Editorial Project Management

This practical course is based on real case studies and, where possible and appropriate, will focus on the everyday issues and problems that you encounter in your editorial project management work. At the end of the two days, you will leave with some immediately applicable solutions and strategies. There will also be a range of more generic checklists to take away and use as tools in the future.

The course looks at each of the four key aspects of successful editorial project management: producing books and other resources to the agreed specification, within budget, on time and at the right quality. In each case you will consider how and where things can go wrong, and how you can prevent this.

Programme

• How to evaluate the resources required for successful delivery
  • People
  • Budget
  • Schedule
• Sticking to the specification
  • Being clear about what the specification should cover
  • Who is responsible for doing the work and for bearing the cost?
  • Effective briefing
  • Working with authors, editors, designers and production – in-house and freelance
  • Being aware of the implications of change, especially for budgets
• Sticking to the budget
  • Overview of basic costing and gross margin calculations
  • Impact of changes to fixed costs on gross margin
  • Negotiating fees
  • Cost vs. time dilemmas
• Sticking to the schedule
  • Creating workable schedules
  • Progress chasing – systems and tools
  • Managing workloads
  • Scheduling work from authors, editors, designers and production
• Ensuring quality
  • Why feedback is important and how to deliver it
• Troubleshooting session on specific problems.

Who will benefit from this course?

Editors, desk editors, project editors, production editors and managing editors in book or journal publishing, and anyone else who is taking on the management of complete editorial projects.

Your tutor

Heather Morris has over twenty years' experience in educational and children's publishing. She was English Publisher at Heinemann Educational Books for nine years. She then left to become Director of Educational Publishing at the BBC where she was responsible for building a business that developed print, audio, video and CD products to support TV and radio broadcasts. Since 1996 she has been running her own publishing consultancy and has been involved in a wide range of projects – from the Teletubbies to the National Numeracy Strategy. Other ventures have included in-house training for a publishing company in Jamaica and writing and co-publishing her own children's books. She continues to work with a variety of clients, both commercial and non-commercial, covering a broad range of markets and media.

We also offerEditorial Project Management by Distance Learning.

Note that most of our short courses can also be run as in-company events.