Developmental Briefs

This past week at the University of California Press, we’ve undertaken a new initiative: to provide consistent early editorial and production assessments of draft manuscripts, which we are calling “EDP briefs” (the acronym is short for “editing, design, and production”). This brief addresses many narrow questions (e.g., length of manuscript, number of pieces of art), but it also prompts the in-house editor to note broader developmental problems. In this sense, the assessments are similar to the “developmental briefs” I’ve seen used by trade publishers and book packagers.

But isn’t the phrase “developmental brief” oxymoronic? In my handbook on developmental editing, Chapter 6 provides a format for writing a full “developmental plan” of five to ten pages in length. A brief, in contrast, merely identifies developmental issues in a bulleted list, though it may also gesture toward possible solutions for the author and publisher to consider. A developmental brief should be one to two pages long and take no more than four hours to complete.

As publishers’ budgets get tighter and tighter, we need to be increasingly strategic in our developmental interventions. Thus, a three-step screening process of brief, full plan, and full edit can help us to ensure that our limited resources go to projects that will truly benefit from them. If a project’s brief is convincing, then we may move on to developing a full plan; if the plan passes muster with all stakeholders, then we’ll undertake the full developmental edit.

I’ll report on the success of this new initiative in future posts. No doubt, the proliferation of assessments will generate plenty of material for this blog!

A Course Packet Is Not a Book

Anyone who has taught or attended college in the past three decades knows how much the teaching world has become dominated by the course packet. When students first arrive in class, they receive directions to the local Kinko’s that sells the instructor’s packet (or instructions for downloading it onto their computers). These packets contain selections from various published sources (reproduced with permission), usually interleaved with unpublished material by the instructor. If the instructor teaches the same course for many years, she may gradually replace most or all of the borrowed material with her own work.

Such packets can have real potential for acquisition by a publisher. After all, they have been created to fill a need not met by existing textbooks, and they’ve been tested in the classroom for effectiveness over many years. But they can also contain developmental issues that are difficult to rout. First, packets invariably bear the stamp of the instructor’s personality—quirks that can be entertaining and effective in the classroom but that may not translate well to the written page. Second, because packets are often devised to distinguish an instructor’s approach to the subject, other instructors may be unwilling to abandon their own packets in favor of someone else’s. Third, the course itself may be an interdisciplinary hybrid with few counterparts on other campuses.

But the most challenging aspect of the packet-turned-book, from the DE’s perspective, is a pervasive lack of transitions providing context. Effective teachers like to surprise their students at the beginning of each class with a change of subject, then eventually demonstrate how the new topic fits in with topics discussed in previous sessions. Much of this relevance is purposely withheld from the written packet to enhance the drama of the “reveal” during class. But a book version needs to supply that missing context. Therefore, the author of a textbook derived from a course packet needs to revise to consciously integrate her lecture and discussion material with her required reading.

The scope of the challenge is not unlike that of revising a dissertation for publication (see Beth Luey, ed., Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors, updated edition, UC Press, 2007). But it can be harder: the instructor has lived with the packet so long, she may have difficulty seeing its deficiencies as a book. DEs, authors, and publishers alike do well to acknowledge these special challenges before attempting to transform a course packet into the backlist staple they desire.

How Do You Like Your Kindle 2?

At UC Press, I am one of the few staff members who actually lunches in our lunchroom. It’s an unattractive place with no windows and stained furniture, many of the stains contributed by me. Eating there gets me away from my desk, and the oppressive décor keeps me from lingering. Invariably, as colleagues arrive to prepare their own lunches, they peek at the cover of the book I’m reading and offer mini-reviews until the microwave dings. So when my partner surprised me with the very generous gift of a Kindle 2, I had a dilemma: Do I bring it into the lunchroom?

After all, one might be forgiven for thinking of Kindle as the enemy of the printed book. With slumping sales, budget cuts, and reduced staffing, the atmosphere in publishing houses today ranges from fear to fatalism. The book industry hasn’t yet decided how it will enter the electronic future, and our careers hang in the balance. Was I abandoning the troops by downloading my books instead of hunting them down in the increasingly rare independent bookstores of the Bay Area?

As a practical matter, I couldn’t see reading an e-book at home and carrying a print book to work. One of the real benefits of a Kindle is that you need never run out of reading material while commuting or traveling—I’ll never again have to lunch over the catalogs of other university presses.

So I sheepishly showed up with the offending instrument, and it’s been a conversation piece ever since. Some colleagues are excited by the prospect of downloading audio books; designers are alarmed by the gap-toothed justification of typeset lines that results from Kindle’s no-hyphenation policy. (Actually, there are plenty of hyphens left in place, mid-line, from the print editions.) Most agree with me that the tiny keyboard at the bottom should have been sacrificed so that the display could more closely approximate the trim dimensions of the standard paperback.

Two months in, I’m grateful for the gift because it has pushed me to begin engaging personally with the future of the book. Although I’m still not ready for what may come. One colleague saw the device and said, “That obsolete thing? My kids are reading their YA [Young Adult] books on their cell phones.” Meanwhile, with my middle-aged eyesight, I celebrate my favorite Kindle feature: type enlargement.

The Future of the Book

My mother returns from each visit to the local library with four or five thick hardbacks, the thicker the better. No matter how much she enjoys a book, if it’s under 400 printed pages, she feels cheated. I have a hard time convincing her to read short story collections: she enjoys the writing, but their brevity gets on her nerves.

I think of my mother when I consider the future of the book. No other form of human expression can create an entire world of thought and feeling as subtly, deeply, and thoroughly as a book-length text. Maybe the closest analog is the television series, which can—at its best, in cases like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under—develop great richness and complexity, with plots tangling and characters evolving as we watch. But that experience is so much more external than the opportunity afforded by a text, whose words occur as though in the reader’s own mind. Feature films, plays, paintings, poems, songs, ballets, even symphonies—these forms, glorious as they are, cannot induce an audience member to slip free of herself so completely and for such a duration.

This degree of absorption is not limited to narrative. A deft writer can draw us into the subtle involutions of an argument so that we experience the author’s intellectual process as our own.

I’m agnostic about how longs books will remain physical objects: I suspect a nostalgia for ink and paper will keep the presses going for a few more generations, but much of the book industry’s nonfiction content will have migrated to electronic form long before then. My deeper concern is whether the fragmented, multi-tasking nature of our new information technologies will erode the human capacity for extended narrative and argument. Then I think of my mom, and the millions of readers like her, and I am encouraged: surely there will always be an appetite that can be satiated only by a good, long book.

The DE Catch-22

When acquisitions editors propose a new edition of a book, they may account for soft sales of a previous edition by saying it was published in the “wrong” trim size, in paperback when it should have been hardcover (or vice versa), or with too few illustrations. They bolster their argument by analyzing comparable titles with better sales performance, often citing works by other publishers. In such matters of format, data is not hard to come by. But because publishers do not advertise which of their books have been developmentally edited, any similar analysis of comparable titles is restricted to the publisher’s own previous experiments. The result is a Catch-22: publishers steer clear of developmental editing because they have no supportive data showing it works, thus perpetuating the paucity of data.

The Cost of DE

Publishers will want to know, How can we justify the extra time and money required by developmental editing? How much does the work of a DE increase the sales of a book, or enhance its critical reception? These valid questions are hard to answer in dollars, but the lack of metrics should not keep a publisher from delving into developmental editing. After all, there are plenty of qualitative factors widely believed to determine the success or failure of a book. We publishers have no tangible proof that strong cover designs increase sales, yet we assign an almost totemic power to the arrangement of image, color, and type.