I work for an independent book publisher as a graphic designer. I’ve been a graphic designer for many years, but came into the book design profession about 4 years ago. Everything I learned about book design and the publishing world has been self-taught or learned from my boss who is the publisher/editor and not a graphic designer. So my workflow I have adopted is purely based on those two sources. I have no idea what the major publishers do or what their process is, or what the industry standard is to do things. We’re working at honing some of our processes to better serve our authors and make it easier for us to make proofreading changes, and to be able to translate books to other languages.
Here’s a quick breakdown of our process: We receive the manuscripts as a Word doc which I import into an InDesign template I’ve made that contains all of our paragraph and character styles. I use a lot Find/Change and GREP to apply the styles to the raw text. Then I design the book and submit a PDF proof. The author or proofreader then goes through the PDF and uses PDF markup to indicate changes that need to be made. I receive the marked up PDF and have it open side-by-side with InDesign and manually go through and make changes in the design file. We go through multiple rounds of this before ending up at the final product.
My question is this: My boss has indicated that there may be some type of software out there that allows a proofreader to make edits to the original Word doc and have the changes reflected in InDesign without me having to make manual edits. Is there such a software out there? I’m aware we could use InCopy, however that’s not user friendly to the layman and a bit too complicated for our authors. We’ve tried it with a couple of clients. Most people are very familiar with Microsoft Word, though. He also mentioned that when he wrote a book with a certain big-name publisher, the galley proofs were sent both as a PDF design proof and a Word text file that the authors were able to make changes to and submit back. Again, I don’t know what the publisher’s process was or if they had some tool that allowed them to go back and forth between Word and InDesign.
It would also be very helpful for doing multiple translations of books. Instead of starting from scratch with a blank Word doc, we could send a Word doc to the translator and possibly reattach it to the InDesign file so that it has the proper styles and layout.
Any ideas? Are any of you out there book designers who can shed some light on this subject? I should note we’re definitely willing to pay for a software or plugin that can do this. I just am not sure where to search.
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