I am hoping this community can help me. I’m president of a firm that is publishing a book. Our graphics artist, who is quite talented, has been laying this out in ID, having imported Word files of the text. It’s two volumes of about 350 pages each.
It’s a book of topics that actually change quite frequently, and we went with CreateSpace so we could flexibly and quickly change content.
The problem is that the people who maintain the content know how to use Word; the content is being “maintained” in ID as a master. To date, our “change management” has consisted of printing out versions, writing updates on the document, and sending to the graphics artist. However, there are multiple people doing so, and she’s going nuts.
Our preference would be that the “authors” can maintain some external, easy to use database, and have this drive the ID layout process. We need a process to flow through to the ID book, recognizing that this can never be automated (pages can change, changing the index, ToC, etc.). We realize that. But what we desperately need to do is consolidate the front end of the changes, so that our GA does not go nuts.
Has anyone else done anything like this? I’m thinking that anyone who publishes market data on a quarterly basis, for instance, has to have new data that comes in all the time. We could realistically be publishing a new pdf once a month, but with dozens of changes inside of that.
We are not trying to get rid of ID, just trying to figure how best to manage this end to end.
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