The total concept had to be spot-on, not only for the publisher but also for us!

A few years ago, Crius Group launched a new concept onto the market to lay out novels and thrillers in a fast, smart and cheap manner. But what technical choices did we make in this regard and why did we make those choices?

In the development of CORE, a number of starting points stood out head and shoulders above the rest: The quality of the books had to be and remain impeccable! The price per page had to come down substantially. Technology and software had to be known in the market and useable by every editor, corrector and designer. We separated the whole process into three large parts.

Content creation

Every editor is naturally provided with his or her manuscript in MS Word. To process the copy into a first proof automatically, an important step must be taken, namely to provide the document with paragraph styles. To make the work of the editors and correctors as simple as possible, they can do a great deal in MS Word. Thanks to macros, the document is not only structured correctly, but common errors such as double spaces are also filtered away automatically. So it’s not more, but less work in this case.

Content management and workflow

A publisher who chooses CORE does not do so for “just a few little books”, but is making a long-term choice. It is therefore important for the whole process to take place quickly and simply, but also and above all for it to remain manageable. 

The automatic generation of the first proof (within a few minutes), the sending back and forth of files, as well as the archiving of all materials: these were all things for which we had to come up with an answer.

In this regard, we explicitly chose not to reinvent the wheel. The conversion to InDesign was not easy, but it does ensure that manual intervention afterwards is still possible. Furthermore, we have integrated all steps into an existing content management system (CMS) hosted at Amazon. Both the conversions and the files are therefore stored in a safe, high-performance environment.

Content unlocking

Of course, the publication of every book is one of the most important steps. And this has of course long been not just a PDF, but also other digital formats.

As we said, we absolutely wanted to continue working with InDesign. It is the standard in the market and therefore offers a massive number of benefits. We have used our knowledge and experience to develop transformation scripts that automatically generate proofs based on templates.

As an extension to this, we use InCopy to be able to make direct corrections to the page. This is almost always done by the editor himself or herself. This minimises the back and forth of proofs.

You might be thinking: “What about ePub?” Well, here too we have chosen to automate processes as much as possible. It is cheaper than offshoring and ensures high quality and recognisable files. Moreover, all files are stored in a structured manner and it is relatively easy to export them to other delivery formats.

What have we learned so far? CORE has been running at several leading publishers in the Netherlands for over five years now. We can draw a number of conclusions from this cooperation: Publishers do not have to invest much to use CORE. The costs for templates and macros are modest and pay for themselves quickly. This simplifies the decision to start working with them. The use of CORE changes the working method used at the publisher. Editors need to be trained and do not always immediately understand why things need to be done differently. However, after a few months, this situation gets better and people are usually happy that they can work in a faster and cheaper manner. The use of existing technologies goes without saying. InDesign is and remains the indispensable link for the publisher and the typesetter alike. The manual control provides work for the designers. The design is done in templates created in advance, but an exception to this is possible if the situation so requires.