Taking Flight

Blue Heron Publishing glides easily into the digital era of book production after a period of functioning as a prepress vendor.WHILE MANY book publishers might cringe at the idea of bringing prepress in-house, Blue Heron Publishing, Hillsboro, OR, has based its own digital success upon its experience as a part-time prepress shop. What started out as a plan designed to generate some additional revenue has helped the small book publisher tackle the challenges of manufacturing.Out of the nestBlue Heron Publishing was conceived more than 14 years ago when former freelance author Dennis Stovall joined forces with a fellow writer to become a leading authority on the publishing and allied graphics fields in the Northwest United States region."I had no background in publishing," acknowledges Stovall with a slight chuckle. "But I did have a sense of the publishing process. … I began to do some serious studying at that point."With Blue Heron's premier publication—The Writer's Northwest Handbook—Blue Heron became a major source for regionally specific literary information. Following the success of the partners' first publication, they soon branched out with a supplement comprising a tabloid-style newsletter. Four years ago, both the newsletter and the rights to the handbook were sold to another publishing house but before the deal was sealed, circulation had reached landmark numbers for the small publisher—75,000 qualified subscribers in the Northwest alone.The success of Blue Heron's early publications prompted Stovall to branch out a bit personally. Suddenly, deeply engrossed in publishing, Stovall found that the direction in which he would like to take the company had changed a bit. His wife, Linny Stovall, took the place of Stovall's former partner, and the company soon began to act as both a publishing resource center and first-time author subsidiary firm.While the company is small by most standards—five on payroll has been Stovall's largest staff to date—its market is quite large. Blue Heron currently publishes between four and six titles each year, ranging from writing tutorial publications to teaching guides, to adult and young-adult literature (most of Blue Heron's authors have strong ties to the Northwest).The educational institution market has been a fast-growing focus for Stovall for several years. Blue Heron's Classroom Publishing—a teaching resource that instructs classroom teachers on implementing the principles of publishing into their curriculum—has been recommended for use in all grade levels by the National Council of Teachers for English.Before tackling book production, Stovall first has to come up with some manuscripts. He acquires them in a couple of ways: by direct solicitation to an author or by unsolicited manuscripts submitted to the publishing house. A good source for manuscripts, according to Stovall, has come from attending industry events and writing seminars, where he has the opportunity to network with a wealth of authors, illustrators and other industry professionals."We accept manuscripts from authors electronically, if it's possible on their end. … Files come in as either text files or, in most cases, we can accept almost any word-processing program file," Stovall explains. A few smaller files have been transmitted to Blue Heron over e-mail, but most come in on diskettes."Occasionally, we'll encounter someone who is still working with a typewriter … and they send us a hard copy of the manuscript. If it's large and complicated, we'll take it outside to be scanned, particularly if we think our OCR software won't be able to read it," Stovall adds.Each of Blue Heron's titles are black-and-white, with a four-color, illustrated cover. Freelance artists are commissioned to design the cover art, unless it is provided by the book's author.Getting it thereBlue Heron's titles are nationally distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, St. Paul, MN. Printers ship the majority of each print run to the distributor, while a third of each run is sent to the publisher's warehouse in Portland, OR. Sales to the institutional and private market are filled from that location. Working with a distribution firm has proven to be a worthwhile investment for Stovall, who notes, "They'll generally indicate how many units they anticipate needing before we go to press. That way, we get a good prediction of what our advanced sales figures will be."Over the years, Stovall has compiled a network of print vendors that he calls on for bids for each project. Stovall's most prominent printing resources have been Gilliland Printing, McNaughton-Gunn, Bookcrafters, and Patterson. Blue Heron is responsible for doing its own prepress work, and, in years past, that role took on a life of its own. "To bring cashflow to the business while we were growing," Stovall recalls, "we contracted out prepress work to other publishers."That not only provided (neccessary) cashflow," he adds, "but it allowed us to afford the best technology for our own books. Among our clients were publishers ranging in size from Van Nostrand in New York to Cedar House Press, a small, Seattle poetry house. Lately, we have emphasized consulting rather than production services."Perhaps largely due to Stovall's experience as a prepress guru, he now conducts all of his business electronically for sheetfed runs of 5,000. Files are either submitted to a printer on diskette or via a portable hard drive. Depending on the printer's preference, Stovall's staff will either translate files to PostScript or simply hand over a native PageMaker file to the printer.The beauty of being digitalEven though file transfers are not conducted over high-speed telecommunications lines, simply being able to do away with paste-up and film-output methods has made a tremendous difference in Stovall's workflow."Electronic editorial and prepress have made it possible for us to survive in a highly volatile, low-margin, cutthroat business," claims Stovall. "Development time for new books has been slashed dramatically, cutting the time that assets are tied up in inventory by months. It has also become more economical to revise books in subsequent printings."On the editorial front end," Stovall continues, "we now rarely deal with hardcopy, though we print editorial proofs to pass back and forth, because it's simpler and, also, some writers and editors are more comfortable with that method. I'd gladly use (PDF), either attached to an e-mail or posted to a private section of our Web site, to handle some or all of this, but not until everyone is ready (to receive it)."Staying proactive in a competitive market is essential to Stovall, who says: "The moment it became possible to do … WYSIWYG composition with PageMaker on those original tiny Macs, we sold our industrial-strength multi-user system and took the leap, (which made) our typesetting house unhappy, but forever (changed) the way we would produce books. We haven't plugged in the waxer for years." -Gretchen A. Kirby

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Taking Flight

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