Category: Books

An amazing honour

Holy crap! I won the Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence!

The award was announced at the Editors’ Association of Canada banquet on the evening of Saturday, June 2, and I was completely surprised. Thanks again to author Florian Werner, translator Doris Ecker, foreworder Temple Grandin and her wonderful assistant Cheryl Miller, proofreader Lara Smith, designer Naomi MacDougall (interior), cover designer Peter Cocking, and the whole D&M production department for making Cow happen. Thanks to Rob Sanders for trusting me with the project, and a million thanks to Nancy Flight for nominating me for the award and for encouraging me along the way.

Thanks to the EAC for having this award in the first place, and thanks to the donors, awards committee, and judges for this tremendous honour.

I had the pleasure of having a long conversation with fellow finalist Peter Midgley about our respective editing projects—both translations, interestingly enough. I’m very sorry he couldn’t have shared in the award with me, because it sounded as though we had parallel experiences. I look forward to reading the book he edited, The Man in Blue Pyjamas.

East Meets West VIP launch

I just got back from the VIP launch for Stephanie Yuen’s cookbook East Meets West at Lin’s Chinese Cuisine, where Chef Zhang and his staff treated us to delicious snacks, including Lin’s signature xiao long bao, as well as a tan-tan noodle demonstration. It was great to chat with the ol’ D&M crew and meet the author in person, and each of us came away with a swank gift bag from Sunrise Soya Foods and Hon’s Wun-Tun House.

Exploring Vancouver pubs

Starting tomorrow you can get your own copy of Exploring Vancouver: An Architectural Guide, the story of Vancouver as told through its architecture. The book is organized into fourteen walking/driving tours of the city’s neighbourhoods and its closest suburbs, each showcasing structures of note—for their architectural excellence or for their historical significance. Architectural historian Harold Kalman and architectural critic Robin Ward have put together an authoritative but accessible guide featuring eye-popping photography by John Roaf in a stunning package designed by the fabulous Naomi MacDougall.

East Meets West event at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks

Over the course of two years food writer Stephanie Yuen scoured Vancouver’s Asian food scene for the best dishes from some of the city’s most acclaimed Asian restaurants, and the result is East Meets West, a gorgeous, full-colour cookbook featuring not only eighty-eight mouth-watering recipes but also an introduction to the ingredients commonly used in Asian cooking and a directory of where to find some of Vancouver’s best Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Thai, Filipino, Indian, and Nepalese cuisine. Stephanie will be signing books at a free public event at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks on Saturday, April 28, from 11 am to 2 pm. Call 604-688-6755 to RSVP.

An Alcuin Award for Fred Herzog: Photographs

Congratulations to D&M’s art director, Peter Cocking, who won second prize in the pictorial category at the Alcuin Awards for his design of Fred Herzog: Photographs, featuring text by Claudia Gochmann, Douglas Coupland, Sarah Milroy, and Jeff Wall. D&M’s design team has a tradition of doing well at the Alcuins, this year winning seven awards in four categories.

Find a full list of winners here.

Coach House Press as a digital pioneer

Last evening Laraine Coates and I went to see John Maxwell give a talk to the Alcuin Society about Coach House Press as a digital pioneer.

Coach House is known as a literary house and a design and printing house. But, John says, a research project he’s undertaken over the past several years reveals that Coach House has a fascinating history of digital innovations in publishing, which shows that innovation doesn’t necessarily require massive amounts of capital, trained technical professionals, or corporate secrecy. Coach House’s innovation was more down to earth—a product of a love of learning and willingness to tinker.

Coach House’s beginnings are legendary: at the height of the Great Canadian Flag Debate of 1964, Stan Bevington sold screen-printed Canadian flags in Toronto and eventually made enough money to buy his first printing press, which he set up in a coach house. Coach House Press started printing posters, then moved into books. Initially the books were hand set; then Coach House acquired a Linotype machine. In the late 1960s, as Coach House began to print the books of emerging young writers and poets, it found itself becoming a cultural hub.

In the early 1970s, phototypesetting became an accessible technology, and Coach House pursued it rather than seeing it as antithetical to the tradition of hand setting. In 1974 Stan Bevington bought a Mergenthaler VIP (variable input phototypesetter) machine, which took paper tape as its input. The tape encoded not only the text but also the design and formatting. It didn’t take long before the team at Coach House began modifying the tape to create new typefaces for the VIP; they essentially “hacked” the tape to drive new typography. Coach House was adept at tinkering with new technology to wring the maximum functionality out of it.

Coach House also recognized the potential of using a computer to create the tape. In 1974 Bevington bought a Datapoint 2200 computer for that purpose; the Datapoint 2200 was the earliest microcomputer—the forefather of all of our personal computers. At a conference, the Coach House team saw a computer hooked up directly to a phototypesetter and decided to try it for themselves. Ed Hale built a circuit board that took output from the Datapoint 2200 and fed it to the VIP—no more need for paper tape. By doing this themselves, Coach House made the technology their own.

At this point, the software became key in the process. David Slocombe at Coach House tinkered with the software and got it to the point where it was usable by the editors themselves. At the same time, Coach House actively collaborated with Ron Baecker’s computer science lab at the University of Toronto—one of the first places in the world to have UNIX installed. Bevington consulted the lab about onscreen typography and in exchange had access to UNIX. In 1983, Coach House proposed a peer-to-peer network with two other Ontario-based publishers, the Porcupine’s Quill and Penumbra Press, and established an uncanny parallel to what universities were setting up in California and what would evolve into the Internet.

Coach House became known for its computer typesetting. In 1984 some of its staff members branched off to form SoftQuad, a developer of software to edit, view, and publish structured (generalized markup language—or GML) content. It was ahead of its time—at first SoftQuad struggled to find a market, but in 1986 it found its feet when the U.S. Department of Defense made GML—now SGML—a mandatory requirement. Of course, SGML is the direct precursor to the ubiquitous HTML and XML.

Coach House acquired Macintosh computers when they were first released in 1984, initially using them as terminals to the UNIX systems. They then discovered that the PostScript paradigm was the way of the future and quickly adopted QuarkXPress on the Macintosh and even developed a way to translate SGML markup into formatting in Quark. Interestingly, now with the rise of ebooks, publishers care about markup once again.

The 1990s were rough for Coach House; in 1996, the publishing arm of the company failed, but Bevington later relaunched it as Coach House Books, which put its entire frontlist on the web for free. The press then made sales of the beautifully printed books as fetishized objects.

If you visit Coach House Books, John tells us, you’ll discover that all of the technological history is there on site; it’s a living, breathing museum. Coach House has always demonstrated a willingness to adopt new technologies and has had a tradition of research, insightful decision making, and a love of tinkering. Unlike many other players in the publishing industry, Coach House isn’t bothered by technical innovation—a fact that still holds today; for instance, when Facebook was first rising, Coach House became the first Canadian publisher to reach a thousand followers, and it has proven itself to be a pioneer of direct sales and e-commerce. The press’s home-grown innovation hasn’t made Bevington rich, but, in hindsight, it is remarkable to consider that Coach House was always five to ten years ahead of the curve.

John’s talk was followed by the presentation of the Alcuin Society’s Robert R. Reid Award and Medal to Stan Bevington, in recognition of lifetime achievement in the book arts in Canada.

We each came away with a lovely souvenir of the evening: a tabloid-sized print of Canadian typefaces used at Coach House, including Amethyst and Stern by Jim Rimmer, Goodchild and Figgins Sans by Nick Shinn, and Gibson and Slate by Rod McDonald.

My synopsis here doesn’t really do justice to the astounding volume of research that John Maxwell has done for this project. I would encourage anyone interesting in learning more about Coach House’s technological history to visit John’s website on the topic.

BC Book Prize nominations

The 2012 shortlist for the BC Book Prizes has been announced, and Fred Herzog: Photographs is a finalist for both the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. Congratulations to Fred and the book’s contributors—Douglas Coupland, Claudia Gochmann, Sarah Milroy, and Jeff Wall!

Winners will be announced on May 12, 2012.

Academic editing

At last evening’s EAC-BC meeting, David Harrison spoke about academic editing. His perspective was quite a bit different from mine—he seems to have gained most of his experience working directly with academic authors, often helping them prepare a manuscript for submission to a publisher, whereas I’ve worked on the other end, editing text that a publisher has already accepted.

Harrison has worked with authors as diverse as literary biographers, CGA systems analysts, expert witnesses, and public policy specialists. One client had initially hired Harrison to edit a grant proposal, so, Harrison emphasizes, academic editors can do more than work on just journal articles and books.

He says that, as with other editing, it’s important to understand the author’s purpose. Academic editors may wish to

  • create new knowledge
  • share ideas
  • challenge the ideas of others
  • support the research and findings of others
  • reach a wider audience
  • reach a more specialized audience
  • promote a cause, a policy, a theory, etc.

We must also not forget that they may also have some more practical motivations; “publish or perish” still very much persists:

  • get published in a journal
  • get a paper accepted for a conference
  • get a research grant
  • achieve tenure
  • get promoted
  • sell a book and life off the royalties
  • get invited to address prestigious audiences in  exotic parts of the world

An academic editor must also have a good handle on what the final product will look like. Fortunately, says Harrison, academic papers generally have a very predictable structure. The first time you work with a particular author or in a particular genre, look online or in a local university library for samples of the type of publication the author wants to create. Alternatively, have the author send you a sample.

Academic publishers may have very specific guidelines that they expect authors to follow—these dictate everything from article or abstract length to preferred spellings to formatting. It’s the author’s responsibility to make sure he or she adheres to these, but it’s helpful for the editor to know about them. If a particular publisher doesn’t have such a “Guide to Authors,” follow some exemplars of that publisher’s existing publications or follow an established style guide, such as Chicago or APA, but be sure to communicate your decision to the author. Keep a style sheet for each project. In fact, archive those style sheets; if you ever have repeat work with that author, the existing style sheet will save you a lot of time.

The contract, says Harrison, is very important; make sure you get the deal in writing. Share your expectations. Is the bibliography included in the cost? Is fact checking? Build in some milestones at which you can be paid. Professionalism is key. Stay within your area of competence.

Harrison could find only a handful of books relating to academic writing and editing, but he mentioned Writing for Scholarly Publication by Anne Sigismund Huff, who encourages authors to think of writing as conversation. She, in turn, suggested Making Sense of the Organization by Karl Weick, who elucidated the cycle of writing as it related to clarifying thought. If thinking is writing and writing is thinking, Harrison says, the editor’s role is to mediate that cycle.

Harrison’s presentation sparked some lively discussion about contracts—whether to charge a project rate or hourly rate; how to educate clients about the difference between an estimate and a bid; how to clearly delineate the scope of the work (e.g., specifying the number of revisions). Harrison himself quotes a project fee, saying that an hourly rate can be intimidating to clients. “Think about it from the author’s perspective,” he advised. “How would you react to someone saying, ‘I charge this much per hour but can’t tell you definitively how long it will take me?'” But what Harrison does is charge an up-front fee of commitment and then use an instalment plan for when certain milestones have been attained (e.g., first three chapters finished, halfway mark, initial edit, final revision, etc.).

The audience also asked about what to do in instances of plagiarism. Harrison doesn’t check for plagiarism as a matter of course but encourages editors to make use of the Editors’ Association of Canada’s “Guidelines for Editing Theses” as a tool to educate authors about an editor’s limitations, especially when it comes to dissertations. Jean Lawrence suggested a helpful strategy for diplomatically flagging instances of plagiarism: give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that he or she has simply left out a citation.

I asked how polished the final product would have to be in such an author-editor relationship given that the paper or book would then go through the publisher’s own editorial process. Harrison said he’s found that less editing is happening at the level of the publisher. In fact, some publishers’ “Guide to Authors” explicitly mentions that if English isn’t your first language, you should strongly consider having your work looked at by an editor prior to submission, and he’s gotten a lot of work that way. He added that he works under the assumption that he’ll be the last person to touch the manuscript from a language point of view.

Follow the editor

Earlier this week my esteemed colleague Barbara Pulling forwarded me an article by Jeff Norton—“Follow the editor: a recommendation engine for readers”—which suggests that editors should be credited for their work on books just as producers are in music and film. He writes:

Pick up any paperback and the author’s name dominates the cover. Big authors are “brands” unto themselves, even though the final prose was a collaborative effort.  Flip the book over the cover designer and illustrator get credit (in quite small print) but search for the editor’s name and you’ll be lucky to find it in the acknowledgements (at the author’s discretion).  How are we to value the role of the professional editorial process if publishers themselves don’t even celebrate their most crucial contribution to a book’s creation?

I suppose I’m spoiled in that I’ve done the majority of my work for a company that does choose to acknowledge editors, though not to the extent that Norton would perhaps like to see. In fact, in Saeko Usukawa’s acceptance speech when she won the 2007 Tom Fairley Award for Editorial Excellence, she specifically thanked Douglas & McIntyre for being one of the few publishers to credit editors on the copyright page. It’s interesting that the practice isn’t more widespread, since giving an editor credit is one of the easiest ways to establish a strong publisher-editor relationship. Not only is the acknowledgement in itself extremely meaningful, but the credit allows an editor to confidently promote the work as part of his or her portfolio. It seems as though sometimes the publishing industry doesn’t want to admit that books get edited at all, perpetuating the myth that prose flows from the author’s brilliant mind onto the manuscript already perfect.

Norton’s assertion that editors are akin to music and movie producers, however, may be too narrow a focus, since only acquiring and developmental editors typically get the same level of creative control as producers would. When a substantive editor is assigned a finished manuscript, the process is often less about building and more about shaping with what’s there. Crediting only producer-like editing would also sell short the vast contributions of the copy editor and all other members of the publishing team that make a book happen.

Norton also talks about “the growing sentiment that in this era of digital books in general, and the rise of self-publishing specifically, that conventional publishers were no longer relevant or required.” He adds, “I believe the most important role that publishers perform is the one they are strangely reluctant to celebrate: the editor and the process of editing an author’s manuscript into a readable book.”

Traditional publishers may have reason to bemoan the rise of the ebook and self-publishing, but editors hardly do. At last year’s Vancouver launch of I Feel Great about My Hands, I had the opportunity to speak with David Mitchell, who I believe was quoting one of his friends at the Globe and Mail when he said that these days, “Anyone can be his own publisher, but very few people can be their own editor.” I know some successful freelancers who now deal almost exclusively with self-published authors. Although I’d be the first to acknowledge that there is a lot of rubbish out there, more and more self-publishing authors are beginning to see the value in having an editor’s expert eye pore over their text—and they’re willing to compensate that editor accordingly.

The thrust of Norton’s article, though, is that he feels books should be catalogued not only by author but also by editor, which “would give readers another recommendation engine, another way to discover new fiction: follow the editor.”

As a nonfiction editor—and as an editor who never acquired projects—I have no coherent theme in my list of work, and such a recommendation engine based on my projects wouldn’t be particularly enlightening. One aspect of my job that I love is that I can be a generalist, learning a little bit of something about everything. (Editors with a more specialized focus may yield more useful results to the general reader.) Still, I’d appreciate the built-in portfolio aspect to such searchability—it would certainly make it easier to show prospective clients and employers what I’m capable of.