12 Profitable Book-Production Tips for Publishers and Printers
They advocate strongly for soft proofs instead of hard proofs and, eventually, no further proof inspection after preflight signoff. “From the printer’s standpoint, each proofing stage is an opportunity for editors and designers to take ‘one more look’ and introduce another correction cycle that would interrupt workflow. This uncertainty factor leads to plant inefficiencies by creating the need to have a larger backlog of jobs in the pipeline to ensure that presses don’t go idle, and larger backlogs translate directly into longer cycle times,” they say.
Eugene G. Schwartz is editor at large for ForeWord Reviews, an industry observer and an occasional columnist for Book Business magazine. In an earlier career, he was in the printing business and held production management positions at Random House, Prentice-Hall/Goodyear and CRM Books/Psychology Today. A former PMA (IBPA) board member, he has headed his own publishing consultancy, Consortium House. He is also Co-Founder of Worthy Shorts Inc., a development stage online private press and publication service for professionals as well as an online back office publication service for publishers and associations. He is on the Publishing Business Conference and Expo Advisory Board.