Book Production Phase 11 ½ aka and I thought I Was in the Home Stretch!
Sep 14, 2008 | From the kitchen of Rose
Last week I brought the corrected galleys in to my publisher Wiley, in Hoboken. NJ and Ava (the production editor) and I went to lunch at my friend Maricel Priscilla’s wonderful Cuban restaurant Zaffra
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Ava is the best production editor I have ever encountered in fact she is just plain incomparable: clear, organized, concerned, calm, gently but firm, loving, intelligent, and just plain charming and adorable. This is not to say that we always see eye to eye. If you read the article about Marcella Hazan in this week’s New York Times, you will have had a glimpse of the possible/inevitable battles that often take place between the author’s point of view and that of the publisher’s. They can be quite acrimonious so I am all the more grateful that Ava comes from the approach of appreciating team work and wanting what is best for the book.
Our major point of contention was the subcomponent recipes. About 8 of my buttercream recipes have two or more components. Most publishers like to put these components before the title of the recipe in which they are used. Most bakers and cooks passionately prefer them in the order in which they will be needed when baking/cooking.
Most of these incidences appear in the wedding cake chapter—for obvious reasons the most complicated chapter in the book. Together we found a way to have the sequence as I envisioned it but with far greater clarity than it was originally. This meant my reconfiguring many things from the pdf galley files—hard to see—hard to copy into word documents—and how I spent the entire weekend.
Changes like these are fraught with potential for mistakes but thankfully Lisa Story, the typesetter, is a meticulous genius so I am only a little concerned. Ava will review my reconfigurations and then send them to Lisa so we can see how they will look before making them final. I should say semi-final because after Lisa completes the process of inputting over 1000 changes from Woody and my review of the galleys, the book will then go into design and first pass pages. This will begin happening while I am in Switzerland on a culinary press trip the first 10 days of October. The week of my return we will take the final group of cake and process photos and it will not be until the first week of January that I get to review the first pass pages with all the photos in place—I think.
Judging from the past phases, no doubt there will be more happening in the interim. Stay tuned!
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Rose Levy Beranbaum
09/19/2008 02:17 PM
burt greene, who was father of the take out store concept, and a great food personality and also a dear friend and great food personality (and named the cake bible!)warned me about mistakes during transposition and told me that he and his partner phillip read back and forth. as i didn't have anyone who could do this at the time i real the entire ms. into a tape recorder and played it back against the galleys. and of course as i mentioned, for this book i was blessed to have woody do this with me. i did not do it for my other books and that is why i had to make corrections in later printings and on the blog. i don't know of any other author who does this but i'm sure there must be!
the ms was in very good shape when it went into galleys so i found few mistakes of mine but essentially the things i did find were when the copy editor moved things around and separated components and then didn't divide them correctly for ex. if caramel was used in two places and i wrote divided, in the second place where it would be used it still had the same amount. it's very risky making changes bc when you think things through the first time around you may have forgotten exactly why you did them in a certain way after months pass and a change can mean a distortion.
but even stylistic changes impact the way in which people navigate through a recipe, especially a comlicated one.
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Beth
09/19/2008 10:50 AM
Rose,
I was just wondering what kind of errors you found along the way? I know with my writing I can miss things 30 times over. Were you making changes for precision or correcting actual errors? You're so lucky to have Woody working with you.
I'm told many baking books, incl. bread books, have a lot of errors. Do you know your process of editing and correcting to be superior to others'? I certainly cannot imagine anyone doing more than you.
Good luck as you approach the end of the process.
Beth
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Bill
09/17/2008 08:46 AM
I agree, the photos are sooooo important in any cook book, but especially with cakes and pastries. I'm not sure exactly why, but I'm always more tempted to try a recipe if the photo looks yummy. Rose, all the care you take in making your books the best they can be is really appreciated. I've just found out that I'll be making my first large wedding cake for a wedding in August '09. Alas, I won't have your new book yet for inspiration...but the cake bible has served me so well the past 10 years or so...I'm sure all will go well.
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Amanda
09/16/2008 01:46 PM
thanks for the tips!
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Julie
09/15/2008 08:48 AM
Fascinating process, I'm so happy to hear about all the photos, they will make this book fabulous!
I just went through a Paris dessert book this weekend, and was so disappointed to find no photos at all! I will end up making a few recipes from it whose ingredients I enjoy using. But without photos, I probably won't be tempted into expanding into new things. There's something about having a photo as a goal that really helps me wrap my brain around a process. I also appreciate how photos help convey the texture/crumb of a cake.
A book that can broaden my horizons and expand my skills is a treasure indeed, and that's what Rose's books do!
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