More aspects of a huge freelance
gig prelude a droll story about personalities and the quality of the freelance
life in New Jersey
Of this series, Part 1 (March
19), “My coming story on Prentice Hall, if/when it happens”:
Part 2 (March 30), “Another
preliminary glance at the Prentice Hall story: A big firm giving a big push”:
Part 3 (April 2), “Another intro
to the Prentice Hall story: A TV actress as lead proofreader, leaving a bit to
be desired”:
Subsections below (Part 4):
Book packaging: What kind of sub-species of print publishing?
A picture of a book production
situation, based mainly on my 1997-98 PH experience
What is a “book packager”?
An interlude: What was my history with educational publishers starting
with Prentice Hall in 1997?
More work at PH, not just at PH
School
Other educational-publisher work
Part 5 (next entry):
By 1998, the opportunities from different companies (compared to today)
bubbled up like bonanzas of oil in an oil field
Prime Time Staffing—pros and big cons
Sidebar—the typical route to
getting non-temp work at big companies
Sidebar: The PTS/PH
relationship—a Rube Goldberg sort of “structure”
A glance at the home stretch
Sidebar—fluky copyright dates
[Editorial note: Please
excuse the occasional density of this entry. Given the complexity—and
successful nature—of the events, now approaching 20 years old, unfolding this
in semi-casual blog entries is a bit tough. Give it some patience, and you
might find it rewarding. Edit 7/8/15.]
As I go about unfolding this
story, I find that I make passing references to things—like “copy” and
“four-color [printing]”—that outsiders, or workers in other areas of the media,
might not be fully familiar with. And I neglect to mention other things that
might help you understand the premises, practical framework, etc., of this
story. So let me catch up on some of this.
(The techno-flavor of this
shouldn’t scare you; the details aren’t crucial to understanding much of the
remaining entries in this series.)
Copy, for those who don’t know, is a technical term that refers to
any wordage that is part of a print-published item (book, newspaper, etc.). An
article drafted for a newspaper, to be edited and ending up on the printed
page, can be generically referred to as copy.
The same with insider reference to wordage put onto pages of a book—such as,
“The teacher’s edition has copy in the margins that make notes on details in
the student text.”
“Four-color” is a description of
the type of printing process that results in color material (or the term can
apply to the product itself)—pictures and/or words on the page. (For a specific
kind of color-printing process, the four colors—which are mixed to result in
the spectrum of colors in a picture—are red [magenta], blue [cyan], yellow, and
black.) For this Prentice Hall series, you need not know many of the details of
this process, aside from what allows you to understand how the textbooks in
question had color features on all, or almost all, pages.
(I will want [or hope] to talk
in a future entry about how certain marketing-related aspects of the textbooks,
germane to color pictures and colored word-subheads, etc., were clearly in this
project and of a type—think of marketing of specific movies—that would seem to
outsiders to be rather afield of what we would expect in serious textbooks, and
weren’t typical of textbooks when I was in high school over 30 years ago. After
all, by 1997, Viacom, which owned Paramount Studios, owned Prentice Hall [though
this wouldn’t be for long], and the potential for cross-marketing was feasible
enough.)
Among other things, these
technical details show how we proofreaders, with our being in the so-called
studio meaning we were more “art-related” than otherwise, could handle in some
sense a massive volume of material when the criteria for our work tended to be
more visual and esthetic in a way than entirely, drily verbal.
Lastly, “pre-press” means
processes that are at a publishing (or other media) company immediately prior
to material being sent to the printer, which latter is very much a blue-collar,
factory-type operation. From my experience, production
editing and related work (such as I’ve been in) that is very close to
making things ready for the printer can still be an important step away from
things being sent to the printer, and the latter step is the province of a
“pre-press” worker. In fact, “pre-press” professionals may well have a
substantive, high-sensitivity role of their own.
Book packaging: What kind of sub-species of print publishing?
One big aspect of this story
actually gives me a way to explain a few other things: what kind of project was
this that so many temps were hauled in, to help make textbooks? Wouldn’t that
run a risk of making a messy, incoherent, unprofessional set of books?
In very general terms, if things
worked out as the staff management planned, the answer is no to the second question. A lot of the educational-publishing work
I did—and if I can expand on this point in the future, I will also argue very
forcefully that, usually, teachers,
even with the best of teacherly skills, aren’t the best editors—had to do with print-production aspects: these were
proofreading, occasional (or a certain level of) copy editing, and occasional
tasks pertinent to printing (like checking color proofs of pages for flaws). In
general, the kind of editing work that is relevant here comprises, on the
verbal side, a sort of technical editing (e.g., proofreading for certain kinds
of problems) and, on the visual side, miscellaneous, very-visually-oriented
tasks. All of this was really aimed to preparing a book for being printed, not
coming up with original intellectual ideas or specific text that would require
some kind of expert to determine or quality-control the content, etc.—such as
you might see with high-quality trade books.
Meanwhile, people who only know
about, or aspire to work in, trade books, such as novels and nonfiction
reviewed in major book-review publications, would tend only to be concerned
with the latter set of considerations, i.e., idea/content type of writing and
editing. But when books feature a large visual component, and/or educational
texts have graphics and visual aids as a big feature, there is a lot of (often
rapidly-paced) work surrounding the issue of making material ready for the page
that is closer to finalizing pages to go to the printer, than it is to having a
Word-file-type ream of a “novel” being circulated among editors, consultants,
and whoever else for months or a year before the book is readied for printing.
And as I suggested in Part 2 of
this series, my having had experience in magazines (mainly 1990-94), a lot of
which were in color, prepared me to a good extent for the production-editing
stuff I did at Prentice Hall and one or two other places in the productive (for
me) years of 1997-2002 or so.
A picture of a book production
situation, based mainly on my 1997-98 PH experience
Anyway, with production editing
and related layout functions—especially when this all involves layouts of graphics-heavy and illustration-heavy
pages, with work on these tending to be wedged fairly close to the deadline for
material to go to the printer for the books to be manufactured—conceivably it’s
easy and plausible to get a huge number of people, well-organized, to work on
the materials to get them into form acceptable to the publisher (in this case,
Prentice Hall) and off to the printer (whoever that outside vendor is).
What makes my 1997-98 Prentice
Hall story notable is how a very few proofreaders in the “studio,” the name for
the pre-press production facility (I say “pre-press” here just to show how much
wedged up against our products’ going to the printer we were), were used for so
much material. This while even there were dozens of compositors—this was the technical name for layout-making technicians [update 7/8/15: on doing further research into my journal, I found that the technical term used by at least my supervisor Penny, who was not a super-crack editor, was "operator," though the more typical term for this worker is compositor, which I will continue to use in this entry hereafter]—and
not only were there many of these during the day shift, but some worked a
second (evening) shift, perhaps along with whatever editors might be available
to work with them; this double-shift arrangement may have gone on for only part
of the production process. Most or all of the compositors (within the period
July 1997-January 1998, when I was there) were freelance, there through temp
agencies, as were most of us proofreaders. As it happened, compositors who
pleased the PH management more with their work were kept on past January 1998
to work on later stages of the multi-stage PH School literature project, or on
other projects. But we freelance proofreaders weren’t handled with the same
“save whom you value” way (more of this story to come).
In any event, most of the total
lot of compositors only worked during the day; some who worked day shifts may also
have worked some nights, but I seem to recall there were some compositors you
only saw working night shifts. And along with the compositors, of course, also
taking part were many, many PH staffers of various sorts (e.g., editors of
various levels, or art-related technicians).
When I eventually come to the
aspect of Prentice Hall’s being sold to Pearson PLC in 1998, that will add to
the story. It could help explain why this HS lit project was pushed along so
ruthlessly, in a way, even while we underworkers were game and willingly
hectic, so to speak, in doing the work.
What is a “book packager”?
Back in about 1995, I remember that
when I attended one of the numerous lectures and other meetings offered to its
members by the Editorial Freelancers Association—whose office I went to for
these meetings periodically from 1994 to 1996—Sheila Buff, who I think was in
charge of the educational program they had, once made the point that one type
of publishing company that was arising, which could prove to be a good source
of work for some, was a “book packager.”
She took pains to explain this
as different from a normal publisher, and—having worked for one or more
herself—she explained it in somewhat clumsy, after-the-fact terms as if she was
only coming to grips with what it was about herself, and (as she suggested) its
business type apparently was atypical and rather new to Manhattan. But (in
retrospect) I think the general principle of what this kind of company was is
something that defines the likes of what the studio operation at Prentice Hall
was in 1997-98 and what other educational-publisher operations I’ve been
associated with have been more or less like (though in these other instances,
the work tended to be more verbal than visually centered). A “book packager,”
Sheila said (not in so many terms), was a sort of publisher that didn’t so much
produce books with original, trade-book content—i.e., were mostly verbal, and
cutting-edge culturally—as it produced “coffee-table” type books, or books
(often heavy with photos) that were suited to specific audiences or such. I
remember her “coffee-table” characterization as if it was the most elegant,
comprehensive way she could put it, and she was no dummy about the
book-publishing industry.
I think the kind of company she
meant is the kind of book-producing operation you tend to see more often in New
Jersey, at least as I’ve been able to access it from 1990 through about 2010.
That is, it’s like a publishing company without a “words-focused” brain. It
does everything else: design the pages as to how they’ll look with whatever is
put on them; and designate what is needed from the printer, i.e., prepare
materials for the printer to use (in the old days, 1990s, these were often
“mechanicals,” concrete items to be photographed from; but starting then too,
pre-press materials could be digital: a digital file was sent to the printer—modern
media people will be much more familiar with this).
No one at this (“book-packaging”)
kind of company is an “acquisition editor,” “developmental editor,” or any
other type of heavily verbally-oriented editor—think of Michael Korda, Robert
Gottlieb, or William Shawn—who deals with the wonder, challenge, complexity,
etc., of a mass of words—in a big nonfiction or fictional work. Here, instead,
the highest-level editor would be some kind of managing production editor. And
copy editors and proofreaders (these last functions being what I’ve mostly
done) would do low-level changing, correcting, burnishing of words to finalize
the copy for what gets printed.
I hope this is all clear.
As an aside, TSI Graphics, which
was based in St. Louis, Missouri (I think; or was it a town in Illinois?),
opened an office in Ramsey or Upper
Saddle River , N.J.
But TSI was a book packager
(with, in its most sober moments, no illusions about this). In a way, it was
like the PH School division’s studio that I am talking about, but smaller, more
nimble, and more tooled to dealing with a range of quite different projects.
##
I think that the book packager
is something that, functionally, is fairly easy to run if you get the right
people for it; its being corporate and methodological without having the sort
of “ingenious” editing associated with the best trade books need not mean it
inevitably turns out mediocre product. Further, I think that, today, a lot of
the publishers that seem to cater to small genre audiences and writers, as well
as (on a simpler level) Internet-mediated services like Smashwords, tend to be more like what book packagers were
becoming in the later 1990s than like
actual publishers with highly skilled acquisition, developmental, and such
editors.
This type of publishing capacity,
at least for educational-publishing purposes, is what allows the management to
haul in a whole lot of talented, willing workers, through temp agencies, to
work on a project, big or not. Then, the only source of scandal, if any, is how
mismanaged the project is. In principle, the “book packager” business model
isn’t inevitably going to make bad product; but what may end up causing poor or
flawed product are specific management decisions, and higher-level executive
commands, rationales, etc.
An interlude: What was my history with educational publishers starting
with Prentice Hall in 1997?
The following should help you
negotiate this series, also. My 1997-98 PH story does stick out in my mind, and
seem worth recounting, for how high-handedly the project was managed, and how
it gave some temp workers such a kick in the ass when it abruptly ended for me
and others. The whole nature of this thing is interesting: today, I remember
details and qualities as I slowly peel away the crust of forgetfulness, and
when my writing frees up the memories….
But the whole thing was such a
pell-mell “crazy train” of busy-ness, and then almost a cruel shock when it suddenly
ended, that a big wad of papers I had from that time, most within a folder
(apart from some PH brochures and such), have generally stayed closed up
(almost as if to seal away a frightening revelation) and all but forgotten for
years. (Part of the reason for this “sealing-off” was that many other work
opportunities came up in the next few years that rather prevented me from
poring over my PH records in stewing, disappointed, investigatory, or other
such fashion.)
Opening up some of it, I find I
haven’t seen some of this stuff in about 18 years—hard to believe. With some
imagination applied in retrospect, the project was really like some historical
fandango—a presidential campaign, or a hustling military activity maybe—where a
big shitload of stuff happens, stress is endured, records are kept; and when
it’s done, its people go back to their privacy, and they almost want not to review the whole mess till for
almost purely accidental reasons, they tentatively review the records many years
later. (“Oh, Comrade Stalin did what?
Order the killing of 1,000 Polish officers? I didn’t know that was going on at
the time, though some of my records seem, agonizing to admit, to suggest
that!”)
More work at PH, not just at PH
School
As it happens, after the HS lit
project ended for me in January 1998, I was left feeling almost like someone
who is jettisoned from a plane which lowers in altitude enough to chuck you
outside but not actually land, and then flies on. I wondered if I’d have more
work there in the near-future.
I did work (in about March 1998)
for a division of PH called Prentice Hall International, which dealt with books
published in other countries, under an editor whose name I forget, a female who
was nice and whom I tried to contact subsequently for more work and got none
from, after probably mid-spring 1998. This little bit of work was also through
the Prime Time Staffing (PTS) agency.
Eventually I was back at PH
School in spring (May?) 1998. Now, I wasn’t technically working in the studio,
I was in what I think was called the Production Editing department (which was
in the same general office area as the studio), under high-level managerial staffer
Christina B. (I definitely remember her last name). I’d had only slim dealings
with Christina, I think, during the HS lit project. Now the project I was
involved with—with Amy Capetta, a new freelancer at the time whom I mentioned
in Part 3—was a history textbook, specifically for the Texas market. (By the
way, the big, more-specific U.S. markets for major educational texts—because
the states have specific requirements for content and because the states
themselves are huge—are Texas and California; and perhaps Florida [?]). Again, I
was at PH through PTS. I was there only a few weeks, and Christina suddenly
ended my time there, in June—and this had a cold finality about it. Specific story
to come.
After June, I itched to get back
into Prentice Hall, but I don’t think it happened again in 1998. The last time
I saw Penny, the head studio proofreader of the HS lit project, was maybe in June,
maybe a little later in the year. (I either happened to cross paths with her,
or specifically sought her out, and we chatted a bit.) But I don’t think I got
into Prentice Hall again, for some years.
And I think I ended my time with
PTS, in terms of any real work from them (and my really seeking anything from them), in June 1998—and
this struck me as appropriate and timely, and still seems that way as I reacquaint
myself with the period. Any further work for some branch of Pearson for me (after
Pearson had finished its purchase of Prentice Hall, though I don’t know how
much this directly impacted my being employed) would not be through a temp agency, healthily enough. (And what about
work at some other firm that year? I’m coming to that, but I did have the very
promising avenue of The World Almanac,
which had started in May 1998.)
Other educational-publisher work
To flesh out my larger
educational-editing picture: TSI Graphics, as I mentioned, I worked at from February
through mid-April 1999 as a staffer, and as a periodic freelancer until October
1999. Once or twice I worked for them again much later, such as, sometime in
2000, for its chief editor Dee Josephson, as I mentioned in Part 2.
I finally got into another gig
with the larger company of Pearson when I landed work with Silver Burdett Ginn,
a company in Parsippany that Pearson bought up in 1998 along with Prentice
Hall. That gig started about September 1999 and ran until sometime in the
spring of 2000. This was working, via copy editing (and to their very specific
rules), on two grade-editions of the “Blest Are We” Catholic-school books.
(Yes, Protestants like myself could work on those books.) I worked there not
through a temp agency. This involved work I picked up from the office, took
home, worked on there, and brought back. This situation was nice, but the work not
terribly voluminous per period of time. (It obviously coincided, over the
longer term, with editorial work from other companies.)
I again worked at Prentice Hall itself,
for the supplements department of the Humanities and Social Sciences section of
the higher-education (mainly college) division, in spring/summer 2001 and
spring/summer 2002. This was freelance (again, no temp agency), with some work
done in-house and some done at home. The hourly rates could be good (this to be
explained). And with my last work with this gig in late summer 2002, that was
the last time I ever worked for
Prentice Hall (not that I didn’t try
to get in there again).
I would work for other
educational publishers outside the Pearson realm, such as Peoples Publishing
Group (now Peoples Education), notably in fall 2000 on the “African-American
textbook” (the 2001 edition of Molefi Kete Asante’s African American History: A Journey
of Liberation) and intermittently on other products afterward, until 2005.
I would also do work for Bogart and Barr, a book packager of sorts, that would
have some hand in educationally related books (such as for Enslow, a New Jersey
firm) and reference books (such as a science-fiction reference tome); my sporadic
time with them was 2002 to 2007, but that work wasn’t quite as typically
educational, or as massive-demand a project, as with Pearson in 1997-98 and
some of Peoples.
As I said, I certainly tried to get work from Prentice Hall again,
whether doing in-house work or take-home. My tries were not continual. In fact, I found that in very recent years, the last
times before the past year or so that I tried to elicit work from a contact at
Prentice Hall were in 2011, maybe once or so in 2012. I know it’s not been
continual through the past four or so years, and I’m not sure how it was in the
several years before that.
To be continued.
