This is number fifty-three in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I WENT TO GRAD SCHOOL in 1976 to study Design and Technical Theatre. By the end of 1978, I’d designed and built twenty-four shows in twenty-four months. I was utterly burned out. I quit my job in a small college theatre department, quit my marriage, and quit just about everything else in my life. I decided to go into something low-stress—like publishing.
I spent five years working inside a couple of different companies to produce their newsletters and marketing materials. Then the desktop publishing revolution occurred and I started my first business as an independent publisher. I had corporate contracts to publish trade journals, tabloids, and newsletters under my new business name, The Wordsmythe.
For the past forty years, I’ve been involved one way or another in publishing—everything from writing and editing to layout and design to publishing technology and training. It’s been a heady trip, that put me in front of hundreds of industry professionals. We changed an industry.
Back in the early stages of desktop publishing, Robin Williams—the author, not the comedian—wrote a ground-breaking book titled The Mac is Not a Typewriter. It was the first treatise I’m aware of that defined the differences between writing and publishing, and between word processing and typesetting.
One of her first rules was “No double spaces after punctuation!” That had been a principle in typesetting for four hundred years, but typing teachers on typewriters had been teaching double-space after a period since the typewriter was invented in 1868. The difference was that typewriters were monospaced and typesetters had variable spacing.
My 2010 award winning Nathan Everett novel, The Gutenberg Rubric, was the culmination of twenty years of research and teaching printing and publishing. I have previously mentioned the extent of editing this book went through. Developmental editing was provided by The Book Doctor, Jason Black. Line editing was by Michele Palmer. Proofreading was handled by a crew of volunteer editors who each brought a unique perspective to the process. And every native German speaker who has read the book has corrected something different in my German phrasing.
But when it was finally time to produce a book that was print worthy, it came back to me—not as author, but as book designer.
The Gutenberg Rubric was offered in print long before it made its eBook appearance in 2011. But the editing process was far from over when it reached me. I still had to do a mechanical edit.
The Gutenberg Rubric is available in both print and eBook for all formats.
Before I actually produce a book, it goes through at least two and often three levels of mechanical edit.
The first level is done in the word processing program. (MS Word for me.) I am astounded to know how many people who consider themselves experts in using Word have no concept of how to use styles. I have my own Word manuscript template that I immediately copy any received manuscript into before I go through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph to apply appropriate styles to it. The styles are named simple things like “ChapterHead,” “ChapterFirst,” “Body,” “Break,” “BreakFirst,” and “Quote.” There are others and I have a library of styles I can add for complex books.
When all the paragraphs have been properly tagged, I do global search and replace for double-spaces, double-returns, space before a return, space after a return, and many things that I might have noticed in the initial scan. There may be styles in the original manuscript that conflict with the layout styles. Perhaps I want some number of words at the beginning of the chapter to be in all caps. These are all mechanical editing decisions.
When the manuscript is truly clean, including not having stray fonts in it anywhere, I place the text in my layout program. I use Adobe InDesign for all my layout of both print and eBooks. MS Word is a word processing program. It is not a publishing program. Books in either eBook or print that are published from a word processing program are almost always identifiable as amateurish and poorly designed.
Once I set the specifications for the styles that I’ve defined, I go through the entire book line-by-line to make visual adjustments. If I’m laying out a print book, visual adjustments might be to fine-tune spacing or hyphenation for widow and orphan control. Widows and orphans are single words, syllables, or even lines of a paragraph that appear at the end or beginning of a page, or a single word or syllable on a line at the end of a paragraph. It’s one of the characteristics in books that can drive a reader crazy as they lose the train of thought from one page to another.
Setting up introductory paragraphs for chapters may involve a drop capital (first character of the paragraph that is two or three lines tall). In nearly every case, the spacing of those lines needs to be adjusted so the lines don’t all look like they start with the same letter.
I’ll check for hyphenation ladders—instances where a hyphen ends two or more consecutive lines. I’ll check to be sure that all quotation marks and apostrophes have been converted to a curled mark instead of a straight mark, and ensure that inch and foot marks have not been converted to curly quotes. I will check all style overrides (italics, bold, etc.) and verify they are applied only to the word or words they were intended for, and to be sure the software has not aberrantly substituted a different font.
Preparing an eBook in InDesign requires different mechanics. No overriding spacing for widows and orphans or for drop caps. The book designer has limited control over what is seen in the eBook because the reader can change devices from small screens to large screens, can change typefaces to what they prefer, can change type size, and can even change background color. In the mechanical edit, I will test the eBook output on several device simulations to be sure nothing in the book creates a problem, like a static-size picture that won’t fit on some pages!
I will simply mention the third possible mechanical edit most of my own books go through is to convert the book to html and code all the entities in the book. On my own website, entities are correctly rendered, but there are some features that may have overrides in the layout engine for the site. For example, the apostrophe at the beginning of ’60s may be automatically changed to an open single quote, even if I have coded the correct entity in the html. I have had people point out “my error” on that one more than once. Intelligent software really isn’t.
So, yes. Even after the developmental edit, the rewrite, the structural edit, the copy edit, the line edit, and proofreading, a professionally published book still needs a mechanical edit and that is a completely different process.
Next week—let’s get off editing for a while. I recall Kenny Rogers being asked in an interview about his work with Dolly Parton, “Are they real?” He responded, “No. They’re all wigs.” Believe it or not, people ask me the same question—but it isn’t about Dolly! Next week: “Are They Real?”