In recent months, when facing the crunch to provide me with book manuscripts for large book projects, several clients asked me some variation of this question:
Is it possible for us to deliver to you the manuscript section by section?
I guess it seems to make sense, I must work from beginning to end of the book, right? So why can’t they send me pages 1-100, and later pages 101-200, etc.?
I always have to tell my under-the-gun client the “bad” news that I request the whole manuscript to be delivered for formatting at once.
But really, it’s not “bad” news; it’s in the client’s best interests and in the book designer’s best interests as well.
It’s in the client’s best interests because if some parts of the manuscript are still being edited, it’s common that changes to the end of the book can also affect the beginning. An editor, at the end of a read-through, could decide to make a change that ends up affecting earlier pages in the book. A manuscript that an author thinks is ready for formatting can then be called back for some significant changes. It’s best for the author, editor, or proofreader to work on the book as a whole and give their final approval to the whole thing, not to a section at a time. To make a global change to the body text that affects various parts of the book can be easy when the author is toying with a Word file on on his or her own laptop, but it gets expensive when the book (or in this case, part of the book) has already been typeset (laid out).
And it’s in the book designer’s best interests because there are a lot of tasks in book formatting that are done globally to the whole book at once. A lot of this is what book formatters call “cleaning up” the text. Some of the global tasks I do are:
flowing the full text into my file, using specific import settings to not lose formatting from the Word document
checking and correcting spaces (For example, a common change is to remove double spaces after periods and make them single spaces.)
checking if hyphens and dashes have been used correctly and if not, correcting them (Do you know the difference between a hyphen (-), en dash (–) and em dash (—)? If you don’t, you’ll be glad that I do.)
removing extra hard returns and manual indents and instead assigning paragraph styles in InDesign that achieve the same results in a cleaner way
assigning character and paragraph styles, to control the formatting of the book on a global scale
It is much less efficient to do all of this clean up multiple times, and possibly less accurate as well, if the designer forgets one of the cleanup steps for part of the manuscript but does it for another part. Although every book designer works differently, I think it’s safe to say that book designers don’t generally work 100% from front to back of the book, perfecting the layout of one chapter before moving on to the next.
When major changes happen to the manuscript after the full layout is completely typeset, they become expensive for the client and possibly also hard to schedule for the book designer (if up to 2 hours of changes to the book layout are expected after full layout, and that becomes 10 or 15 hours, the client may find herself or himself with a long delay to receive the finalized layout!)
Years I ago I had a client who had me design and format several books in a series for him, only to come back with major changes to the original manuscripts, over and over. There were large gaps of silence (over six months at a time) when I assume he was once again rewriting, testing and editing his manuscript. Then I would hear from him again, asking for an update to his layout. This was costly for him, and frustrating for me. Eventually one time when he resurfaced asking for my help, I was on leave, and I must admit that I was happy to turn over the files to him and ask him to engage another book designer (I gave him a few contacts to try). He and I both would have been better off if he had waited to send me the book manuscripts when they were truly finalized.
The long and the short of it is that no, you can’t send your book designer your manuscript in parts, because it makes for a messy, expensive and time-consuming workflow. But I know, if you’re a visual person, you’re dying to see what your finalized manuscript will look like as a book! As I wrote in this article, two “visual” tasks you can get your book designer to work on before the full manuscript is ready for layout are the design of your book cover, and a sample interior layout.
In case you can’t tell, I’m a complete book design nerd. I’m happy to answer your questions about your book project. Do you want a free consultation?