Travel
Guide books for Thomas Cook Publishing
We have a long and well-established working relationship with Thomas Cook, and have produced hundreds of guide books over the past ten years for all their major series, including traveller guides, pocket guides and driving guides. We manage both new titles and the rolling programme of updates, taking the projects from the preliminary stages of commissioning authors and photographers right through to sending PDF files to the printer.
For 2010-11 we commissioned and produced a brand new series of guides to UK cities, developing the content and structure to fit into Thomas Cook’s pocket guide series and researching and advising on destinations to be included. From the moment of the decision to publish we had four months to produce the first eight titles from scratch, so our cartographer, photographers and team of local authors were all tightly scheduled - not to mention our editorial and production staff!
Initial reactions from the market were so positive that a third batch of titles soon had to be squeezed into the year’s publishing programme. In all, we produced 29 new titles in nine months.
Scope of the project:
Full project management; commissioning text, photography and maps; copy-editing; photo selection; layout; proofreading; indexing; provision of final print-ready files.
Travel guides for Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet has a well-established streamlined process by which they produce their market-leading travel guides, and we work hard to fit seamlessly into their organisation. Occasionally this requires some early-morning Skype calls to bridge the UK–Australia time difference, and it always means remembering that a Friday delivery deadline is actually Thursday afternoon for us!
One of our recent projects was the latest edition of City Guide Vancouver. As the schedule was, as always, tight, we used a team of proofreaders for this single title. We trained all of the proofreaders to implement Lonely Planet’s exacting style guide, but all the same the CPM in-house project editor played an inevitably important role in ensuring consistency between their work.
From receipt of copy-edited text to delivery of print-ready PDFs, we typically have five weeks for a Lonely Planet book, which includes the time-consuming and necessarily last-minute task of inserting cross-references throughout the title.
Scope of the project:
Full project management from edited manuscript; layout of text and maps; picture selection and design of colour section; proofreading; indexing; inserting cross-references; delivery of open files.
InsideOut City Guides for Compass
Maps are what originally gave birth to Compass, and cartography is to this day an extremely important element of their products. Their patented maps are much more detailed than those found in most travel guides, so it is no surprise that updating them should be such a time-consuming task.
Due to their complexity, the map amendments are done by Compass in their studio. It falls to CPM therefore to ensure that their strict guidelines for supplying crystal-clear amendment instructions, both on and off the maps, are adhered to by all of the authors and updaters. If not, it becomes our job to reformat them accordingly.
These instructions have to be supplied earlier than is usual, before all the authors’ queries have been answered. This way of doing things requires us to work slightly differently, and we must start by skimming through the text to assess which elements will affect the maps.
We also supply Compass with ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison Word files for their co-edition partners. In these we highlight the text that has changed since the previous edition so that the foreign publishers can update their own editions likewise.
Scope of the project:
Full project management; commissioning updaters; copy-editing; proofreading; preparing cartographic instructions for Compass’ studio; typesetting; delivery of print-ready files.