What Is Book Production?

A roundtable discussion with the production department of Catapult books.

Have you always wanted a career in publishing? Do you already have a career in publishing but are curious about how other companies function? Over the past few months, we’ve been sharing roundtable discussions with full-time Catapult staff members from various departments, including publicity, design, and the magazine. (You can also hear from our past and present interns here!) This conversation is a discussion with Catapult’s full-time production team: vice president of corporate culture and senior managing editor Wah-Ming Chang (WMC); production manager Olenka Burgess (OB); production editor Laura Berry (LB); and production assistant tracy danes (TD). We hope you enjoy learning more about how the production team functions at Catapult, how they each arrived at publishing, and their recommendations for breaking into the industry.

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Spell it out for us! What is the role of the production team? What other departments do you interact with—and what does your relationship with Catapult’s authors look like?

WMC: The production department is the behind-the-scenes mechanics ensuring that books go to print on time and with as few errors as possible. We work with the editorial and design teams to set up and track schedules for stakeholders, make corrections to text that our roster of copy editors and proofreaders catch, and design and typeset each book’s interior layout. As soon as a manuscript is sent to us for copyediting, we are in touch with the authors. It is exciting to introduce authors to this part of the process, whether they’re publishing for the first or tenth time. When I started out as a production editor at the bigger publishing houses, I rarely interacted with authors (and if I did, it was only because I’d snuck a note of admiration to them). At an independent house, our relationship with authors is intimate and direct. All the steps that are separated into different departments at a bigger house (production editorial [formerly known as copyediting], production, typesetting, book design) are integrated into one department at a smaller house. As Olenka says below, we lay down the tracks and monitor timetables so the trains can run smoothly—and everybody riding our train rides first-class.

​​LB: The production team turns a Word document into a physical book. Copyediting, proofreading, interior book design, typesetting, printing, and ebook conversion happen at the production stage, and we work with freelance copy editors, proofreaders, and indexers as well as with printer and prepress services. As a production editor, my interaction with the author begins when they turn in the final manuscript and are ready to have it copyedited.

OB (she/her): All of the above. I was trying to come up with an elaborate rail-system metaphor, in which we lay schedule tracks for book trains and monitor conflicting timetables and interact with way station managers, but it was getting unwieldy (something a copy editor might have queried). In my capacity, I don’t often interact with our authors, unless their book will incorporate lots of artwork—in those cases, a more in-depth conversation can be useful to determine the best way to produce the book. I always look forward to unusual projects that push us to explore new materials and processes!

TD (they/them): My favorite stop on the production train is the one where I hand the newly typeset pages off to the author—it’s the first time they see what their Word document will look like as a book. Getting there takes fiddling with fonts, margins, leading, kerning, headers, subheaders, and all the fine-toothed gears that interlock to create the balanced page spreads you see when you crack open a book.

What has your professional journey been like? How did you arrive at publishing and, more specifically, production?

OB: Toward the end of college, I got involved in letterpress printmaking—a happy fusion of my linguistic and aesthetic leanings—and ended up working at a boutique stationery print shop for several years, first as a printer/papermaker and then as the production manager. I found that I enjoyed handling the analytical and logistical aspects of a creative enterprise as much as I enjoyed physically handling the materials and processes involved in making beautiful things. Eventually, I felt called to return to my literary roots and knew that “production manager” was a thing that existed within the book-publishing industry as well. I ended up doing a book-publishing master’s program, which inspired me to veer toward the editorial side of publishing for a time . . . but paper and ink always pull me back in.

LB: A lot of lovely experiences pushed me toward publishing and book production, but my background in InDesign (the standard typesetting/layout-design software) got me my first full-time gig. A college friend trained me in InDesign so I could take over as the production manager of the school lit mag (thank you!), and later, after a year on a literature research grant in Japan, I was hired as a digital production assistant at W. W. Norton. In addition to typesetting, that job involved reading hard copy proofs, which included color-coded markup from the proofreader, author, and production editor; I was moved by the care and attention they each devoted to every word. Meanwhile, I was doing freelance production work on comics, so I applied for a job managing the copyediting/proofreading of manga and light novels at Yen Press. That job was a lot of fun, but I missed working in InDesign; I joined Catapult so I would get to do all my favorite things at the same time.

TD: I always thought I was going to work in video game development (always meaning through middle and high school, at which time I was addicted to World of Warcraft). I ended up in a creative writing BFA program instead, thanks to my high school English teachers. I’ve never been terribly interested in the idea of a career; my curiosities are much too chaotic to follow just one course, to ride just one train. I was as bemused at elementary school’s Career Day as I am today when somebody asks, “Which gender are you?” The axiom “Do what you love and the money will follow” never made sense to me because there is no one passion around which I wish to build my profession (or my personality). No, multiplicity is key.

I arrived at Catapult as a publicity and marketing intern in March 2020. A sobering time to start a new job. In the summer of that year, in the midst of nationwide civil unrest, I started to learn how systemic forces of oppression manifest in the US publishing industry. What became important to me was to cultivate mutual and nurturing relationships throughout the company and the industry. Exploitation thrives in isolation; to work against it requires collaboration, love, and honesty (perhaps these are what solidarity means). What I cherish most about working at Catapult is spending my days with these three people—Olenka, Laura, and Wah-Ming—and the many folks in other departments who astound me on the regular.

All of which is to say: I struggled for a long time with the idea that I am supposed to know what I want. Only in the past two years have I come to understand that what’s most fulfilling to me is to be playful and to find people who bring me to life, with whom I can explore all the curiosities. If you’re reading this, maybe you already have more clarity than I did (or do). But it’s okay to flail.

WMC: After college, I worked first as a production editor and then as a managing editor. I started in scientific, medical, and technical publishing (cutting and pasting running heads and folios onto physical proofs over a light box) before moving to trade book publishing at the bigger houses, first at St. Martin’s Press and then at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. From there, I went on to work in independent publishing, where, after fourteen years of wearing a single snug hat, suddenly I was wearing ten, all of them various sizes. Eventually, I wound up at Catapult as managing editor, where I got to assemble a Voltron of a production team from scratch. It is to this team’s credit that our books are created with a thoughtfulness that catches as many typos as possible, anticipates potential scheduling issues, and prioritizes clear communication with our authors. Some of the skills I learned throughout my career felt intuitive (proofreading and typesetting, for example, because I love a well-placed comma and a classic typeface), but most came about because of time, sweat, and, most important, collaboration with my team.

The production department is the behind-the-scenes mechanics ensuring that books go to print on time and with as few errors as possible.

What’s your position at Catapult? Can you give us a general overview of your role and/or describe what a standard workweek or workday looks like?

OB: I am the production manager. My main responsibilities are planning production schedules for each season’s books, monitoring the inventory and reprint needs of our extensive backlist, and serving as a point of contact between Catapult and our printers and warehouse to ensure that books exist when they are supposed to, looking how they are supposed to. A typical day involves a lot of spreadsheets—reports of fast-moving inventory, detailed book schedules and progress trackers, logs of active print jobs and their timelines—and some physical sheets, i.e. samples of finished books I flip through to make sure all is as it should be.

LB: I’m a production editor. A production editor typically manages (or, at some publishers, performs in-house) a book’s copyediting and proofreading. At Catapult, the book’s production editor also designs and typesets the book interior; other houses might have a separate interior design department or outsource the work.

On a typical day, I might arrange a proofread with a freelancer, input second-pass corrections to a book in InDesign, collate manuscript edits from the copy editor and author in Word, design a sample book interior, review covers, and take care of minutia involving invoices, barcodes, and the Library of Congress.

TD: I am the production assistant for the three book imprints (Catapult Press, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press). It’s a role that didn’t exist at Catapult before me, which means I’ve had the joy of sculpting, to an extent, my own job description. I handle a menagerie of PDFs, spreadsheets, form templates, cover-copy documents, task schedules, and blurbs; I manage all things ebook production; and, most delightfully, I don the production editor’s cap for paperback conversions and a handful of frontlist titles each season. As Laura points out, there’s little consistency from day to day. Production, to me, is about riding the tides and, after being unceremoniously tossed around by printer delays and schedule shifts, coming at last to understand the ebb and flow—to predict the rushes and to wade with grace through the unpredictable.

WMC: I am the senior managing editor and oversee the growth of the production team. A typical day involves copyediting and proofreading in-house material, reviewing mechanicals, obsessively going over and adjusting deadlines for all titles in production or about to go into production, contacting stakeholders about material that’s past due, adding proofreading corrections to a book interior, and examining the book package once it arrives at my door.

What would you recommend for people interested in breaking into the publishing industry?

LB: There’s no harm in casting a wide net, but I would try to figure out what things you actually enjoy doing on a daily basis and then reach out to people in publishing to learn what their work lives are like. Even if you know someone only through a friend of a friend or social media, most people are happy to discuss their experiences, and you can compare what they love/don’t love about their jobs with your own priorities.

Also, a tip if you’re specifically interested in typesetting and layout—there’s no standard title for these jobs, so you’ll want to search the terms “production design,” “book interior design,” “digital production,” and “desktop publishing.”

TD: What Laura said! Be playful and try things out, especially if you’re applying for internships. A question I asked myself when sending applications was “Big Five or small indie?” A job at a tiny five-person operation is going to have you doing more diverse work than a role at one of the Big Five. Catapult is somewhere in between; to me, a person whose interests are always shifting, that’s the Goldilocks zone. The breadth of responsibilities keeps me interested, engaged, and learning. (Where else does an assistant manage ebooks?) If you prefer to have a clearly defined role and stable job description, then a bigger, more established corporate structure might be a better fit.

Whatever position you end up in, advocate for yourself—for your salary, your benefits, your boundaries, but also your job description. Even though I started at Catapult as a publicity and marketing intern, I knew I liked production. I made a point of reaching out to the production team to ask what tasks I might dip my toes into; from there, I took on more and more until, after my internship, I was brought on as a production assistant. Don’t do more work than you’re getting paid for, though!

WMC: Work your way into a house that publishes your favorite writers. Love being a step in the process that creates books. Love writers. Have opinions about certain writers. Don’t be shy about expressing these opinions. Love books.

OB: I’ll take this opportunity to give a shout-out to the book-publishing master’s program at Portland State University. The program is unique in that you can really get your hands dirty working at Ooligan Press, the program’s trade publishing house. At Ooligan, you’re able to take on responsibilities and make high-level decisions that would otherwise require years of job experience to access. While a publishing degree is certainly not necessary, it can be a great way to gain a comprehensive understanding of the publishing process and industry, especially for those who are outside New York (though remote internships have diminished this hurdle!) and those looking to make a career shift. You come away from the program with skills and connections that can help you break into the industry and that are also widely applicable outside of it.

What skills and/or interests do you think are ideal for pursuing a career in book production?

OB: A nearly unhealthy attention to detail. A love of the shapes of words, with their attendant loops and angles.

LB: Knowledge of The Chicago Manual of Style, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Microsoft Office, and maybe HTML/CSS for ebook purposes. A love, or at least tolerance, for spreadsheets and schedules. Even if you’re unfamiliar with most of these things, if you’re an artsy/nerdy type, production might suit you. On the less technical side, it helps to be empathetic, organized, and decisive.

TD: List making and flexibility (priorities can shift often and suddenly). Delight in details. An appreciation of paper.

WMC: Meticulousness to detail is essential. If you don’t have it when you start out, and for some reason you want to find a home in book production, you will learn it. This involves a lot of repetitive steps that teach you what to look out for—for example, always adding a serial comma per house style; confirming a publication name against its online or printed masthead; reviewing edits from authors, copy editors, and proofreaders to make sure they conform to general house style and are consistent with the title’s style sheet; and lightly proofing the new pass against the previous pass to make sure all edits were made correctly. I learned a lot of these copyediting and proofreading skills not through a class but from reviewing copy editors’ work. It’s this repetitiveness and willingness to learn from your own errors and absorb from those around you that will make book production a good fit.

What’s something about the industry (or your position) that you wish were more transparent or better understood by those outside of it?

OB: The printing and binding of books is still a craft, even on an industrial scale! Though printing technology is advanced and the equipment is high volume, the materials involved have their own organic quirks and fluctuations, and there are humans behind every step of the process.

LB: Production can get pretty technical, and you’re not expected to know everything going in, whether you’re a production assistant learning the ropes or an author whose book is headed for print. If you have questions, please ask away!

Also, you never need to apologize for typos. They’re inevitable, and they keep copy editors warm and fed.

TD: Again, what Laura said. Production is heavy with jargon. My time at Penguin Random House was spent mostly just asking “What does that mean?” and “How does that work?” I’ve found that people who get paid to interrogate the clarity of language are generally sympathetic to misunderstandings.

More important: If you’re someone who sees something questionable and can’t help but ask, if you’re invested in change, if you value workers over tradition, publishing stands to benefit from your collaboration, love, and honesty.

WMC: We love all the fussy rules around grammar and syntax and, when it’s done right, all the breaking of these rules.