Proof copies are being printed of my book.
I'm not sure why, or what purpose this serves.
I'm sure I was told but I was getting info overload from the sales people at the time- and I'm not sure what it all means.

Can anyone enlighten me?

They use them to send out free to their big customers in advance of the release date, to try to drum up interest in ordering the book in when it comes out. They probably send them out for review, too. Not sure why you'd care, particularly... except that it may be the first time you've got to hold your lovely book in your hands (?). (Only it will look cheap and nasty as it's a proof copy.)

Rosy.

Lola, when they typeset your novel they print off the proofs that you and the proof-reader will get (i.e. looking like the pages will in the book, but complete with typos and perhaps slightly wonky bits of layout they might change their minds about. If you change your mind about anything at this stage they'll be a bit fed up, because typesetters are well paid so their time doing corrections is expensive!). They'll come to you in lose sheets, but then they bind up some of these proofs to send out for reviews and giving to booksellers and other promotional purposes. They used to just glue them into a folder, but more and more they seem to bind them with a versio of the final cover.

You're slightly pleased they're doing this - it costs something to do, and shows they're really pushing the book. You may even find they turn up on eBay.

Emma

<Added>

It does vary how cheap and nasty a proof copy looks - some are virtually indistiguishable from a paperback.

It was a huge thrill for me when they came through, I have to admit - the first time I held a Real Book in my hands.

Emma

It was a huge thrill for me when they came through, I have to admit - the first time I held a Real Book in my hands.

Yes, indeed. Then when you see them being advertised on ebay - that's another very special moment!

Incidentally, can somebody who understands these things tell me why on earth they still typeset books?

You e-mail your novel to the editor, and the copy editor works directly on it, and you and the copy editor together get it all perfect and just how you want it. Why don't they just use that file as the basis for the book? But no, they have to go away and typeset it and a whole new load of typos and errors creep in which you have to spot at the page proof stage. In this day and age, why do this, as it just makes extra work and leaves room for extra errors?

Rosy.

Typesetting is all digital these days, and they do use your word doc - it just goes into another program, such as Quark Xpress, where the layout can be controlled beyond the abilities of programs like Word. It isn't set with metal type and physical leading, but those typesetting terms are still used. The last time I used a Mac, horizontal spacing was called "leading" (as in ledd-ing)

So why all the brand new typos, then? Is that all just errors creeping in when they reformat it? It seemed much more as if somebody had re-typed it - BADLY!

Rosy.

I rather think TMOL was typeset by hand from scratch from the copy-edited hard copy - I'm pretty sure they never had the Word files from me.

I can only suppose that for a real lightening-quick typesetter, wading through putting in the copyedits, unscrambling the formatting into Quark or whatever they use, and then fiddling around getting the kerning and leading right so there aren't all those subtle things like rivers of white and doing proper hyphenation that computers don't understand, takes longer than getting it right first time round by typing it in from scratch.

Emma

Are there still presses that use metal type though? I thought it was common practice for lithographic printing to use a photo-etched metal plate, created from a master that comes out of a digital printer - so the thing has to be on computer. Hard copy is scanned and converted to real type, and then taken into a typesetting program.

Even Clays, who are the biggest printers of paperbacks in the country, include in their guidelines, a specific format for PDF files, so the machine can take it and print without any human intervention.

In an age where robots do everything in factories from making pencils to cars, it seems a real stretch of the imagination that a real live human being would have to sit and place metal type into blocks.

Colin M

No, I think metal type is confined to the fine printers these days - everything else is offset litho. It's inputting the text into the computer that's making the films for the offset litho prss that still seems to be done manually in some cases.
Emma

I'm still gobsmacked, as some cheap scanners come with character recognition software. Mind you, a friend of mine went down that route and this particular software had a clever little filter that looked for any blemishes on the paper and removed them, so the result was a clean and perfect print.

Unfortunately, it saw every comma and full stop as a speck of dirt and deleted them. He had two hundred copies of a book with no punctuation. How he laughed!

<Added>

just to clarify - this software belonged to the printers, not him. He sent in his perfect hard copy and received the printed books three days later.

It's amazing, I know. I think OCR scanning is still a bit primitive, in the sense that it's not 100%, and of course it completely can't cope with handwritten copy-edits.

Emma

I'm quite a dab hand at Quark, and it's not as hard as it looks to get things looking uniform.
But then again, I'm talking about news pages and not novels.

Yes, I gather Quark's not difficult when you've learnt it (it wouldn't be the industry standard if it were, I guess.) I don't know if they do use Quark for books, though because you don't make up a book's pages the way you do a newspaper, it's more about handling huge quantities of text than moving the elements of a page about - a different kind specialist job. But I'm sure it's translating from Word into other things that's more fiddly than you'd think. If typesetting had become completely easy in the digital age there wouldn't still be typestting firms, you'd just send printers a file. But good typesetting is still an art, because printing may be digital, but humans are analogue.

Emma

I was a typesetter (ran my own company) for over 25 years. I'm astonished that any work is being retyped from scratch.

We always used the Word file, from the first time that discs became available. If there were no electronic version we would OCR the MS. Yes, there was a list of things to check for in scanned text, and we'd have to incorporate any handwritten edits, but it was still faster than typing.

Not everyone uses Quark. We used PageMaker, but that was a choice we made when the first computers became available. In recent years the finished product sent to the printer was a pdf file, optimised to their settings, particularly for the illustrations. In the case of journals, there'd be another pdf optimised for web publication.

I always subedited directly onto the screen. The author was never asked to make alterations her/himself, but that was for house style, accuracy, consistency rather than for material changes agreed between an editor and author.