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Ensuring a successful publication

The production process involves many contributors, who are most often not colocated, and who are not all publishing professionals. The Electric Book workflow is also a unique approach to producing publications that won’t be familiar to all contributors. To ensure that your project runs as smoothly as possible, we recommend that you incorporate these elements into your plan for the publication.

Have a process czar

One person, with the authority to change author-responsible deadlines and enforce them, should be appointed. In more traditional publishing companies, this role may belong to the publisher or commissioning editor. In this setting, the role is shared between the EBW project lead and the CORE editor/project lead (whoever takes full ownership of the publication, reviews every aspect of it, and has the authority to make decisions about it).

Have a single source of truth and reliable version control system in place

Every part of a publication—every text file and every image—must have a single source of truth: a master version. This is a publication’s most up-to-date, official, editable collection of files. Everyone on the editorial team must know exactly where the master is. There must not be any doubt in anyone’s mind about what specific files constitute the master version, and how to access and edit them. And everyone should understand that any other version is instantly, inherently out of date. When a publication has multiple masters, confusion and delay becomes inevitable.

You should also have a reliable system for managing version control, in order to roll back to previous versions if that is necessary, or to be able to look back through versions to understand why decisions were made or what has been changed over time. Version control issues are especially common on big, complex projects with lots of contributors.

Once the content has been digitized and is stored in a version-controlled GitHub repository, it is clear that this is the master content. Prior to that, while the content is being written and developed, another way of managing versions should be in place. Use Google Docs or a shared Dropbox to control and manage versions in a suitable way.

Clean handoffs

Academic work is usually the result of incremental rewrites. This process can’t work in that way. It is vital to make sure that people at different steps in the process are not working on the same unit. In the development and editing stages, authors will probably be accustomed to using the process they employ to write papers: emailing documents or posting several sets of revisions in a Dropbox. This can lead to multiple versions of the truth, which creates errors and wastes time because someone has to reconcile the document afterwards, line by line.

So, after the authors deliver the draft for the development edit, they shouldn’t work on the material (besides answering editor’s queries) until the first proof check, and then only to correct mistakes. If they start rewriting the material it will need to go through the entire development/edit/fact check/layout process again.

Passing on incomplete work is also to be avoided at all costs, as it creates an entirely new set of writing and editing jobs.

Don’t start late

The most important deadline is the copy deadline, right at the beginning. Authors who are accustomed to journal publishing might not think that an extra two weeks is much of a problem—but everyone else in the process has allocated time on the assumption that previous deadlines have been met.

Add contingency

Don’t make a plan assuming that everything will go well. There must be some contingency for late content, illness, tasks taking longer than first anticipated, and so on.

If the process isn’t running smoothly and you’re constantly revising schedules, change the plan. It might be that some jobs take longer and some shorter, or some can be moved to a different place in the process.

Use some sort of project management software

Using project management software to define the tasks, workflow, and schedule for the content creation stage has the following benefits:

  • Critical path. When processes on the path run late, it will affect the finish date unless you can make up the time. But not all processes are on that path, so it helps you to know what your critical path is when you need to extend deadlines.
  • Resource allocation. Some single-point-of-failure tasks are potential bottlenecks. For example, an author can’t work on two documents at once. You can plan for this.
  • Accommodating what-ifs. You can change a date or allocate an extra day to a task, and the whole process and critical path will recalculate automatically. This means some small tweaks early in the process can save a couple of weeks later on.
  • Single source of truth. You can share the project online, and also let the task owner tick off completed jobs, which cuts the need for reporting.