I will tell myself three times: not everyone is like me (and for good reason).

Now, yes, sure, there are plenty of ways in which this is true (and all for the better because of it), but I’m referring in general to the hows and whys in which instructors use textbooks in their classes and, more particularly, the supplemental resource guides that come with them. After all, we publish textbooks; we want them adopted; and those ancillary instructor resources are one of the key elements to having that happen. This is a fact I’m having to come to grips with despite my own contrary experience as a college English teacher for ten years.

When I was in grad school taking my teaching methods course to be “officially” (yes, that’s ironic use of quotation marks) “qualified” (redux) to teach freshman comp classes, the prevailing wisdom from our professor was that we shouldn’t be using a textbook to teach writing. After all, people learn to do things by doing them and while it would be nice (and easier), as she supposed, if students could learn to write by reading about it or, better yet, by have some stressed, overworked teaching fellow talk at them, unfortunately it just isn’t the case. Combine that concept with your typical (and grossly unsupported by empirical evidence) grad student arrogance—no book is going to tell me how to teach!—you wind up with a real disdain for textbooks in general and, of course, the supplemental resource guides that come with them.

In my own case, this was compounded by the fact that after I got my MA I adjuncted full-time—that means carrying a full load plus some by virtue of teaching part time at 2-3 schools simultaneously any given semester—for three years or so with each school using a different textbook for their composition classes. Sure, I could’ve driven myself mad trying to work up separate class preps that dovetailed with each book. Then again, I convinced myself I was too busy spending 13-15 hours week just to drive a total of 600 miles in order to teach six days out of seven at one farflung class to another to worry about such mundane pedagogy-related issues.

But, you know, then times change.  One day you wake up and go, man, as a textbook publiser I sure wish I knew why instructors choose some books over others. And then you go, d’uh! And then you slap your head and go, d’oh! Because you suddenly realize a big reason why teachers make the decisions they do about which book to use for their classes: they want a textbook that is as easy to integrate into a class as possible. And who can blame them? (That’s the thing, you know, about logic: so much of the time it’s blindingly, compellingly simple and obvious.)

So, as we put the finishing touches on not only our forthcoming technical college student orientation guide, Taking Charge: Your Education, Your Career, Your Life, we’re also wrapping up our first official supplemental resource guide for instructors as well. It has, however, been something of a crapshoot in figuring out exactly what we were going to put in it. (In the final analysis this will actually be uploaded to a password-protected Web site for instructors as opposed to going to print.) We have, however, settled on these elements so far:

1. Detailed chapter outlines
2. Additional discussion & writing prompts (7-10 per chapter)
3. Additional suggested online and hard-copy resources (7-10 per chapter)
4. A bank of test questions (10 each of short answer, fill-in-the-blank, true-false, and multiple choice)

Now that we’ve finally put this sort of instructor guide together, we’re also planning this summer to go back and produce the same kind of materials for each of the general-use (as opposed to custom) textbooks we’ve done the last few years including the the biomedical equipment troubleshooting book, the hand tools manual, the guide to safety in healthcare facilities, and the server installation projects manual.

My question would be: in addition to the four elements above—plus, of course, answers for our textbooks that have labs in them—what are the other most useful supplemental instructor resources people have come across?

(And, while I’m waiting to see what folks have to say, I will keep repeating my mantra: not everyone is like me (and for good reason).)

Mark

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Today is a time of great anticipation as we are putting the final touches on everything for our two-day site visit from the publishing consultant that kicks off at nine tomorrow morning. There is, however, some other personnel-related news to report as Grace Arsiaga—originally hired at as a desktop publisher/computer graphics specialist (DPCG)—has been recategorized as a project manager (PMAN) to oversee both book development and production. (Given that, we’re probably not going to fill our vacant publishing editor (PUED) position any time soon, if ever.) This wasn’t just a title change for Grace, however, as it also entails revamping the overall workflow in the office.

In the past, we’ve carried both a full-time editor and a full-time graphics specialist to do the majority of front-line production work in addition to managing their respective interns. On the one hand, it was great having two production specialists in the office to oversee that workflow. On the other hand, however, the more I’ve been looking at the setup of other small publishers, the less sense this made. If you look at, say, a State House Press or TCU Press (or any of a number of others), you’ll see a lot of four-person operations where you have a publisher, managing editor (or production manager), a business person, and a marketing person. It was nice to have two production folks but, given our lack of a marketing person, I think we just weren’t utilizing our full-time slots as effectively as possible. Plus, over the last six months we’ve started to build up a pool of good freelancers—especially on the editorial side—so it’s just not as critical to have a full-time editor as it was this time a year or even two years ago.

Of course, going from two production people to one project manager to oversee what those two positions used to do is quite a radical departure from how we’ve worked over the past couple of years. We are, though, very lucky to have Grace Arsiaga and to be able to better utilize her skills as a project manager as opposed to a graphics specialist. Don’t get me wrong: Grace is great at the job that she’s been doing. But the problem is that she’s been doing primarily page layout on book after book for the last year and a half. In the greater scheme of things graphics-wise, this is not the most exciting work to do, especially when you consider that it was the graphics interns who were doing individual illustrations, book cover designs, and marketing pieces.

All the time Grace was verging on having her right hand fall off from running a mouse for eight hours straight formatting books, she was also managing increasingly complex graphics projects with the help of an ever-changing sets of interns. There were the 300 illustrations for the the hand tools books. There were 200+ illustrations for another project. In both of these cases Grace did none of the actual illustrations but, instead, organized and assigned all the work, met with the authors for updates and corrections, and did quality control on the end products. So, given her people- and project-management skills, it was smarter put those to good use instead of leaving in the page-layout trenches.

I’m always a big worrier, especially when it comes to change, but I think if anyone is up to the task of radically changing job duties and responsibilities, it’s Grace. She started out over here as a graphics intern in the fall of 2005, then became our work study, and upon graduation became our full-time graphics specialist in December 2006. She’s one of the best examples of an employee we’ve had over here: hard working, easy to get along with, eager for challenges, and always up to learn even more to do something new.

(Now, if only that described me as well!)

Mark

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Now that the semester is over—with the exception of putting the final touches on Karen Mitchell Smith’s Taking Charge: Your Education, Your Career, Your Life—the summer book orders are filled, and we have no interns for the next couple of weeks, the pace and atmosphere has certainly quieted down.

But, not too much. Currently, now that the letter of agreement has been signed and terms of confidentiality have been squared away, we’ve been (and still are) getting ready for a two-day site visit next week from a publishing consultant we’ve hired. Finally, we’ll have an outside professional evaluate our operation from top to bottom—contracts, financials, workflow, software, personnel, marketing, distribution, and the rest of the whole nine yards—to calculate our progress against standard publishing industry benchmarks and make recommendations for the future.

As I’ve been telling folks recently (and have been thinking about even longer) we’re at that point where to best make those big decisions to chart our course over the next 2-3 years we need more input than just scouring books and Web sites alone. I’ll have more to say about this over the course of the next six weeks as the whole process plays out, but I did want to provide a list of the preliminary materials we were asked to provide up front so anyone can get an idea of what’s being looked and at what depth:

1. A P&L (profit and loss) for the publishing business for 2006, 2007, and 2008 YTD.
2. A balance sheet for the same time periods
3. An organizational chart with job descriptions for all employees
4. An author contract
5. Total sales by title, units sold in 2006, 2007, and 2008 YTD
6. Total sales for title and dollars in 2006, 2007, and 2008 YTD
7. Total sales by account in 2006, 2007, and 2008 YTD
8. Editorial schedules for 2007, 2008, and the future
9. Production schedules for 2007, 2008, and the future
10. Marketing schedules
11. Catalogs for 2006, 2007, 2008
12. Marketing pieces
13. Title fact sheets and/or sell sheets

Already this has been quite the learning process as we’ve pulled all of this information together. In particular, Melanie and I have discovered that we haven’t beebn taking advantage of even close to all the capabilities that QuickBooks has for record keeping and report generation. Figuring that out alone has given us—that is, Melanie—more than enough to do over the next few weeks reconfiguring those files to streamline our financials.

Mark

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And then, the spring 2008 semester came to end.

Yes, it’s that time of the semester when we officially wrap things up with the publishing interns reception tomorrow. (And, thanks in particular to the project management skills of Grace Arsiaga, we really are done with our book orders for the upcoming semester by the time of this intern reception.) As always, we’ve had a great bunch of interns over here from both TSTC Waco’s ADP technology and Baylor University’s journalism and professional writing programs.

We had three TSTC graphics interns—Ashley Stovall, Kelly Spencer, and Callie Trueblood—who contributed greatly over the past three months. Ashley helped close out the final illustrations on the hand tools book as well as doing the design for the 2008-09 TSTC Publishing calendar, which is at the printer even as I write. Kelly had been a first-semester intern with us last year and even had a stint as a work study working on the hand tools book as well but since she’s been back for a second go-round she’s been working on a children’s coloring book for the TSTC Harlingen library. Callie was another intern we got kind of late in the semester but she’s been a production machine, knocking out a whole set of dental assisting book covers we’ll be using over the course of the next year as we publish new editions of all 11 of their books.

(And, although she wasn’t an intern, I do have to commend the work of Carmen Rangel, our newest graphics work study, who has done a slew of things for us this semester including the most recent poster and ticket designs for the Waco Junior Chamber of Commerce’s Smoke on the River Chili Cook-Off as well as the cover for our summer 2008 catalog.)

On the editorial side, we had two students—Rachel Baldwin and Jennifer Bui—from the professional writing program out of the English department at Baylor and Katelyn Foster, a recent graduate of the Baylor journalism program. The Baylor interns are always useful when it comes to having a second and third (or even fourth) set of eyes for copyediting and proofreading but all three of them were especially valuable as we closed out Karen Mitchell Smith’s Taking Charge: Your Education, Your Career, Your Life, the new freshman orientation textbook that’s going to print next week. All of them did valuable background research for each of the chapters that helped facilitate Karen’s writing process as well as producing many of the supplementary materials going into the instructor resource online site: supplemental Web sites and books, discussion questions and writing prompts, and a whole bank of multiple choice, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank test bank questions.

To show our appreciation for the interns this semester, we’ll be having a reception for them tomorrow—Tuesday, April 22—from 12-2 in the Culinary Arts ballroom at TSTC Waco. (The ballroom is across the hall from our offices.) Samples of intern work will be on display, we’ll have some certificates and moderately lovely parting gifts for them, and there will be barbecue from Eddie Ray’s Smoke House in West. I wholeheartedly encourage anyone with an interest in publishing in general or what our interns (and us) are up to in particular to stop by.

Mark

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Or, technically speaking, we were that happy Tuesday as we could finally say at our weekly department meeting that all the books for TSTC Waco bookstore had been printed, invoiced, and delivered. Currently, the Waco campus bookstore is by far our largest account so having their work done means a huge chunk of our work for this semester is done.

Since 2005 when we published our first two books we’ve always done three print runs a year—one each in the fall, spring, and summer—based on the book orders for an upcoming semester. That allowed us to update materials relatively easily while our inventory (and storage costs) stayed reasonably low. That, however, is all going to change this summer due to some workflow and production issues that have reared their ugly heads as our book list has grown.

First of all, back when we just had a handful of titles in print—3-5—it was easy enough for us to update books as often as each semester without too much of a problem. And, for sure, the first couple of semesters you’re going to have to be doing this as you pick up odds and ends of corrections that come to light when a book is actually being field-tested in the classroom for the first time. But, as our title list has grown, over the past couple of semesters we’ve found ourselves—”ourselves” being that kind of royal “we” usage that really mean Grace, our graphics specialist—updating the same books over and over again. It’s not that we don’t want the most current and relevant books to be available but, on the other hand, if you spend half of your semester updating a book for the second or third time in the past 6-9 months, you’re losing a lot of time that could be spent getting new books out.

Second, as I said above, we would also wait until we had the book orders in hand so that we kept our printing costs as close to the bone as possible and had no excess inventory. (Anyone who has ever been to our office knows how tight space is over here.) Plus, when you’re updating too-regularly, you want as few older versions of a book in stock because you’ve just reduced their monetary value to zero. But, the flip side of having virtually no inventory is that if somebody orders even 5-10 extra books that requires another round of trips to the print shop and book store and so on which eats up everybody’s time. And, while the bookstores were getting their orders as quickly as they could to us each semester, as we began having more titles it was hard to get all them done in the time frame that they needed them by.

But, you know, you begin doing things one way and that becomes the way you always do things until one day you look around and say, My gosh, what on earth could be the rationale for doing that like that!?!?! For us, that moment came a couple of months ago when we realized that even for our summer book orders—the smallest we have quantity-wise over the course of the year—we were going to need 6-8 weeks to print, proof, and then finalize the print runs for those orders. Then I started thinking: If it’s now taking that long for the summer book orders alone, that means we’re spending like 6 months a year just printing book and/or sending books to print. Which, of course, means we have really reduced the amount of time we have available for more mundane tasks . . . you know, like publishing new books!

So, there are a couple of things we’re going to do differently beginning this sumer. First, we’re getting all of our authors/departments who we publish books for to be on a once-a-year schedule for updates/corrections. (This excludes, of course, the initial semester or two of field testing right after initial publication to shake out any last issues to deal with.) Second, we’re going to look at our book orders from last fall, do some moderately unscientific calculations, and begin printing books in June without waiting for the official book orders from our various accounts.

Yes, we will have more inventory sitting in our office on a regular basis. Yes (redux), we will probably end up eating the cost of more of the inventory than we are now. But, the savings in time from not updating books so often combined with having more inventory on hand to fill orders without wearing tire tracks in the street from constantly going to the print shop to drop off or pick up orders should more than make up for that.

(And, if none of this works as it should, then next year we’ll figure out something else to do.)

Mark

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