In this video, UC Press Marketing Associate and FirstGen Program Committee member Sara Fan interviews Senior Production Editor Stephanie Summerhays and FirstGen Program Committee member on the role of the production editor in turning a manuscript into a book and the people authors work with throughout the process.
Stephanie Summerhays, senior production editor at UC Press, has been producing books for almost 15 years. She has experience with everything from genre fiction to trade nonfiction and technical science but enjoys university press books the most. She loves her work in publishing, her mischievous young children, and serial commas.
People involved in the production process:
Copyeditor: edits the book word for word for the sake of style and mechanics
Typesetter: composes the book by setting the text of the final copyedited manuscript into book pages that have been designed by a book designer
Book designer: works on the interior and the cover
Proofreader: reads the typeset pages word for word to check for lingering errors and any typographic problems that might have occurred when the pages made that transition from manuscript into typeset pages
Indexer: reads the typeset pages and creates an index, which captures the important concepts, themes, people, and things that the author discusses
Printer: manufactures the book and turns it into an actual, real life object that can sit on the bookshelf
Conversion experts: turn the final book into an ebook that can be bought and downloaded by readers