On Production.

by Pablo Defendini

I came of age, career-wise, in the late 90′s, as an art director at J. Walter Thompson, a multinational advertising agency. The 1990′s were an interesting time to be in an art department. The desktop publishing revolution was changing the way art directors and designers went about their work: x-acto knives, paste-ups, and letraset lettering were being displaced by Macs running Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Freehand (nowadays Adobe Illustrator, sadly. Freehand kicked ass) and Quark Xpress (these days it’s InDesign, thankfully. Quark Xpress is a piece of trash and should be put out of its misery with a bullet or twenty. But I digress). Many old-school designers and art directors were being forced to completely upend their usual modus operandi. During my tenure at JWT and other agencies, I saw art directors mostly take one of three tacks to attack the problem of their suddenly impending obsolescence:

a) hire a bright young thing to translate their hand-crafted comps into electronic desktop publishing files,

b) hunker down, learn the new tools of the trade, and become proficient in the new lingua franca of creative production, or

c) sit back with their head in the sand, coast on their reputations (and their sometimes exorbitant paychecks), complain loudly about how computers were destroying their livelihood, or how they were just a fad or trend, and would soon pass.

I remember being one of those bright young things from a), and I learned a lot from my mentors, who would—in exchange for some relatively minor Photoshop jockeying—help me hone my conceptualization and design skills: you know, the kinds of abilities that no amount of Photoshop-fu can magically instill in you; I still keep in touch with some of my former colleagues who embraced solution b); and had absolutely no patience for the old-guard who decided to take tack c). I’ve no idea what’s become of those poor fools—they are certainly not professionally active in any substantial sense anymore, as far as I can tell.

As time went on, my career and interests expanded into film-making and web design, and I saw the same effect in these sectors. The advent of Apple’s Final Cut film-editing software in the early 2000′s, for example, allowed me to put together a very lean television production team, hiring out producers and creatives like directors, DPs and editors directly, and creating TV spots which enabled me to not have to depend on outsourcing production to film-based studios, thereby (legitimately) undercutting competitors on price and speed-to-air. The debut of software like Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG code editors allowed me to learn to code HTML in a way that was much more accessible to me than having to learn a programming language blind, and let me put together a nascent interactive department.

It absolutely boggles my mind that, at this late stage in the game, publishers still consider themselves somehow exempt from the repercussions of the digital revolution.

As publishing makes its unfashionably late entrance into the digital realm, the people working in publishing production are facing similar challenges. Unfortunately, the prevalence of attitude c) is legion, especially among the big six legacy publishers. It amazes me that, despite being run by what seems to be a bunch of genuinely intelligent people, and despite the fact that, within all the big publishing houses, there are incredibly smart and competent and observant people (usually our age and pay grade) who are acutely aware of what needs to be done, legacy publishing is stubbornly determined to make the same mistakes that others have made before them.

There is a saying that my mother is very fond of, and it’s one that I’ve been saying to myself over and over, like a mantra, over the past couple of years: Si las barbas de tu vecino se están quemando, pon las tuyas en remojo. Or, for the monolingual among you: “If your neighbour’s beard is on fire, you should go soak yours in water.” So let’s take a look at what a hypothetical publisher with some cojones could stick in their bucket of water, shall we?

You know that author who swears by their 1965 IBM Selectric, the one they bought at a garage sale when they were fifteen and still use to this day, because “the only way I can write is by clacking away at my Selectric in my special writing corner of my special writing cabin in the middle of my special woods”? Well, that’s adorable, really. Very quaint, and I’m sure it makes for a wonderful quip while on tour and trying to aggrandize the author’s romantic mystique. Unfortunately, it’s also fucking retarded. You know what? Grow a goatee, or wear a beret, but use a modern word processor, or even better, an XML editor. Like it or not, authors who produce creative work for big publishers are not fine artists, they are commercial artists, like illustrators, designers, session musicians, etc. If you’re writing a book of poetry for yourself, or as a purely artistic endeavour, then go ahead and break out the chisel and chip away at your stone tablets. But if you’re a commercially published author, who depends on a production team in order to get your work published, you’re damn well served making your support team’s life easier. Musicians don’t hand in a box full of reel-to-reel tapes to their record companies; they’re rocking ProTools files.

Editors, same deal: learn to author XML. Learn to love versioning tools. That way you’ll have full control over the master edition of your work: the one that gets distributed to all the different formats: print, ebook, web, smoke signals, what have you. Looking for typos and errors in galleys of the printed book before it goes to press is too late in the game (not that it shouldn’t be done, of course). By the time something hits the production department, it should be good to go. That kind of print-centric approach is soon to be very inadequate anyway, as ebook production gets rolled into the main line of a book’s production cycle, which in turn becomes much less linear.

Hey typesetters, compositors, and producers in general: you know how I’m hectoring authors and editors about XML? Well, that goes quadruple for you. Learn how to cleanly import XML into InDesign for your print edition (hint: it’s not quite as simple as mousing over to File>Import); learn how to create a proper, well-crafted, compliant and appropriate ePub file from that XML document (which is also not quite as simple as hitting File>Export to Digital Editions—go listen to what Liza Daly has to say. Listen to that woman—make her your bible, your fucking virgin mary); learn how to automate these processes so that you’re always working from the original manuscript (which is now an XML file), as opposed to making ad-hoc, in-line corrections on the fly which don’t propagate to subsequent editions.

Wait a minute… it’s kind of quiet in here. Where did everybody go? Oh shit, big publishers outsource a large part of these services, don’t they? They’ve found that cutting out expensive production departments and hiring out the services of middlepeople, who also handle distribution and sometimes even retail fulfillment, saves on people power (read: health insurance and pensions), hassle, and extra load on their IT departments. Well, guess what one of the cardinal rules of the digital revolution is: digital production eliminates the need for most middlepeople. Bring this all back in-house, make it a lean operation. Settle on nothing less than a standards-compliant workflow, but please, build it from the ground up, as opposed to tacking it onto your existing production setup as an afterthought. I’m a rip-the-band-aid-off-quickly kind of guy, so it should come as no surprise that I’m advocating the scorched-earth approach here, but scorched-earth is the right approach here, I think; things are moving too quickly around you for it to not be.

I know it’s an enormous outlay of capital at the beginning, and it requires re-thinking many of your core business relationships and practices, and that we’re in a recession, and that you don’t want to lay off or re-train half your workforce. It’s gonna be hard. Real hard. Old habits, and all that. But you know, it’s going to have to happen sooner or later, like it or not. Why not get a jump on things—be proactive, take advantage of the fact that we’re in a recession, and people are out of work, and looking for gigs. Steve Jobs once said, during the dot-com bust of the early ’00s: “We decided to innovate our way through this downturn, so that we would be further ahead of our competitors when things turn up“. That’s worked out rather well for Apple, don’t you think? Take a page from Uncle Steve’s playbook.

Otherwise, smaller and more agile shops are coming in to eat your lunch. They don’t have the large amounts of capital from the latest Dan Brown/Stephen King.J.K. Rowling/Stephanie Myers/Janet Evanovich, but they also don’t have the overhead, the legacy, or the inbred, grandfathered attitudes so prevalent at legacy publishing houses.