Case study · Manuscript and production package
A six-volume illustrated series under contract with a trade publisher. This is what actually had to be delivered for one volume — the conformance, the image research, the rights position, the reconciliation — and what that apparatus costs when you buy it at market rates.
A contract with a trade publisher is not a request for a manuscript. It is a request for a package — text conformed to a house prep guide, artwork sourced and cleared, every image credited to a standard, captions written, a list of illustrations, and a rights position the publisher’s own counsel can live with.
Most of that never appears in the finished book. All of it has to exist before the book can be produced.
The paperwork is nearly as large as the book
Component word counts for one volume of a six-volume illustrated series under contract. The narrative and appendices become the book; the caption file and image placement guide are production apparatus.
The publisher’s prep guide is specific and non-negotiable: a named style manual and dictionary, a named font at a named size, double-spaced, one-inch margins, one file per chapter with a prescribed naming convention, first-line indent set by paragraph property rather than by tab, italics rather than underline, notes through the embedded note feature, and nothing shaded, highlighted or left in tracked changes.
Each of those is trivial. Twenty-three files times six volumes times every rule is not, and a manuscript that fails on any of them comes back.
Adding italics to several hundred book and film titles appeared to work and did not. The runs carried an explicit italic-off property, so the new formatting was present in the file and rendered as plain text on screen — 120 runs that looked correct in the markup and wrong in the document. The fix is to strip the cancelling property, and the lesson is to render to PDF and look, rather than trusting that the file says what you told it to say.
A co-author returned his edits on a copy that predated three weeks of work. Neither file could replace the other without destroying something.
Reconciling divergent versions
Revision counts taken directly from the tracked-changes markup. The 8,795 formatting revisions turned out to be a single global action setting everything to 12 point - which corrected a prep-guide violation in the tables and simultaneously flattened the title page display type.
Reconciling this by hand means reading both versions of every chapter side by side and deciding on each difference. It was done, and the result was re-split into the twenty-three conformed files the prep guide requires.
Editing is priced per word. Reconciliation is not, because nobody can predict it. It is the line item that blows publishing schedules, and it happens on almost every multi-author project the moment two people work from different copies.
Every figure needs a subject, a source, a verified provenance chain, a formal credit line in the house citation style, a rights position, and a file that will actually print. Getting any one of those wrong is a correction at proof stage or a permissions problem after publication.
| What verification caught | Consequence had it shipped |
|---|---|
| Three of five supplied images were different works than their filenames claimed | Three wrong pictures with confident captions underneath them |
| An episode cited to the wrong season and number | A checkable factual error in a reference work |
| A composite image assembled from three separate episodes, credited to one | An uncorrectable citation — the credit could not be true |
| A figure slot invented with a placeholder caption for an image nobody had sourced | A caption in the finished book describing a picture that does not exist |
| An appendix dating a work to 1919 while the chapter said 1920 | The book contradicting itself in print |
| A license requiring the photographer be named, with no photographer recorded | A license breach on a book already in stores |
Never fabricate a citation. If provenance cannot be established, the image is replaced or the figure is deleted — and one was deleted, along with its caption, once it became clear it described an image that had never existed. A resolution audit on the same principle cut a set of 202 candidate files to 106, because the rest could not print four inches wide at three hundred dots per inch.
Every task above is something a publisher or an author can hire out. Here is the bill at published market rates.
One volume, at freelance market rates
Editorial rates from the Editorial Freelancers Association rate survey and comparable market data: developmental editing $0.06/word, copyediting $0.035/word, proofreading $0.02/word. Image research at $60 per image and provenance verification at 45 minutes per image at $50/hour. Reconciliation and conformance at $45-50/hour. Rights analysis at $75/hour.
| Line | Basis | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Image research and sourcing | 155 figures at $60 each | $9,300 |
| Provenance verification and credit lines | 155 at 45 minutes, $50/hr | $5,800 |
| Three editorial passes | 26,144 words, developmental, copy, proof | $3,007 |
| Version reconciliation | ~50 hours at $50 | $2,500 |
| Rights analysis and permissions | ~30 hours at $75 | $2,250 |
| Prep-guide conformance, 23 files | ~25 hours at $45 | $1,125 |
| Caption writing | 155 captions | $1,550 |
| Print-resolution audit | 200+ files, ~20 hours at $50 | $1,000 |
| List of illustrations and rights memo | 18-page and 5-page production documents | $1,850 |
| One volume | about $28,400 | |
| Six volumes | roughly $170,000 |
Elapsed time. Image research alone on 155 figures is six to ten weeks of a freelancer’s calendar. Three editorial passes with turnaround between them is another eight to twelve. Reconciliation cannot start until both parties stop editing. Sequenced conventionally, one volume is six to nine months of production — which is exactly why publishers schedule a year between delivery and publication.
| AI did this well | A person had to do this |
|---|---|
| Conforming 23 files to a prep guide and checking every rule | Deciding what the book is about and what to leave out |
| Reconciling two divergent versions difference by difference | Judging which of two competing edits was better |
| Generating the caption file, the list of illustrations, the rights memo | Choosing the images |
| Cross-checking dates and citations for internal contradiction | Establishing provenance where the record was ambiguous |
| Auditing 200+ files for print resolution | Standing behind every factual claim in the book |
| Restoring crushed shadows across a set of scans without shifting hue | Deciding the warm cast in the artwork was deliberate and must not be corrected away |
AI did not write this book and could not have. What it did was absorb the production apparatus — the conformance, the reconciliation, the cross-checking, the paperwork — that otherwise consumes most of an author’s time and most of a publisher’s budget, and which is the reason illustrated books are expensive and slow. The judgment stayed where it belongs.
Marketing Analytics Consultants
We do the apparatus — conformance, reconciliation, sourcing, citation, rights position and the production paperwork — so the part only you can do is the part you spend your time on.