Outsourcing of design, editorial, and production services offers for many publishers an avenue to complement their staffs' capacities when extraordinary demand is placed upon them by unanticipated publishing opportunities. Some publishers may wish to outsource to increase their current list and profit potential without incurring long-term overhead. The services offered by Book Production Resources (BPR) include:  

• complete project planning and management
• book and jacket design
• art program development
• editorial evaluation
• substantive and copy editing, proofreading
• composition and prepress services
• author liaison and relations
• indexing
• placement and supervision of printing/binding production
• shipping and distribution

Interior Book Design & Cover / Jacket Design

Interiors

BPR uses leading designers throughout the U.S. to create both functionality and marketability in our products. In most cases, we furnish the interior designer with the unedited disk files so that appropriate material will be used in creating a design for all of the textual apparatus. Extensive specifications and a large selection of the frontmatter, chapter openers, facing spreads showing tables, illustrations, and sub-heads, plus backmatter are presented to the publisher for evaluation.  If the book is to be casebound, stamping die repros (or disk file) will be included along with the selection of case materials.

In order to create books to serve specific marketing plans, the publisher should furnish basic information for the trim size, desired page count, press run, and desired unit cost. Copies of pages from other books are very helpful to show the layout and design which the publisher finds appropriate for the manuscript under consideration. 

The Model Book Program

For a number of clients with larger lists, BPR offers our model book program. A basic design with  typeset samples for all textual apparatus is created,  accompanied by full typographic specifications and standard generic codes. Used over even a short period of time, the model book program can reduce a publisher’s interior book design cost to just pennies per book. A one-time charge is made for the model book, and it is exclusively the property of the publisher.

Each design is available in three type families offering low, median, and high CPP values to increase the model’s future use. For a very nominal charge, the designer of your model will apply that design to any  appropriate manuscript which you select. The application will deal with any ideosyncracies of the manuscript not covered by the selected model book design. The application fee includes the design of a unique title page and modifications to chapter openers and sub-heads as needed. Case design and  stamping die art for the spine and front panel are included in the application .

Cover and Jacket 

Cover and jacket designs from BPRCover and jacket designs from BPR range from cost-efficient two-color jobs to sophisticated four- to six-color creations with embossing and foil stamping. Almost all of our covers and jackets are designed with layflat film lamination. Original art, photo research and procurement, and studio photography are offered. Food photography for cookbooks is a speciality. Please view our gallery of book covers from completed projects.

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BPR offers a wide range of services including original art (pen&ink, watercolor, acrylic, oil), charts and graphs, electronic art, b/w and color photography, photo research, and stock photography. We supply the appropriate resources to meet your needs and requirements.

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For those who have made the decision to self-publish, you may find it invaluable to have an unbiased editorial evaluation of your manuscript. A reviewer with extensive knowledge in your field will be retained to critique your manuscript with regard to content, argument, support, bibliography, and contribution. An editor will offer an evaluation focusing on grammar, syntax, writing style, bibliography and notes, idiosyncracies, and paragraph structure. 

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It is rare that the work of a good author cannot be improved by a good copyeditor. The guidance provided by a skilled editor often pushes a book over the threshold of success. At Book Production Resources, we have been very fortunate in finding talented editors, copyeditors, and proofreaders. They continually receive accolades from both the publishers and the authors.

Publishers appreciate very much the estimating and billing system which we use for editorial services. To charge consistently, we estimated the number of “standard manuscript pages” in an unedited manuscript. A std mss page is approximately 270 words and represents a “billable unit.” Each category of editing service includes an on-screen edit (or mss edit if no files are available), a print-out of the edited manuscript, author liaison, entering the author’s changes to the edited manuscript files, and reprinting any affected pages. With the publisher’s input, we rate a manuscript for a (1) light,  (2) medium, or a (3) heavy edit. The number of standard manuscript pages is established before the editing process begins as well as the final bill. There is never an open-ended bill based on the number of hours logged by the copyeditor or editor.

A light edit provides all of the usual housekeeping activities (stylesheet, illustration log, verifying cross-references, checking callouts against corresponding notes and illustrations, attribution and permission checks, etc.) with copyediting generally focusing on grammar, syntax, bibliographic and notes style, and author idiosyncracies.