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From Manuscript to Book

© Julia Buitrago

If you’ve been following this series for the past few installments, you’ve watched a manuscript go through the secretary, editor, and graphic designer. This week is the final installment of this process: the printing operation. (You’ve also been following my move to another state and the question of where I put the can opener. The answer: in a lunchbox packed in a box labeled “Miscellaneous Kitchen Items.”)

Naturally there are other people who are involved in the process from imaging artists who scan the photographs to marketing professionals who drum up sales for the upcoming book. Although I won’t be discussing their jobs in detail, I just wanted to take a moment to thank all those behind-the-scenes people for their hard work. I sent my most recent manuscript off to the publisher this week, and before I get my advance copy it will be touched in some way by more than fifteen people, not counting the booksellers, contributors, or customers.

So how exactly does a book get printed? Once the graphic artist has designed the book in a program like Quark XPress or Adobe PageMaker, they have to package it for the printer. In the past 20 years, publishing has come a long way through technological advances. Originally a designer would send a pastebook to the printer to be published. Imagine taking a blank journal or notebook, cutting your manuscript into pieces and gluing them into this blank journal. Then you would need to glue headers, footers, page numbers, photos, and any other graphics into the book (and hope that it fit!).

Today all of this work is done by computer. The files, containing the text, photos, and other graphics are put onto Zip disks or burned onto CDs along with the fonts and original high-resolution photo files to send to a printer.

A new trend that is catching on is the use of PDF files to send books to the printer. A PDF file is very similar to a photograph of the page. There’s no concern about fonts or photos coming up missing, because a PDF already has them in place. With a PDF, there’s no surprises when the book is printed, because a PDF is locked in and will not change when the file is opened on different computers (a common problem I’ve seen with Quark and PageMaker files).

At the printing plant, the files are run through a computer to identify any technical errors (such as text printing on a dark section of a photograph). Once approved, the files are used to make film for the book. There are four main colors used to print most books: black, magenta, cyan, and yellow. For black and white text or photos, only one set of film is run. If the book is in color, however, four sections of film must be run for each page. One in black, one in magenta, one in cyan, and one in yellow. By overlapping these four pieces of film, the colors are created. It is quite costly to run new film, and, since color pages require four sheets of film each, making changes to a color page can be very expenses. In some cases the publisher will pay for any changes, but other publishers will charge the author for not catching a typo. If you have a correction you want made, it might cost you up to several thousand dollars. (Always a good idea to ask who’s picking up the tab if you have last minute corrections!)

The copyright of the article From Manuscript to Book in Historical Writing is owned by Julia Buitrago. Permission to republish From Manuscript to Book in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.