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Saturday, May 14, 2016

Working on Captain's Log through the Years

Jean Sexton muses:

One of the first items I ever proofread for ADB was Captain's Log #35, released in May 2007. Steve Cole would send me a PDF, I would proofread it, and send line item reports. Those turned out to be pretty long. We moved to me calling in corrections and Steve Cole and Steven Petrick taking turns sitting at the computer and making changes late into the night. That continued until I moved to Amarillo.

Finally I could read the pages, mark what needed to be changed, and someone would make those changes. People being human, mistakes were sometimes made. I might mark that "the Bridge" should be "the bridge" and the correction might come back "thebridge." Some of these mistakes were more embarrassing than the original error. So we instituted a "check changes" step where I would check the changes made to make sure that they weren't skipped and that nothing peculiar happened. Sometimes that was more hit-and-miss than we liked. Sometimes an article slipped by me or by Petrick.

With Captain's Log #51, we started a new procedure.


As you can see, an article moves along the "clipboard trail" from Petrick to me to Steve Cole. Then the revised article and the marked-up copy come back to me for re-checks. That article may go back and forth between Steve and me until all the problems have been resolved. Finally it moves to the "Finished Pages" clipboard.

At the very end we will print off a new copy and go through the pages one by one. Is the art right? Did a line get covered by the art? Did a line drop off the page? Is there a hole that needs art? Does the table of contents match the contents? Did we get all the artists listed?

Only then does the inside of the book get printed. It gets bound into its cover, packed up for distributors to send to the stores, and major contributors get their copy. Those of us on the Design Team use this week to pull together the Supplement so it can be bought with the magazine.

So you can see that over the years we've gotten better at getting you a good issue. We hope you will enjoy Captain's Log #51 and the next 49 issues!