[Edit 3/31/15. Edit 7/8/15.]
As always, there is stuff
percolating in my own sphere of affairs for my two blogs, and I should have a
short film review coming soon to this blog. I thought I would say something
more about the possible Prentice Hall reminiscence that I mentioned in the
just-prior post.
I am definitely taking my time
with this, and I definitely would like to get to a point where I discuss the
letters between myself and the freelancer (from 1998) I mentioned in the prior
post. But I’m debating how much detail to go into on the wealth of activity
leading up to these 1998 letters. There is great virtue in both alternatives of
a detailed and a sketchy approach: the latter would be better for a blog (and most
readers), and the former would actually be more suited to the content, which is
an enormous area of freelance work over several months that made huge demands
on the energy and time of a set of colorful people, which can pose some lessons
for aspiring professionals today.
How do people see some publishing stories?
One of the problems I consider
is that I never know how my stories of work for certain standard-type
publishers will be received on my blog. (And it’s yet another reason I don’t
allow blog comments: I could well imagine some responses would be totally off
the wall, and annoying just to behold, never mind answering. It actually saves
us all headaches if I prevent these.) When I wrote about my work for Jason
Aronson, in a couple parts, over a year ago, I thought the account’s points should
be pretty clear, the main one being that (along with being a good opportunity
of a sort for me) Aronson was quite a cheap place to work for (and, in some
practical respects, quite unreasonable). But some readers might have wanted to
second-guess me left and right on some aspects of my story, which possibility I
wondered about when I saw what variously-blooming interest the story generated
over time.
The Prentice Hall story should
be more unambiguous, but again, you never know how people will respond to it,
especially since a lot of people who are laymen with respect to publishing seem
to want to cling to ridiculous illusions they have about the industry (whether
complimentary to it or not).
Here’s one example of a point
people would need to get straight on--what it means for many workers on a project to be temps. At the PH project, myself, a few other of
the proofreaders I was among, and plenty of “compositors” (layout,
art-department people) were all temps. As it happened, this high school
literature project, in terms of pages for textbooks being laid out for
printing, was apparently usually done (in previous edition-years) by an
out-of-house vendor. But this time, in 1997-98, it was being done in-house,
meaning as a project conducted by PH itself, under supervision by staffers and
with many temporary workers brought in. Now how this compared to previous
similar projects of PH’s, I don’t know, but this one seemed unusual in
involving a huge number of freelancers, a push to get done in a compressed
timeframe, and (as had already been in place by the time we temps were involved) a big re-design of the textbooks (which as a general matter was
done by staffers, not freelancers). The re-design aspect worked around the fact
that there was a lot of content—selections from classical literature (stories,
plays, poems, etc.)—being preserved from previous editions, while there were
new reading selections put in, and (I believe) all the student-and-teacher-directed
copy was written afresh—this copy comprised lessons spelled out in the book,
questions, end-of-section tests, and marginalia in the teacher’s editions.
If that sounds like it was a fun
project to be part of, it was, but what really struck you (and certainly shaped
your ongoing work) was the volume of material, and how much room there was for
error just because of the ambition (in terms of volume and time constraints) of
the project. For instance, each textbook (for grades nine through 12) was about
1,000 pages; and each teacher’s edition was the same (because the TEs basically
took all the student pages, and expanded the page size, on the extra space
being all the teacher-exclusive marginalia). So you had a total of 8,000 pages.
Now, from July through September 1997, there were three of us proofreaders in
the “studio,” PH’s name for the production/art facility. The job of us
proofreaders was largely layout-related (seeing if all the copy had flowed in
right; if formatting of fonts, etc., was correct; and if colors of type was
right—yes, these were four-color books; and generally, what we had to proofread
for was sorts of things that meant our proofreading was more of a
magazine-mentality type).
There were also proofreaders (and/or
copy editors) in an editorial department (some staff and some freelance) that
was functionally aligned with the studio (we all were downstairs in the
facility), and there were more general-conception-type editors (who were, I
think, almost all staffers) who were functionally more administrative, coming
up with content ideas, liaising with outside contributors and/or such, and
resolving complex content issues, who were located upstairs. This roughly
describes the situation. So we studio proofreaders were among the more
expendable workers, doing work that was a little more art-oriented than “nerdishly
verbal,” but there were plenty of other types of editors around who were
additional cooks to stir the broth. [Added 3/31/15: The cast-of-thousands and pell-mell approach of this project was such that, about two years later in maybe late 2000, when I worked as a freelancer under Dee Josephson, a veteran educational-publishing editor under whom I'd worked briefly as a staffer at TSI Graphics in 1999, she had the HS lit textbooks to do minor corrections and changes to, with TSI acting as an outside vendor for this. As an indication of how she found the project in its finished books, she was looking at a page spread in the teacher's edition for one grade, where a chart arrayed lesson points, and it was so busy and cluttered that she remarked, "Where do you put your eye?"--and coming from an editor who had once herself worked at Prentice Hall and who had her own eagle eye, this was a solid criticism.]
(By the way, though I had years
of magazine experience early in the 1990s, I was gravitating toward more
textual and trade-book-type editing by about 1997, and in fact I was doing
detailed copy editing for a small company that spring that was of that textual
type. Being roped into the PH work—which I took because it meant such a huge
shot in the arm of work time and money—left me feeling there that I wasn’t
being used there quite well; I should have been among the more textual editors
there, but that’s not how I was brought
in to work there. This touches on an ethical/professional issue my
fuller PH story should cover, whenever it happens.)
The point I’m getting at: How temps
were used for such a project, and how publishing laypeople see temps
Now, if you just consider all
this part of the picture, for management to have 8,000 pages—and keep in mind
that various pages could come through in more than one iteration—come through
the hands of three people was
demanding at best, and doomed to mishaps at worst. (More broadly, there are
other editorial situations, at other normal-type publishing companies over the
years, that I could tell you about that show that sometimes being an editor is “doing
the best you can” under conditions that are [on the management’s part] unrealistic
at best and shamefully reckless at worst.)
Why weren’t more proofreaders
gotten for the studio in this project? I don’t know. In fact, Mike, the one
connected with the 1998 letters, was brought in—again, through a temp agency—in
about early October 1997, and was with us the last three months [update 7/8/15: on doing further research for this series, I found Mike started only in early December 1997 and was with us two months, an important difference]. Four
proofreaders, and still the work was like a big, ever-flowing waterfall of
stuff we all had to be a bit manic (in our respective ways) to keep up with.
Anyway, the point I was
originally getting at is that at least three of us editors—myself, Rebecca (who
had started a few months before I did), and Mike—were all there through a temp
agency. Penny, the other of us four who was basically the first among equals of
us (not quite a supervisor), may have been employed directly by Prentice Hall
(and, working over time on numerous projects, she had only started there about
two years before Rebecca and I were there). The way Penny would talk about how
things normally worked there (mind you, a lot of these details I only got
reacquainted with in recent weeks, in looking over old papers and a journal),
she usually had a fairly mundane time working there as a sort of freelance
proofreader (she was actually a TV actress by usual trade), and when the PH
high school literature project started, she (and maybe some managers above her)
apparently thought it wouldn’t be such a monster, in terms of the need for
proofreaders.
But it got evident as a monster
pretty quickly by about July. A couple extra proofreaders (as I was told much
later), one each at different times, were brought in earlier in the
spring/summer, and quickly didn’t work out (one was kicked up into sales, where
he apparently fit in [*snort*]). Then I eventually was brought in, and once I
got worked into the pattern of work there, I apparently was a good, useful pair
of hands, picking up a goodly amount of slack, for about three months before
Mike was brought in for the final-push weeks.
Some might say: Aren’t temps
underpaid dog-work types? I’ve talked about the nature of editors hired through
temp agencies, or the slightly more sophisticatedly-conceived “placement
agencies,” before (in mid-2012 on this blog). When special-skill workers are
hired through temp/placement agencies (even lawyers can be hired through such
agencies), it doesn’t mean the work is menial. And the pay can be pretty good.
But (in my experience) one thing
that seems common to many arrangements of this type is that, with respect to
your particular situation, there is maximization of the power and privileges of
the client company that is using you (in this case, Prentice Hall) and of the
temp agency itself (which is ironic, given how little work it actually does in
the situation). And you yourself, the temp worker, are wedged between a lot of
limits, generally speaking, even if the hourly pay seems to make up for this.
Actually, the temp agency that
had me at PH—“Prime Time Staffing” (PTS)—did not position itself in the
slightly snooty way (as for “creative workers”) that Horizon Graphics did by
about 2001 (or even when I first dealt with it in 1994), or the way The Guy
Louise Group did by the time I worked with it starting in 2004. PTS (in
1997-98) saw itself more as a regular temp agency…well, these experiences
always have nuances worth analyzing, and PTS was amusing in its own right. A
story for another time.
But for now, some blog readers
who are under illusions about what temping is might say, “Oh, you were hired
almost like some kind of day laborer, and then run ragged by handling 8,000
pages of work? Were you suckered?” Actually, being “suckered” was not the
problem I would have focused on here, but there were some technical and
ethnical paradoxes or problems that are worth looking at, in due time.
Anyway, that’s a start on the Prentice
Hall story.
The virtues of big corporations (arguably speaking)
I had prefaced all this with
talking about the PARCC test. I didn’t want people who are worked up by the
PARCC to think I had any “inside info” at all specific to that. And my testimony
might seem like an old war story from a quite-different time.
But what my story does present
is that, when it comes to publishing—an area where typically you, the worker,
deliver “cottage industry” skills, i.e., hands-on skills, no matter how big the
employing company—the idea that a huge corporation can somehow provide a better
product isn’t always true. Economies of scale? Money for fancy production? Big
corporations might specialize in those, but when a project needs, in the view
of anyone using his or her wits to assess it, time appropriate to do the good
hands-on work--and as it turns out, the project at hand is so ambitious and hustled-through
that it’s a minor miracle the product even comes out 80 percent acceptable--you
have to question what value a big corporation provides (which seems often to be
in default mode), other than some arrogant shoving of a huge product into final
shape, complete with inevitable flaws.
