Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Define Your Contractor Responsibilities
July 1, 2008

I'm annoyed. I admit—I'm using this as my own personal soap box today. But, hopefully,  it will save someone else from a headache.

I spent nearly one year developing and rewriting a book on marriage and singleness for a very lovely family counselor who does a lot of speaking but isn’t strong in the area of writing. I added content, rewrote large sections of the book, and did a major overhaul to smooth and polish her writing.

Once the book was finished (and after multiple rounds from third-party editors to doublecheck the copy), the book finally went to a designer. As part of the package, this designer employs a third-party proofer to look over the copy once it was laid out.

Great. The more eyes, the better. That is, until the questions started coming from my client.

Who's Job Is It, Anyway?

The proofer was questioning this. He was questioning that. My antennae perked up. These were not proofing questions, but editing questions—well out of the bounds of his responsibility. Still, it was the author's book. If she wanted to take his suggestions, that was okay with me.

Sometime later, however, the author mentioned that the proofer had actually made “many” changes, but she only accepted a few. Now I was alarmed. The book had gone through three layers of editing. There should have been very little, if anything, left to catch.

Plus, I had been serving as more than an editor, but also as an editorial consultant. What kinds of suggestions was the proofer making? The author wasn’t in a position to know what was a good suggestion and what wasn’t. What was now in the book that I didn’t know about?

I asked her for examples. The list was alarming. The proofer should have stuck to missing periods, missing words, and transposed letters. Instead, he had stepped into a developmental editing role, making judgment calls that were inappropriate and even contradictory to the style we had established for the book.

What does this have to do with print marketing?

Lessons for Sub-Contracting

Print marketing often involves working with subcontractors. Those contractors can be very experienced in their area of specialty, but they also must understand and stick within their defined responsibilities.

In the book in question, for example, from a very technical grammar perspective, the “only” in certain sentences should be moved from here to there. The proofer moved them all. This changed the voice of the author from the very informal, colloquial style to stilted and formal in those places. The proofer also wanted to change some of the numbered lists to bulleted lists, changing the narrative feel into a more corporate feel and breaking the consistency we had established for the book.

Imagine this was your direct mail piece or corporate brochure. Your print ad with a very specific slant and tone. Imagine the impact of choices like this on the intended message.

So what are some takeaway lessons here?

1. When you are subcontracting, make sure that you choose professionals who understand both their craft and their place in the workflow.

Responsibilities need to be clearly defined. If you develop a direct mailer that uses slangy language to make a point, you don’t want your copy editor fixing the grammar on you. You also don’t want your copywriter going behind your back and talking the designer into putting in a few more variable fields in your 1:1 marketing piece without discussing it with you.

This can be a bigger issue for small and mid-sized marketing companies who do work with smaller independents and don't necessarily have the same workflow standards and expectations in place. 

2. Set up a workflow with the proper checks and balances.

Make sure that proofs, suggestions, and revisions all route to the proper people and are approved, if necessary, before they go live. Certain last-minute changes don’t affect the impact of the campaign. But others can have reverberations beyond what the person making them can realize. Make sure that there is a system of checks and balances to prevent unintended consequences.

This is where collaborative workflow solutions (even inexpensive SaaS solutions like CatalystWeb) can be very helpful.

Okay, I feel better. Now I’m going to have a second Ho-Ho and a cup of tea.

Have questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at htollvr@aol.com. For more information on primers for marketers and small businesses on digital, 1:1, and Web-to-print technologies, visit www.digitalprintingreports.com.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on July 1, 2008 | Comments (0)