Check the numbers first

It’s time for a little lesson in publishing, boys and girls. When you’re preparing to print a magazine or book, you do something called costing. You decide the trim size of the product, which is a nice way of saying how big the finished product will be after printing. You decide how many pages, what kind of paper, etc. All of this works to determine how much paper to buy and how much this thing is going to cost.

Not long ago, we redesigned the magazine. A few weeks ago we sent the first issue of the redesign to the printer. Last week, we sent the second issue.

Today we discovered that every page in the magazine had been built to the wrong specs. Every page was about 1/8 of an inch too big.

Doesn’t seem like a big deal, until you realize you’re talking completely redesigning something to fix it and possibly missing the delivery date. Which CAN’T happen with a monthly mag. It just can’t. It doesn’t seem like a big deal until you realize that to fix it, you might be losing a few lines of text on each page.

It’s especially frustrating when the magazine was supposedly complete and marked off the to-do list.

It’s especially frustrating when you know it’s not your fault but feel like you could have done something to stop it from happening.

It’s frustrating that even though it’s being fixed, everyone wants to play the blame game.

I don’t care whose fault it was. I just want it fixed. Cheaply, completely, and as soon as possible.