Gene Therapy: Managing Workflow: How Top Publishers Keep Their Houses in Order

“In a way, the whole process comes full circle,” says D’Onofrio. “The files we use at the beginning of a book’s life are the ones that we are still using at the end. Because we now have that ability to extend any book’s life far beyond what was possible in the past, it’s especially important to get it right at the start.”

JOHN WILEY AND SONS INC.
At a high-end, multiple-channel publisher such as John Wiley, with about 1,700 distinct, new titles each year, an active backlist of 17,000 titles and some 5,000 employees, the volume of through-put and the number of networked users impose significant operating requirements.

Major Wiley divisions include higher education, professional/trade, and science, technical, medical and scholarly (STMS). Wiley’s acquisition of Blackwell Publishing last year added 1,000 journals to the 400 it already was publishing, largely within the STMS division. It maintains two warehouse distribution centers in Somerset, N.J. and Harrisonburg, Va.

Data Management
The company creates its own ONIX files, which are used primarily as “a communications format to send data out into the marketplace,” says Mike McDonnell, manager of business information. Data for the files are drawn from Wiley’s Book Project Management system and what McDonnell describes as marketing-oriented “rich data” files that contain matter such as title descriptions, author bios, cover text and graphics.

“We prepare a full-title ONIX file monthly and push it to about 24 partners by FTP to their sites,” McDonnell reports. “We send update files weekly, and we also make the files available for anyone to pick up from our own site.”

Project files in the database, opened by acquisition editors, provide documentation for the initial proposal, precontract and contract stages. The editor owns the space and assures content quality until its release into production. By that time, the following workflow data needs to be completed: author’s name, working title, Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication record and copyright application, which are monitored by a product information services group. The ISBN is assigned by the inventory control unit when the contract is signed.