg to differ in a polite way.” She advocated keeping a professional distance from the work. If you get too invested, “you’ll be eaten alive.”

Not every editor is suited to working with memoirists. Some editors, for example, prefer not to work with people and might be better off quietly editing government documents. For Simmins, however, editing memoirs is enormously rewarding, as she knows that her contribution can bring a stranger “great psychic happiness.” She closed her talk with some terrific perspective, courtesy of Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”

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Marjorie Simmins’s own memoir, Coastal Lives, about her embracing the identify of Maritimer after moving to Nova Scotia from the West Coast, will be published by Pottersfield Press in 2014.

Pilar Wyman—Metadata, marketing, and more (ISC conference 2013)

Pilar Wyman (@pilarw on Twitter) is the immediate past president of the American Society for Indexing, as well as a member of the ASI’s Digital Trends Task Force, and she spoke at the ISC conference about promoting indexes as metadata and showing our clients how our indexes can be used as sales tools for their books.

We’re used to thinking of a book’s metadata as information about the book as a product—its title, author, ISBN, etc.—but a book’s index can also serve as metadata: each index heading and subheading can be thought of as a tag for a chunk of text that we want readers to see. As a result, readers can use this metadata to provide them with a filtered view of the content that reveals specific facets or dimensions of a book.

Indexes, Wyman argues, are as important for ebooks as a search function. They

  • add browsability and help readers find what they need by expanding the number of access points to content
  • serve as a navigational tool
  • offer pre-analysis: indexes give readers a good sense of the range of topics covered and the importance of each
  • provide a conversation with the reader, allowing publishers to show what their product has to offer

Wyman advocates giving away a book’s index for free (as Amazon essentially does with its Look Inside feature) as a marketing strategy, to let readers know what they could be getting. She also showed us the potential of index mashups, in which you combine the indexes of several publications in a collection, allowing users to browse or search across all of them. These mashups could be enormously useful for “scrapbook files”—collections of content from a variety of sources, as you’d find in a university course pack, for example.  Each heading in the mashed-up index is a link, taking you either directly to the content or to a summary screen of available information, with context. Most importantly for publishers, these indexes would offer users a direct link to purchase any of the books included in the mashup.

To exploit this marketing potential of ebook indexes, whether they are standalone indexes or mashups, publishers should link them—both in to the content and out to further resources or places to buy the book. These linked indexes should be included as back-of-the-file chapters or, better yet, in the front of an ebook so that the index gets searched first. For usability, the index should be accessible wherever you are in the book (just as you can flip to the back of a print book anytime you want), and the “find” tool should bring up the best hits, as identified by the index. Results should show snippets of a term in context, and cross-references should help the reader refine their search terms.

Generic cross-references can often present a dilemma for the indexer (e.g., Does See specific battles really give readers the information they need?), but Wyman’s vision for the EPUB index eliminates this problem: “specific battles” would link to a list of those battles, which would in turn link to the corresponding headings in the index. She also adds that smart use of tagging would allow you to filter not only based on concept but also type of content. For example, many of us already indicate definitions with boldface, images with italics, etc. This “decoration metadata,” as Wyman calls it, can be another layer of information that users can use to narrow their search down to what they need. Wyman also introduced the concept of a reverse index: users can highlight a section of text and discover what terms in the index are associated with it, allowing them to easily jump to other places in the text that discuss the same topic.

As indexers, Wyman said, we’re already skilled at figuring out aboutness and can easily apply those skills, especially if we’re already familiar with embedded indexing, to semantic tagging of text. If we can persuade our clients of the value of using our indexes as a sales tool, we can further leverage our expertise.

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(My take: I think the idea of index mashups is brilliant. My colleagues who work in academic publishing spend huge amounts of time compiling different catalogues for different subject areas and markets. Offering one index mashup of all of their Aboriginal studies titles and another for their women’s studies titles, for example, could allow them to show the breadth and depth of their list to particular target markets, including academics considering course adoptions and subject-specific libraries.)

Derek Hayes wins inaugural Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize

Congratulations to Derek Hayes, whose British Columbia: A New Historical Atlas has picked up yet another honour! Hayes’s visually stunning opus has won the Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book on British Columbia, a new award from UBC Library and the Pacific BookWorld News Society. More details here.

The Alcuin Society honours Will Rueter and The Aliquando Press

The Alcuin Society gave its sixth annual Robert R. Reid Award and Medal for lifetime achievement in the book arts to Will Rueter—teacher, printmaker, bookbinder, graphic designer, one-time senior designer at the University of Toronto Press, and founder of The Aliquando Press, a private press based in Dundas, Ontario. To celebrate this honour, the Alcuin Society invited Rueter and fellow private press owner Rollin Milroy (of Heavenly Monkey) to sit down for an informal interview and chat.

To kick off the evening, Alcuin board member Ralph Stanton acknowledged Leah Gordon, who helped organize the event, as well as special guests in the audience—patron Yosef Wosk; Don McLeod, editor of The Devil’s Artisan magazine; Stan Bevington of Coach House Press; typographer Rod McDonald; Chester and Camilla Gryski of Toronto; and of course Will Rueter himself. Stanton introduced Rueter, a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, who established The Aliquando Press in 1963 and has published over one hundred books and broadsheets, as well as interviewer Rollin Milroy, who, through Heavenly Monkey, has published about three dozen books, the archives of which are housed in Rare Books and Special Collections at UBC Library.

Milroy began his interview by asking Rueter about his background; as it turns out, Rueter’s family has a long history in the book arts. His grandfather’s brother was a Dutch artist who created patterned papers, some of which found its way into Rueter’s Majesty, Order and Beauty: Selections from the Journals of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. Rueter’s father was a printmaker as well, although because his parents were divorced, Rueter never got a chance to see his father’s private press.

He travelled to Europe to meet his Dutch family in 1960, and he lived in London for ten months. “I had no money but was able to find a small job and soak up whatever I could,” he said. When he got the opportunity to see the Book of Kells, which was being exhibited at the Royal Academy on loan from Ireland, he became excited about the physical properties of the book.

Rueter returned to Canada, where he worked for while in a bookstore and discovered the work of Frank Newfeld. He became inspired to be a book designer and wanted to be able to do everything himself. The hurdle, Rueter explained, was that he knew nothing about making books.

Rueter bought a tabletop press and, under the mentorship of Stan Bevington, began to design and print. It was an exciting time for typography in Ontario, said Rueter: advertising design was strong, and that aesthetic seeped out into book design. Private presses were experimenting with exciting ways of presenting information, poetry, and essays. With the encouragement of designer and typographer Leslie (Sam) Smart, Rueter returned to Europe in 1968 and spent three months reading, looking at time, and visiting the Monotype Works. When he returned to Canada, he had no job, and he applied for a graphic design position at the University of Toronto Press.

Milroy asked if Rueter was interested in publishing generally or in academic publishing specifically. Rueter replied that he would have been happy with any job in publishing but he was lucky to have ended up at the University of Toronto Press, saying that his boss, Allan Fleming, gave him an awful lot of confidence. Rueter noted that scholarly publishing pushed him to find creative ways of tackling what he called “the minutiae of scholarly design”—the bits and pieces including footnotes, block quotes, tables, charts, and images—and he adapted many of those ideas to his work at The Aliquando Press, which occupied his evenings and weekends.

Rueter told us that he and Jim Rimmer shared a mentor in Paul Duensing. Duensing loved monotype machines and designed and cast his own type. He owned his own foundry and was in the unique position of being a one-man shop. Through Duensing, Rueter met Leonard Bahr of Adagio Press. Bahr, said Rueter, was a type-A personality—“He was once hospitalized because he found a typo in a book he’d just printed,” Rueter said, prompting raucous laughter. “He was totally passionate about type and books.” Bahr had wanted to write a book on private printing and even set some of it in type, but he never completed it. Miraculously, Rueter said, he’d kept Bahr’s galley proofs, and on the fiftieth anniversary of The Aliquando Press, Rueter printed Pressing Matters, a book in Bahr’s honour. Bahr’s first two chapters became the first two essays of the book; Bahr had written an outline for the subsequent chapters but hadn’t gotten any further. Pressing Matters also included correspondence from Paul Duensing and a contribution about the economics of the private press publishing from Rollin Milroy. Rueter contributed an afterword, “Printing Is Pleasure,” about the state of the private press today.

“What about the future?” Rollin Milroy asked. “I can’t make any prognostications,” Rueter answered, adding that he hopes the private press will continue to exist even if technological changes mean that the physical book may not exist at a commercial scale. “I can’t imagine not having a private press,” said Rueter, explaining that he feels he’s been able to hide behind the press—that the discipline of making books has forged his sense of self and has been a kind of salvation for him. He hopes that in the future we uphold “the importance of the text—always the text—because that’s what we work for.”

Milroy showed some examples of Rueter’s hand lettering, asking, “Do you think it’s important for people interested in the graphic arts to render letters by hand?”

“Absolutely,” answered Rueter. “It’s important to appreciate the subtlety of letterforms,” as well as the relationships between them. He mentioned that he’d tried to design his own typeface, but it was clunky and just didn’t work. “Letterforms are not necessarily type,” he elaborated. They have their own rules and disciplines when they become type.”

Rollin Milroy mentioned that he and Rueter both shared a strong interest in music, as well as a desire to express that interest through printing and books. “Why do you see these two media overlapping?” Rueter admitted that he has great difficulty with music and that he can’t read it. But he says he can’t print without music. “Letterpress printing and private printing have a kind of parallel relationship with early music,” he said. Whereas a piano is refined, he explained, earlier instruments such as harpsichords and lutes have a kind of tension; you get sour notes if they are not well tuned, much like a letterpress.

How, asked Milroy, does someone wanting to create their own press today get started? “Talk to anyone who’s actually printing,” said Rueter. “Read the classics.” He recommended several titles, including

  • D.B. Updike’s Printing Types
  • Just My Type by Simon Garfield
  • The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree
  • Letterpress Now by Jessica White

“Be devoted to printing, want to learn,” said Rueter. “There is no money to be made, but you can have a lot of fun.” He added that one of the joys of letterpress these days is the flexibility to experiment offered by polymer plates.

Milroy asked Rueter which of his own books were his favourite. Rueter mentioned the following:

  • The Articulation of Time, a book he printed twenty years ago, “the first time I really became aware of my own mortality,” he said. The book features a lot of quotations and poetry that had meaning to him at the time.
  • Diary of an Amaryllis, which features colour reproductions of drawings by Rueter’s wife, who illustrated the life cycle of an amaryllis plant.
  • Majesty, Order and Beauty, the diary of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. Rueter described Sanderson (1840–1922) as “one of the most complex people. He started life as a barrister but then became the best bookbinder of the nineteenth century. He wrote journals and was an important figure in the early fine-press movement.”

“Private printers do work in very strange ways,” Rueter said. He offered a quote from Henry James, saying “He’s talking about writing, but I think it says a lot about private printing and its frustrations: ‘We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we can… The rest is madness of art.”

The evening ended with a tribute from last year’s Robert R. Reid recipient, Stan Bevington, who said of Rueter’s work, “Every letter has been picked up by hand. And his choice of paper is exquisite… As a designer at the University of Toronto Press, the largest university press in Canada, Will Rueter made a great contribution to setting high standards for commercial printing.” At Aliquando, Bevington added, Rueter is involved in every aspect: selecting texts, editing, designing, writing, illustrating, setting type, and printing. He has come a long way from his first book, A Bach Fugue, which Rueter derided as having “derivative design and poor inking” to the impressive opus of Majesty, Order and Beauty, which was his hundredth publication.

Each of the audience members got to go home with a special keepsake—a gorgeously printed and incisive quote from Latin grammarian Terentianus: “Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli”—or “The fate of books depends on the capacity of the reader.”

Upcoming editing and publishing events

A lot is happening over this next week! I hope to be posting about all of these editing- and publishing-related events—though probably not all at once. Look for my summaries over the next few weeks.

1. Ethics for editors

Having been a member of the Editors’ Association of Canada’s code of ethics task force about a year and a half ago, I’m very interested to hear what Mary Schendlinger will have to say about ethical dimensions of editing at her EAC-BC seminar on Saturday. At our January EAC-BC meeting, David Harrison and some members of his audience had discussed whether a code of ethics was the only piece of the puzzle we were missing before we could consider editing a bona fide profession. Schendlinger will tackle such issues as how creative a piece of creative non-fiction can be and how best to navigate a situation in which an author has used racist or sexist language.

Registration for this seminar is closed, but if you can’t attend and have some ethics-related questions about editing, get in touch with me, and I’d be happy to take them to the session and bring back whatever answers I can get.

2. Plain language certification

Katherine McManus, director of the SFU Writing and Communications Program, will speak at our March EAC-BC meeting about SFU’s role in the project by IC Clear, the International Consortium for Clear Communication, to launch certification in clear communication and plain language. McManus will also give us a preview of the upcoming PLAIN 2013 conference in October, where IC Clear hopes to pilot its first course. Join us on Wednesday, March 20, at 7pm, at the YWCA on Hornby.

3. Robert R. Reid Award and Medal to Will Rueter

The Alcuin Society will present its Robert R. Reid Award and Medal for lifetime achievement in the book arts to William Rueter of Aliquando Press on Thursday, March 21. At the free event, which starts at 7:30pm at SFU Harbour Centre,  Rollin Milroy of Heavenly Monkey will interview Rueter and show illustrations of Rueter’s work.

Book review: Book Production

More than any other role in publishing, production seems to be one in which people learn by doing. Whereas editors and designers have a wealth of  professional development courses and workshops at their disposal, those who shepherd publications through the production process don’t have as many options for structured learning. Some design courses touch on how to liaise with commercial printers, but most of the managing editors and production managers I know started off in either editorial or design and fell into the rather critical role of project management without specific project management training.

The lack of formal training hasn’t been particularly detrimental to those in production, who are generally tapped for those jobs because they’re already super organized and are adept at problem solving. What courses and workshops also offer beyond just their content, though, is a tribal culture, where you can learn from more experienced peers through an oral history of sorts. When that aspect is missing in your career, it can be pretty easy to feel isolated.

Enter Adrian Bullock, a publishing veteran who has written Book Production (published by Routledge), a lucid and comprehensive guide to everything from project management and prepress to printing, binding, and getting stock into the warehouse. Written in crystal clear, plain English, this book offers practical advice about how best to balance the needs of a book’s various stakeholders, recognizing that in the real world, the goal of publication production management is to reach an acceptable compromise between speed, quality, and cost. Eschewing the sentimentality that publishing-related books often carry—about the industry’s contributions to culture, the beauty of books as artifacts, etc.—Bullock’s book is grounded in the best practices of making the business of publishing viable:

The big difference between a publishing project and, say, building a school, is that publishing projects are usually carried out in a highly competitive, commercial environment, where there is an unremitting drive to produce new products and a premium on bringing them to market as speedily and cheaply as possible, working in the knowledge that someone else might get there before you, and produce a better or cheaper project into the bargain.

In this kind of environment time becomes speed, money becomes price, and quality can become relative. Skills, equipment and project logic are all co-ordinated to make the project move faster and cost less than one’s competitors can. (p. 7)

One of the book’s major strengths is the way in which it formalizes project management principles in a publishing context. Bullock emphasizes the need for a well-defined project management cycle that incorporates a clearly articulated plan, implementation, and also a post-mortem phase:

It is precisely because life in production can be so relentlessly hectic and busy, and there is a tendency to move without thinking from one project to another, that reflection plays such a vital part in project management, and why reflection should be formalized to become standard procedure at the end of a project, giving everyone involved a chance to discuss what they think went well, what didn’t go well and how things can be done better the next time. Reflections should take no longer than 20–30 minutes, especially if project team members know that it is standard, and come to the meeting prepared. (p. 76)

Bullock is clear about the many demands of a job in book production. Above all, however, a project manager must be a good communicator:

Communication is a vital tool in managing the project: its value cannot be overstated. Poor quality communication is one of the commonest causes of unsuccessful projects… (p. 21)

Communication starts with the project definition and continues right through to completion. The more that people directly, and indirectly, involved in the project know about it, the better. Telling people – in-house staff, suppliers and other stakeholders, what is expected and what is happening, helps to manage expectations and eliminates last-minute surprises. (p. 22)

A sound project definition notwithstanding, the number of variables in a project mean that something will likely go wrong somewhere. Adrian Bullock offers this level-headed advice:

It’s only when the problem has been solved and the project is moving forward again – and only then – that you can start to work out what went wrong, how it went wrong, whose fault it is, how to prevent it recurring, and the amount of compensation you could reasonably expect, if the supplier is at fault. Remember that the person whose fault it might be could well be the person most able to sort out the problem. (p. 73)

Whereas Book Production‘s first section deals with managing editorial and design, its second half looks at physical production. Bullock gives a fascinating overview of the raw materials that go into a book—how paper is made, what kinds of inks are used for printing and glue for binding, etc.—and offers tips about selecting an appropriate commercial printer. Throughout, he reminds readers to be mindful of environmental issues, from considering recycled paper options to keeping track of the number of book miles that stock has to travel.

With the increased awareness of environmental and green issues, you would want to know how green your printer is in terms of how it manages its impact on the environment. This could be through an accredited environmental management system (EMS), which has been certified to a recognized standard such as ISO 14001. Or it could be that the printer has reduced its emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from printing, uses recycled paper, is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified and has policies for waste recycling and energy reduction. (p. 65)

Bullock mentions several other standards and certification programs that production managers should be aware of, many of which can help streamline workflow. For example, ISO 9001 certification means that a printer has excellent quality management systems in place, making it unnecessary, some publishers believe, to proof printer’s proofs; using the International Color Consortium colour management system can eliminate the need for colour correction; and

JDF [Job Definition Format] is an XML-based industry standard, which is being developed by the international consortium CIP4 (the International Co-operation for the Integration of Processes in Prepress, Press and Postpress Organization). According to the CIP4 website, JDF:

  • ‘is designed to streamline information exchange between different applications and systems
  • is intended to enable the entire industry, including media, design, graphic arts, on-demand and e-commerce companies, to implement and work with individual workflow solutions
  • will allow integration of heterogenous products from diverse vendors to create seamless workflow solutions.’ (p. 98)

This last example shows that although Book Production is focused mainly on traditional print books, it also gives up-to-date information about XML and other digital workflows, as well as print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies. This book is packed with case studies that show the reader what kinds of scenarios can arise in book production and how best to implement the ideas that Bullock has laid out in the text. Those new to book production will appreciate this book’s clarity and thoroughness. Seasoned production managers will find affirmation in having their practices validated and reinforced, and they may even learn about some recent developments that might make their jobs a lot easier.

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Rather than give this book away at an upcoming EAC-BC meeting, as I’ve done with the other books I’ve reviewed, I’ll be offering my copy of Book Production as a door prize to participants of the upcoming PubPro 2013 professional development event. Register now!

Editing books in translation

Yesterday I gave a talk at the EAC-BC meeting about editing books in translation, and I was buoyed by the thought-provoking discussions that came out of the audience, which was packed with expertise. Here’s a short summary of my presentation.

Why translations?

Unlike a piece of visual art, which virtually anyone can see and appreciate, a book has an audience limited to those who understand the language in which it’s written. When you work on a translation, you’re bringing a work of art, a point of view, or a piece of knowledge to a much broader audience than it previously had—a pretty powerful idea, when you think about it. Canadian historian of translation Louis Kelly declared that “Western Europe owes its civilization to translators,” and although that statement may seem grandiose, the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance wouldn’t have played out the way they did if the Bible and classical Greek and Latin texts hadn’t been translated into the vernacular.

On a more practical level, publishers like translations because, in a way, they mitigate a bit of the risk of cultural production. If you know that the source text has done well in its native territory and your target audience has a comparable culture, there’s a decent chance the translation may also do well. (On the flip side, publishers have to contend with the notion—whether it’s real or merely perceived—that the reading public is loath to buy translations.) Publishers also like translations because they’re often subsidized. Grants from the Canada Council for the Arts or from other funding bodies are available to offset the cost of producing translations for certain kinds of books (eligibility criteria vary depending on the type of program).

If you’re an editor, translations are a great way to cut your teeth: with the odd exception, they involve no structural editing, and most of the work is copy editing, with a bit of stylistic editing. You also get to work with translators, who, because they are language professionals like you, understand the role of the editor and often come into the working relationship with an eagerness to start a dialogue about the text. Many translators are also editors (in fact, I often like to think about stylistic editing as translating from English to English), and because both parties are, in a sense, working with what one translator called “borrowed words,” the relationship can be really collaborative and dynamic. You would normally be working with a translator who’s translating from the source language into his or her mother tongue, so, even if you don’t know the source language, there’s no language barrier to worry about.

Copyright and contracts

As the editor of a book in translation, you have to be aware of three different contracts:

  • the contract for the translation rights
  • the contract with the translator
  • the agreement with the funding body

The contract for the translation rights is usually between the publisher of the translation and the publisher of the original text, although occasionally it’s between the publisher of the translation and the author. An author has to authorize a translation before it can be published, and the translation rights have to be assigned to the publisher—this contract typically serves both of these functions. For an illustrated book, those rights may or may not include image rights. This contract may also specify an approval process for the translation, as well as the format of the copyright notice on the translation’s copyright page.

The contract with the translator defines the scope of the translator’s work—any tasks that fall beyond that scope (e.g., translating praise quotes for marketing copy) may mean the publisher has to pay extra—as well as project timelines. This contract will also specify how the translator will be credited. (Because a publisher will often try to downplay the fact that a translation is a translation, the translator’s name may not have to appear on the cover but would appear on the title and copyright pages.)

The agreement with the funding body, whether it’s the Canada Council or a foreign organization, such as the Goethe-Institut or China Book International or NORLA (Norwegian Literature Abroad), will usually include the exact wording of an acknowledgement clause, and possibly a logo, that must appear in the published translation. If you fail to include this clause, the publisher may lose its translation funding.

A publisher might not allow you to see these contracts directly, but you should know to ask for these specific pieces of information so that you can complete the project properly. Any tasks that these agreements don’t cover—for example, clearing image rights or handling text permissions—may fall to you as the book’s editor. The publisher may also ask you to approach well-known people to write a foreword or cover blurb for the book.

Working with a translated manuscript

When you receive the finished manuscript from the translator, the only structural work you’d be expected to do is a quick concordance check to make sure that all of the paragraphs in the original appear in the translation. Otherwise, you’re mostly copy editing, although you’ll want to offer stylistic suggestions when something in the translation doesn’t sound quite right.

You don’t have to know the source language to edit a translation, although, in my experience, having some experience with the source language can help you know what to look out for (and, as we’ll see later, can help you land work), including problems such as false cognates. Also pay attention to idioms that don’t work in the target language; you may have to suggest different idioms that convey the same concept. Prepositions are by far the most idiomatic part of speech, so if a sentence sounds a little off, check the prepositions to see if the appropriate ones have been used. When a translator is switching back and forth between languages, it’s really easy to use a preposition that works for the source but not for the target language. Finally, punctuation is treated differently in different languages, so be sure that the punctuation in the manuscript is appropriate to the target language.

As you would for any manuscript, keep an eye out for quoted passages that may require permission to reproduce. Text permissions in translations are an especially tricky issue, because they can be multilayered—for example, even if a passage in the source text is in the public domain, the translation of the passage in the target language may still be under copyright. Avoid what the Chicago Manual of Style calls “the sin of retranslation”—if the quote in the source text had been translated from the target language, the translator must track down the original quote rather than translating it anew.

Always ask the publisher for a copy of the source text. Not only do you need to do an initial concordance check, but you’ll want to be able to refer to the source if you run into passages in the translation that sound strange or awkward because of possible homonym confusion. Tools such as source language–target language dictionaries, and terminology databases like Termium can come in handy in those situations. (Of course, you’d never send a whole novel through Google Translate, but the tool can be useful for interpreting one or two problematic sentences as a starting point to a discussion with the translator.)

Other translation-related issues that you often hear about—including whether the translation should be literal or free, whether a translator should define unfamiliar terms with footnotes or glosses, how to approach culturally sensitive topics—are usually, if you’re working with an experienced professional translator, within the translator’s domain. You should absolutely be aware of these issues, since the translator may look to you for discussion or advice, but in many cases you won’t be expected to play too hands-on a role. With a less experienced editor, however, you may be called on to offer more input on these matters.

Finding work as an editor of translations

If you’re interested in editing books in translations, start, as you would for any kind of book editing, with a query letter to a publisher, but specify your interest in translations. (Of course, it helps to know someone on the inside, which is why it’s important to build relationships with publishers in other ways.) You can check the Canada Council website for a list of translation grants that have been awarded to find out which publishers in the country publish translations. Try also to build relationships with translators—such as members of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada—because a translator who knows you and trusts your work may recommend you to his or her publisher.

If you know a second language, you can offer your services as a reader. Publishers return from the London Book Fair in the spring and the Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall with boxes of books in languages they may not know how to read; they’ll offer readers a fee to read and evaluate whether translations of these books might be good fits on their lists. If you identify a promising project and the publisher goes ahead with it, you’d be a natural choice to edit it.

Do a bit of research into funding programs for translations that are available outside of Canada. Many countries are eager to export their literature and have ministries of culture or associated organizations that subsidize foreign translations. If you approach a publisher right before a book fair with the pitch that you’re available as a reader, you’ve built connections with several literary translators, and you’re aware of a specific funding body that might subsidize the cost of a translation, that’s a pretty compelling package.

When evaluating books as a reader, consider the following:

Does it fit on the publisher’s list?

This point may seem obvious, but it can be tempting to recommend a book project even if it’s not a good fit just so that you’ll get to work on it. Doing so would only sabotage your credibility with the publisher.

How much localization does the work need?

Would the book need to be changed in any way to be comprehensible to the translation’s readership? Would the book benefit from a foreword?

How long will the translation be?

French texts are about 20% longer than English texts, and Spanish about 25% longer than English. if the original is short to begin with, will a translation be too slight to publish? Length is less of a concern for ebooks but is definitely a consideration for print books.

Are there image or text permissions to worry about?

Flag these for the publisher, because they may add to the schedule or to the budget, and they may affect how the publisher approaches the contract for translation rights.

For illustrated books, is there reverse type?

If the publisher of the translation hopes to use the same printer as the originating publisher, reverse type means added production costs: rather than replacing just the black plate, the printer would have to replace all four CMYK plates. Flag instances of reverse type so that the publisher is at least aware of them.

Further resources

If you’d like to learn more about the world of books in translation, I highly recommend Translators on Translating by Andrew Wilson and Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman. You may also find resources on the websites of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, the Canadian Translators, Terminologists and Interpreters Council, the Society of Translators and Interpreters of British Columbia, and similar groups in other provinces.

February EAC-BC meeting

A week from today, on Wednesday, February 20, I’ll be giving a talk at the EAC-BC meeting about editing books in translation. I’ll talk about copyright, the editor–translator relationship, special issues in translation projects, and strategies for getting work as an editor of translations. I’ll also be giving away a couple of books that I’ve recently reviewed: Science in Print and Book Was There. Come join us (but leave all of your tough questions at home)!

There’s a pre-meeting pay-as-you-go dinner:

Elephant & Castle
385 Burrard Street (Marine Building)
5:00pm–6:45pm
RSVP here by the end of the day Monday, February 18

followed by the meeting at the usual location:

YWCA
535 Hornby Street, fourth floor
7:00pm–9:00pm

I start blathering at 7:30pm.

For those of you who can’t make it but still care, I’ll post a summary of my talk here by the end of next week.

Book review: Book Was There

As a professor of literature at McGill University, Andrew Piper is, in essence, a professional reader, and he brings this experience to his latest book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (University of Chicago Press), in which he offers a very personal meditation on our evolving relationship with reading. In what ways is a physical book more than its content? How have screens and digital technologies changed the way we understand, interact with, and share texts? Writes Piper in the book’s prologue,

This book is not a case for or against books. It is not about old media or new media (or even new new media). Instead, it is an attempt to understand the relationship between books and screens, to identify some of their fundamental differences and to chart the continuities that might run between them. (p. ix)

Their “fundamental differences” dominate the content of the book, since the similarities between books and screens are perhaps more obvious. Piper wonders whether, in the era of ebooks, we have become a culture of skimmers—the slipperiness of digital text and the immediacy of the page turn on e-reading devices mean that we don’t give ourselves the chance to digest what we read. Exacerbating this problem is a glut of content:

We have entered into an exponential relationship to the growth of reading material. Like many parents or educators, I worry that the growing expanse of reading pulls us apart, not just socially, but also personally. The incessant insistence on the functionality of reading—that there must be some “value” to it—only amplifies this problem. When there is so much more to read and when we are always reading for some purpose, we are only ever “catching up.” (p. 129)

The social aspect of reading is key to Piper’s book. Reading in itself is an act of isolation, yet by reading, we develop a common culture that socializes us. We catalyze that socialization by sharing what we read, and Piper notes that whereas sharing a printed book is a meaningful act—not only do you give something up to another reader, but by doing so you also make public your appreciation and endorsement for that book—sharing digital content may not carry the same weight:

If I do not have any collection of digital files in the same way as my books, will I be able to give them away in the same manner? When I pass down my books to my children, I imagine I will be sharing with them as sense of time. Books are meaningful because as material objects they bear time within themselves. (p. 107)

As much as Piper attempts to remain above the fray in the oft-promoted argument that digital reading and ebooks spell the death of print, his text is tinged throughout with nostalgia for print books—or, at least, for their former primacy as the authoritative sources of human knowledge. He argues that each time a new technology replicates a book’s functionality in terms of conveying content, we try to load it with features that replicate other aspects of a printed book, whether it be the ability to hold it in our hands, turn pages, or jot down marginal notes. The relationship between print and digital texts, however, doesn’t have to be antagonistic; their co-existence could have benefits to understanding:

The use of multiple channels—speech, scroll, book—is the best guarantee that a message will be received, that individuals will arrive at a sense of shared meaning. Like the book’s ability to conjoin the different faculties of touch, sight, and sound into a single medium, according to the tradition of the Codex Manesse the book itself is imagined to reside within a more diverse ecology of information. When we think about media death, about the idea of the end of certain technologies, we do well to remember this medieval insistence on the need for redundancy, the importance of communicating the same thing through different channels. (p. 7)

As much as he is a champion of the printed book (downplay that fact as he may), Piper acknowledges that some digital technologies can be used to enhance our understanding of text. I like this example:

Feature Lens, which was developed by the Human–Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, is a program that allows you to view meaningful semantic patterns within large structures of texts. For Tanya Clement, who undertook an analysis of Gertrude Stein’s famously difficulty and repetitive novel The Making of Americans (1925), the interface revealed a range of structural patterns so far unnoticed by readers. (p. 141)

Although Book Was There raises some interesting points, I didn’t find any of what Piper wrote particularly revelatory, and because the text was so personal to him, there were portions to which I just couldn’t relate and that made me feel disengaged from the book. Maybe I’m not well-read enough to appreciate the author’s many literary references, but their liberal use, often in places where I would have found historical or scientific examples more persuasive, made some of his conclusions seem tenuous. He reads a lot into shared terminology between the print and digital worlds—pages and page views, the faces of Facebook and the faces of typefaces, etc.—extracting meaning where I simply see a metaphor to allow users to relate to new technologies. Although I appreciate Piper’s enthusiasm for this topic, I would stop short of recommending this book to anyone looking for objective and rigorous insight into the act and consequences of reading. Instead I’ll cross my fingers and hope that Alberto Manguel will one day decide to update A History of Reading to encompass the digital age.