The Business of Books: The Front End

When it comes to current trends in the business of books, the world of prepress is no different: We are seeing shorter runs, higher demands and more advanced technological capabilities. Workflows have come a long way since the 1970s and 1980s, and are now more streamlined than ever. As digital is seemingly dominating print, it’s continuing to show more of an effect on prepress.

Joanne Shwed, owner of Backspaceink.com, a prepress provider of book production services to publishers and self-publishing authors, has been doing prepress since the late 1970s, before the age of computers.

Changing With the Times

“The first typesetting machine I had was an IBM Selectric Composer. It looked like a typewriter and had memory. If you wanted to change a font or go from italic to bold, you had to type in a code, put in an italic ball or bold ball, change the font, stop it, change the ball, type one word, then change it back again. This became very tedious,” Shwed recalled.

“We had to process film. The process involved stinky chemicals and long strips of type that we cut and pasted onto screens. That’s how pages were made back then, until computers came out and we can actually see letters and numbers on a screen in front of us.”

WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), part of early desktop publishing, was a system for displaying content representing something similar to final output on a monitor. This was an advancement during that time, but “if you wanted to draw something simple like a box, you would have a screen full of code,” she warned.

The 1990s and early 2000s brought significant changes to the industry, such as the introduction of Microsoft Word, QuarkXPress, and Adobe InDesign. Book designers used to have to print proofs from a paper output, but PDFs have since replaced the need for printing and mailing out proofs.

The Internet also plays a major role as it allows prepress providers to work with people from all over the world.

“For authors, Microsoft Word can track changes, meaning I can mark changes onto their documents electronically and send it to them. There are no marking changes on paper. When I get done with all the edits, I can just pour them into a page layout program and add style tabs, drop caps, or other style elements and assign tags to them. I can change 50 headings from 12-point to 14-point at once, and once the book is laid out, it’s easy to repaginate and reformat,” she offered.

And now, on-demand book printing has “revolutionized” her business again. More people are now self-publishing, according to Shwed, since it’s easy to take a PDF and post it to a site such as createspace.com, obtain an ISBN number, put the order number next to the book, and have one book printed at a time. Much of her business involves preparing authors’ PDFs for on-demand publishing.

“On-demand liberates authors; the front end of book publishing is much less overwhelming for them now. Everything is automated, easy and people can download files quickly from FTP sites. Business has grown because people want to be in control, and self publishing puts authors in control of their work. The self-publishing field is growing,” she said.

She also stressed the importance of forming partnerships with printers who don’t have an in-house prepress department. “Partnering with printers forms a cross-promotional effect. It’s a win-win relationship that creates business.”

Implementing the Strategies

Allworth Press, located in New York City, publishes books to help creatives (writers, artists, actors and designers) succeed.
“We get manuscripts, come up with in-house ideas for books, and we go out and look for authors if we have good ideas. We set up a contract with the author who agrees to royalties, and once the book goes into production, the prepress process including the cover design takes nine months before the book goes into printing,” explained Publisher Tad Crawford.