It's a dog's life but we love it! (Production Controller)

Member Name: clairep4

Product:	Production Controller
Date:	02/04/02 (148 review reads)
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Advantages: job satisfaction, free books!

Disadvantages: cut-throat industry

Publishing can be divided into the following basic sub-categories:

1. Editorial - this includes your editorial assistants and commissioning editors, the ones that go out and find the best-selling authors and get to wine and dine them and go to the launch parties.

2. Sales/Marketing - the people who promote and sell the books and get that all important dosh rolling in.

3. Production - the dogsbodies of the publishing world, the ones who make sure the books get produced on time, within budget, looking gorgeous and having no print problems. Production is where most of the money gets spent, accounting for around 60% of the cost of getting a book out there (there are then the overheads, royalties, marketing budget, freight etc).

I got into Book Production having left college with a humanities degree. The best way of getting into Production is to do a post-grad course, the best of these being at London College of Printing (Post-Grad Diploma in Printing and Publishing Studies) and lasting about 7 months. This is a very well reknowned course covering very detailed aspects of book production from design to printing, including all the old letterpress ways and the new computer to plate technology (in a nutshell, alot of books these days are supplied on disk, typeset on disk and supplied to a printer who whacks them into a machine which produces printing plates).

Even with the diploma under my belt it still took hard graft to get a foot in the door. Most Production jobs attract 100-300 applicants, of which about 6 will be interviewed. Make sure your application is absolutely error free, I have sifted through potential interviewees myself and hard as it may be, anyone who writes that they pay "meticulous attention to detail" and then has a typo, goes straight in the bin. Most production jobs are advertised in Monday and Saturday Guardian, and in The Bookseller (trade magazine of publishing). It may be worth writing on spec
but it has never got me a job in the past. Try and get some voluntary work with a small publisher as this may help to get some experience to put on your CV. Production jobs are almost always by CV rather than application form so make sure you have a decent layout on yours.

I was lucky to get a first job with Faber & Faber about 8 months after leaving London College of Printing - if you can get your foot in the door with a well-known publisher it seems to help you in future moves. I have only every worked for big publishers - you find that there is a small pool of suppliers (printers) who know the production directors for the big publishers, and once you have been working for a while, you may well move up through word of mouth recommendations.

Book production these days is alot more admin based than it was when I first started - the industry is going through a technological revolution with DTP and Computer-to-Plate technology cutting out alot of the old work. Whether this is a good thing or not, you need to know about it and you need to be willing to change as the industry does. The basic pattern of production is that the book comes in on disk from the author, and is copy-edited (usually by a freelancer who works out of house) to knock it into shape if needed. Simultaneously to this a design is found for the text and covers, and the book is then typeset according to this design. The finished, typeset disk is then sent to a printer, who prints and binds the book. Production is this side of things, sorting out a typesetter and printer for the book, getting the best deal you can, the best quality you can, and the quickest schedule you can (all the time in a book's schedule tends to get chipped away at so that by the time it reaches production you have about a third less than you should have, but woe betide you if you miss the end date!).

Basic skills you need are computer literacy, good attention to detail, being able to work on lots of
projects simultaneously, technical know-how about printing/paper/typesetting/binding, and most of all, the ability to be a good diplomat even under pressure. Relationships with printers often work on a mutual understanding that if they do you a favour, you'll return it at some point by giving them more time when they need it or accepting a slightly higher price on something - you need to keep these guys happy!

Production is not the glamorous side of publishing, but it can be immensely satisfying, particularly if you get to see projects through from the typesetting stage to the finished copies - seeing a box of brand new books turn up when you've seen the manuscript in its tatty stage is a wonderful thing, and seeing those books in the bookshops or being read by somebody on the tube is lovely as well.

One warning - publishing is a cut-throat industry, be prepared for a bit of job-hopping and lots of company take-overs, but don't let this put you off, it's worth it!

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