so a lot of you really liked my day in the life as a production assistant when i posted that
and that got i think that's like over a thousand views at the moment so thank you it's like you
know what i'll do another one a bit of like an updated one for 2021 so i've got a to-do list
and things i need to do so i'm just basically just going to be going through each of those taking you
with me screen recording so you can see exactly what i'm doing and hopefully you can find out a
bit more about what a production assistant might do so just before i start this video just a quick
disclaimer everything i'm about to cover does not contain any condensable confidential information
roles do vary at different publishing houses so everything i'm about to cover isn't exclusively
what a production assistant would do in the book publishing industry it's just my personal
experience i think is that what i need to cover i think yeah okay let's get into it
so if you find this useful make sure you like comment subscribe share all that jazz your support
really does mean a lot to me so thank you so much so one of the biggest responsibilities of my job
is reprints and that's self-explanatory it's reprinting a title a book that's already been
published and we're just loan stock of it so what i have to do for this is run the pnls festival so
the profit and loss reports to get the costing see how many we need to print in order to make
up our margin our markups and to make sure that we obviously make a profit on it because we are
a business then i'll probably do a bit of type setting as well it's friday so i have to send my
titles to press today which means yes sending it sending the files to the printer so they can get
start printing on it so i have sent those already but i am waiting proof so when the digital proofs
come through from the printers i just have to check it make sure they're okay and they can go
ahead on printing that so this is a link to one of the digital proofs for the reprint that i'm going
to look at now so the priest looks slightly different in terms of these like red lines
basically oh yeah so this is my work blog this is where i track the reprints that i've been doing
so say like the title of it the isbn the important date so when we're informing the printers that the
files are coming when we actually send them to the printers and then when we want it in stock
then this is all like the specs of the book so yeah whether it's paperback or hardback etc and
any additional information so for example this one i sent to press earlier today it was going
from china to hong kong and then going to america and then
uk because we needed in both our warehouses so first things first we'll use the mish tool
198x129 yeah perfect that's a common tps that's fine just make sure that they've got
the colorful in the right place and it's updated and then on the imprint page just making sure
that the reprinted line has been updated that we've got our addresses in there etc make sure
the isbns are correct i mean at this point you would have done a lot of these checks when you're
sending the files off the type setting this is just kind of making sure that the file looks
okay to be printed i mean if we scroll through and the text was completely off center you'd
obviously know that perhaps there's been an issue with creating this proof on the printer's end and
yeah just making sure that it's it's fine so i mean from a rough look at it it looks fine
and i have another one to look at midsummer night stream when we were in the office we
used to have advanced copies come through and we could check the color and the printing of
them then but obviously we're working from home at the moment and so it's just digitally you'd
have to just check that the colors of them look okay it's not too dark not too light etc
but yes that one looks okay okay i'm gonna hide the prices there but um to just say that it's in
the text groups have been approved for these two titles so type setting is what i'm going to be
doing next that's what we do for reprint so every time a book is reprinted you have to change a
couple of things whether that's the reprinted line in the copyright page or if it's like a correction
that's been noted by the author or the editorial team we usually do that on monday but have quite
a few reprints this week so i'd rather just do it on friday give the typesetters long enough
time to do it because we usually ask for it back for the wednesday ready to send to the printers
on the friday so then the next titles to work on they're going to press next week are these
ones here so how many are there there are 11 so that means i have to do the type setting of those
ones kind of like today or monday ready to have the text files back for wednesday unfortunately
for confidentiality reasons and when speaking to the legal team at bloomsbury i can't show you
i can't tell you what systems we're using but i mean if you happen to recognize any of them that
you use at your workplace and i'm just now going to go on to our server that holds all of our files
so i've just downloaded the text file for one of the titles i need to do type setting for so
it's this title called keywritings i've just downloaded that from our internal server that
holds all of our files i've downloaded the print text pdf because there's different types of pdfs
that you can have but this is print text because self-explanatory is the one that's going to the
printers the one that eventually is going to be printed when you're doing the type setting
a misconception is that we actually do the type setting we don't as production assistants
we get sent off to external suppliers to do it we just tell them what needs to be done
so first of all i measure it and make sure yes this is what it's supposed to be and so compared
to my workload it's supposed to be 216x13a again that's another common specification in inches
that's 5.5 times 8.5 inches so that's all fine just check obviously if it is the right title
make sure that we've got the imprint the color phone and the imprint page is the updated one if
it's like an old one we like to update them to make sure that they're the newest possible then
this is what we change every time we reprint a book so we change the reprinted line so i'm going
to say we've been to 2020 we're printed 2021 um we also are missing our island address here um so i'm
just making a note there to add in our island address because that's missing and for brexit
reasons etc we need that in there now checking again that the isbns are correct et cetera and
then just generally looking if there were any corrections as well that would be on our content
management system to say that yeah any corrections need to be added in just from an oval look
everything centered um in terms of page numbers well make sure that's correct so 240 14.239
i mean the thing is that you have to remember with reprints is yes obviously do your checks on them
but they have been printed before this like this is an original file from the first time that it
was printed that's the whole point of it being a reprint so you know it was correct at one point so
there's not much that could go wrong as if you're working on frontlist titles for new publications
that would be slightly different so yeah just to make that clear that these are reprints so
all i'm doing now is using our content management system to create a purchase for the typesetters
and i'll save that to my files and then send that to the type setters along with
the text file that's got all the commentary on it on the changes that need to be made
and then ask for them to come back to me in a few days time next week with the corrective file
so this email that i've just come through now what was happening with this is i sent a p l
for 75 copies of this book to be printed and it wasn't making markup so that basically means
the percentage of how much we're selling it for compared to how much we're spending on getting
it printed we weren't basically making enough profit so the conversation was looking to see if
we could get costs for 100 copies instead to make it see if that makes a difference we send them the
costs for 100 copies and then i sent them the p l the profit and loss report for that as well and
it's just come through that we've approved 125 copies so we've gone up again so i'm just going
to add that on here now how to be a writer it's going to be 125 copies and it has been approved
to print for a reprint to be 125 conference that's not uncommon but it's quite low obviously the more
books you print the cheaper it will be in terms of the unit cost so ideally you want to print as many
as possible but if you know that you're not making that many sales on them there's obviously no point
keeping them in the warehouse and just hoping that one day they'll sell if we compare it to
a one that i've just done this week the crucible i think i studied that at school at gcc um but
this one we're printing ten thousand copies so that just kind of shows how it can differ
i think the drama titles do sell more copies because they go to schools etc as well
whereas some of our other titles so literary studies history philosophy whatever it is
we perhaps won't sell as many of them because because i work in academic a lot of our titles
go to universities or libraries or students academics anything like that so not as many
people would be buying them if i were to work in trade and work on like fiction titles the reprints
would be a lot higher so probably more like 20 to 30 000 depending on how popular the title is
i've been sent a few more pis as well so print instructions from our inventory managers so that
means i basically just have to get costs so i'm going to be doing a few of those today as well
usually when we're in the office and it's just been our financial year end which is at the
end of february we usually clear out all of our bookshelves rearrange them etcetera depending on
what's been published and reprinted that year where we're not in the offices at the current
time of filming this we've just been advised to do a bit of a digital clean up as well
if our folders you know deleting any files that we no longer need to keep or anything
so i'll probably do that in the afternoon just as like a more chill relaxing task yeah that's one
of the things that i'm going to aim to do today as well i also work on nipples so that stands for new
and paperback print-on-demand titles so i sent some text files off to the typesetters for some
corrections a few weeks ago so i'm going to now just check those make sure that they're all in
order so i have a separate work blog for many pods these are the ones that i'm working on etc so if
we go to the may ones it should be all of these ones that have been corrected the original file
comes from the hardback file and then because now that the paperback has come out it's usually 18
months after you would add in the paperback isbn and then you would add in a line to say when this
paperback edition was published as well so in this case it's 2021. so if we look at this one prem
i don't even know it's like prem raw white and counter culture should be two three four by one
five six millimeters 248 pages and the corrections were just the paid back line the paperback icn and
then the island address being added again so we can scroll over here it's two three four four
one five six that's fine the difference between these pod files and so pod because it's nippled
so it's still taking a pd file and print text files if they don't have trim page lines so
if you just scroll down here that is the accurate measurement fine so they've added in the island to
dress that's fab they've added in sentence that says this paperback edition published in 2021
and then they've added in the payback i said i'm just going gonna check that is correct as well so
it ends in four four eight and so this one ends in four four eight as well so that's fine usually
with pod files and nipple files the images will be mono so black and white so just making sure that
if any of them were changed from color to black and white that they look okay also for pod and
nipple files there needs to be blank pages at the end of the file um yeah it does and just the way
that it works about pod printers it it needs to be there one or two blank pages at the end this
one happens there so that's fine so that file all looks okay to me 24 page extent looks okay all the
questions have been made so i can go back to them and say that that one's fine and they can upload
that to our system and then i will basically just go through and do that for all of them now
so this one is slightly different additional time this actually needed a new imprint page so this
is an ibt title so ivy taurus is an imprint that we acquired so although we're keeping it as the
ibt branding the colorful and the imprint pages needed updating because it was an older version
so just checking that that's the newest one and that's the imprint page is updated as well
yeah a lot of my job to be honest is just checking text files whether
that's to the printers or pd files or whatever it is it's a lot of checking
text files nine times out of ten even more than that there's no issues there's no corrections etc
then i really like to stick to kind of key dates and we do have like a key date schedule that
gets sent around to us to basically say these are the key dates that you need to stick to
in order for this book to make publication so nipples although they are print onto one they
are technically new publications because they're new and paperback
and so they have a pub date so these ones i'm working on now they publish on the 20th of may
that's their pub date their publication date so working back to backwards from that you want them
live for as soon as possible but you know a couple months before so these textiles were due a couple
days ago and i did receive them a couple days ago and then once i approved all the text files i'll
just mark in my workflow that they're all okay and that i've received copy so i'll check with
the designers now to make sure that there's no delays on that and the code will be ready
and then this column here is basically saying if i've updated the metadata or not on our system
and then distribution so this is when i aim to actually distribute the files so by that like
digitally just distributing file sending it to the pod printers and then hopefully
um within sort of a month's time they will be able to get that live and it's available for printing
ready for our pub date of may 20. may 20 may 20th so i'm going to cover some of this up but i
use on outlook the task systems here so you can see that i put in kind of all the key dates here
so mainly for july for example is on the 6th of may and that reflects what's in my workbook or
it should be there yeah i can basically just keep on track of when things are due in because it can
be really hard when titles are all at different stages they're all publishing in different months
and so i like just keep that there when whilst you in like if the typesetters are late for example i
know when to chase them up because they're behind unfortunately i don't have any covers to check at
the moment um but they things i would check on that would be that the gps is correct that the
extent is correct because if you think about it a higher extent to the number of pages in it
would be result in a thicker book and therefore the spine would be thicker so making sure that
that's correct so that the cover the spine is is the correct width checking that the colors
look okay checking that there are no changes to the author affiliation in the book like the blurb
checking that the ibn's correct checking that we have the specific kodi bar code on the back
checking obviously shit's the right book checking just checking check and check in basically so when
i get those through from the design team i will look at those so another responsibility of my job
is managing the author project management survey and that's the server that we send out to authors
to get their feedback on things like proofreading copy editing communication indexing etc based on
the service that our external project managers typesetters provide for them and i manage that so
i will send out the surveys and then i'll collate their results and then once i've kind of got
as many results as i can for all the titles that have gone to press that month i share that with
our external team and wait for it to get approval before sending it off to the project management
companies themselves so they can see how they've been performing the whole idea of that is because
if they're consistently performing badly we will give them what's called a black mark and if they
get three black marks then we will consider like terminating our contracts with them basically so
it's it's basically just a way to make sure that they're providing the best service that they can
because essentially they work on behalf of us if that makes sense i won't have to show you
this properly but what this spreadsheet is is our author project management survey sheet and it's
where i collate all the results from an author and we have questions one to five and i'll put
in there what they scored for that question and i can see what project management company were
working on that title as well so i can see who i need to go back to if there's any issues etc
i've just got a reminder to have some lunch sent these emails from one of our design team that's
usually because they have uploaded a cover for me so this one i know bunnies is a pod file and it's
oberon so we acquired oberon we have a priority pod list at the moment so all the ones that we're
really low in stock in and we need to get um kodi as soon as possible so people can start ordering
them and this is the design team basically just saying that they have uploaded that to
our file server thingy so it's ready for me to check this email here is almost like an automatic
feed from our content management system but the person who's feeding it can add an extra note
so this is basically saying that this title that i mentioned earlier for 125 copies it's
been approved to print basically just so that it's in our system so that if anyone were to
query the status of it etc they can see that it's now been approved to print i feel like
that's mainly it to be honest i don't really know what else you can show the confidentiality reasons
but that's kind of it that's just another day in the life as a production assistant there might be
a lot of reprints on nipples we'll look at that author survey a bit later on as well do a bit of
a digital cleanup so i think that's basically all i need to share today i hope that's useful for you
in knowing what a production assistant might do in the book publishing industry let me know down
below if this was helpful or you have ideas for future videos etc and thanks for watching bye