5 Tips for Accurate Castoffs
We’re closing out our series of posts on the publishing supply chain with a few tips for producing castoffs. Be sure to check out our breakdown of the BISG supply chain survey and our interview with veteran publishing guru Ken Brooks.
If you tell someone outside the publishing world that you are “casting off” a manuscript, they might get the impression that the work is no good and destined for the rejection pile. But on the contrary, creating a castoff represents the next stage of commitment between a publisher and a manuscript; not to be too normative here, but if a signed contract between publisher and author is like getting engaged, creating the castoff is like doing the seating chart for the reception or figuring out how many plates of food you need to order from your caterer.
The castoff is essentially a mockup of the printed book that helps the publisher estimate the page count of the final product, a crucial datapoint for determining the cost for editing, composing, proofing, manufacturing, and shipping, the last two of which have become very closely scrutinized in the face of paper shortages, price inflation for materials, and persistent delays in shipping and distribution. So, yeah, castoffs are kind of a big deal, and obtaining an accurate castoff page count is essential to successful book production planning.
Below, we’ve put together a few tips for creating accurate and effective castoffs. Our examples are based on using the Hederis app, but much of the guidance can be put into practice in any publishing workflow.
1. Make sure to align your castoff with specs that reflect your actual finished products.
→ Hederis can help you create quick castoffs that show you exactly what a particular page count with a particular set of specs is going to look like, beyond the estimates based on number of words and illustrations that publishers sometimes rely on for early-stage costing. This castoff can be shared with collaborators within a Hederis project, which features a WYSIWYG preview of the print output, or exported to pdf for easy dissemination. There’s no point in building a budget around specs that won’t fly for the final book. Plus, a well-formatted castoff is a great tool for early promotion and soliciting blurbs and reviewers.
2. If your manuscript runs long and you need to adjust your specs, develop a routine for which adjustments to make as you try to hit your desired page count. Store those adjustments in alternative templates.
→ With Hederis, you can build variations on your standard template to tackle changes in the content that force you to deviate from your planned design in order to stay on budget. Save a template with wider margins, or a longer text page, to see if that gets you to your desired length. From there, build out templates that also have smaller type/leading sizes, for example, or other progressive tweaks. The cost of Hederis is per project, with no limitation on how many templates you can create within a project.
3. Give yourself the freedom to experiment with display faces and title pages, which generally have a minor effect on page count.
→ Unique display faces and title page designs are a great way to add variety to your list while still relying on predictable fonts for the main text. Hederis allows you to load your own custom fonts or select from a list of popular typesetting fonts. And there’s no need to worry about teammates not having the fonts installed on their machine — custom fonts can be shared among group members in Hederis’s collaborative, cloud-based environment.
4. Make sure your manuscript elements are coded correctly so that unintended tagging errors don’t crop up in page proofs and cause reflow headaches.
→ Is your published extract coded as a poem? Is your chapter head accidentally run into the end of the previous chapter? We’ve all had to deal with these tagging snafus. While Hederis will do its best to determine the right tags for your content, you can see an output previous in your design template immediately in Hederis’s Design View so you can check on (and easily change) tag names in Hederis’s Structure Editor.
5. Once you’re satisfied with the castoff, make a clean transition to the editing process — you don’t want to end up with a copyedited manuscript that’s missing style tags you had in place for your castoff.
→ The easiest way to ensure a smooth transition from castoff to editing and back to typesetting is to turn your castoff file into your copyediting file, and to have that file carry the same tags you will use to typeset. With Hederis, you can export any project as a docx file. That means you get a Word-compatible file with the tag names you need to create your final product. When editing is done, re-import the same file to make a seamless transition to composition. Hederis also offers an Edit Text pane for making changes at the proofing stage, so there’s no need to wait for an outside vendor to see second pass and final pages.
Want to know more about how you can use Hederis to produce quick and accurate castoffs, and about the other ways our platform can help with your book production workflow? Visit our website where you can browse our features and products and contact us with any specific questions.
