This week we’re bringing you the first in a 3-week series looking at the issues around selecting and submitting images for your book manuscript. We’re not going to cover absolutely everything, and as always your mileage may vary, depending on the publisher you work with, but here we go with part one:
One of the things that surprised me when I started my career in publishing as an editorial assistant (EA), was how much of my time was spent worrying about images. A manuscript would come in and one of the very first things I would do would be to go through and tabulate separate counts of tables, line diagrams and halftones (photographs and other non-vector graphics). Now it should be said that I worked on a civil engineering book list in those days, and certainly those were books more prone to extensive tables, diagrams and even illustrations than most political science or history monographs. Even so, a great deal of my time was spent counting images, checking their quality for reproduction, and confirming their copyright status.
Some of this is obvious. Print has been a text-oriented medium since the invention of movable type. It is fundamentally adapted to the efficient production of text, and indeed the role of print in the standardisation of textual conventions such as punctuation, spelling and the morphology of alpha-numeric characters is well-documented. Even today, word processing and typesetting software packages are built around the manipulation of text, with images and tables introducing complications and often frustrating the text layout. We’ve all had the experience of trying to paste some pictures into a Word document only to be completely baffled by what it does to the text and why it doesn’t do what we thought we’d told it to do. Thus it does feel intuitive to a degree that images are the exception rather than the norm in a fundamentally text-based medium. At the same time many authors are justifiably puzzled about the extent to which many publishers are wary of images of all kinds. I thought we might use this week’s update to explore a bit more why this is, and to look at ways to mitigate the challenges brought by images. Then I found that I was writing thousands of words, hence why this is now the first of three parts!
Shear Volume
I mentioned that the first thing that struck me when I had to check through manuscripts was the amount of time I needed to spend looking at images. Often the first thing I would do as an EA when a manuscript came in would be to go through a count of every image, divided by type. In civil engineering books these counts could sometimes run to three figures, so this was time-consuming stuff. I’d then compare these numbers to those we’d agreed with the author in their contract and if they’d radically overshot we might have words with them about whether they were all strictly necessary.
The context for this is really quite simple, many of the costs in publishing a book are in direct proportion to the number of words in the manuscript. Even if they do the work in-house, any publisher much larger than a one-man-band will tend to allocate a cost to a manuscript for copy-editing, typesetting and proof-reading based on an hourly rate. This might be what they’ll pay a freelancer, or it might be the nominal overhead cost of the in-house production editor. In fact a poorly written manuscript might take vastly more time per 1,000 words than a well written one, but an average cost is generally fairly predictable. Images are very variable, because they may insert quite simply into the text, but they very much might not, as with our MS Word example above. Then there’s the impact on the extent — that is, the number of pages — of the book, which will affect the cost to print and ship each copy. This is again quite predictable by the word (unless you have an author who really likes to intensively deploy long words) but becomes much more variable when images are introduced.
In short, images introduce a significant element of unpredictability to both the production cost and the long-term marginal cost of a book. The more of them there are the higher the likelihood of having one or more outliers that cause headaches, even if the majority are quite simple to handle. As to what it is that causes an image to be an outlier, quite honestly this isn’t always easy to predict, but both copyright status and image quality can be very significant factors, and usually can be managed ahead of time to avoid causing problems later.
Copyright
Copyright is a concern for both text and images. We’ll no doubt write another time about the ongoing challenges that the erosion of fair usage standards over the past twenty years have created when it comes to handling long quotations. In the main though, the overwhelming majority of your text is going to be your own material that you’ve created yourself, and thus presents no particular problems in terms of ownership. In some manuscripts this will also be true of the images. You may have created all your own tables, drawn all your own diagrams and taken all your own photos. It is my experience, however, that most authors do not.
To begin with the basics here, and forgive me if this is very obvious, you need explicit permission from the copyright owner of any image you want to reproduce in your manuscript that was created by somebody else. That’s every table, every drawing (whether it’s a line diagram, or a cartoon), and every photograph.
It follows that the first thing to ascertain is who the copyright owner of an image is. It’s important to understand that if it has previously been published (in the broadest possible sense of the word) then there is a good chance the right to reproduce the image is held by the publisher. That’s certainly where I would recommend starting in most cases. This is a little more complicated in the case of photographs specifically, because photographers often retain broader rights to their work and so you often need their direct permission as well as that of their publisher — if they have one.
There are three big issues you may run into when it comes to obtaining copyright. The first is that the rightsholder may want to be paid a fee for their work. This is very much part of how intellectual property works, and larger publishers in particular will expect to treat permissions as a small but lucrative source of revenue. Your publisher may or may not feel inclined to pay for this. From a publisher’s perspective this is a cost that may appear to have very little benefit. We are obliged to consider how many copies of your book we need to sell to cover the cost of each permission we pay for and weigh that against how many more copies we can expect to sell by including the image in question. This varies hugely depending on specifics, but in many cases the answers will be respectively “several” and “none”.
The second issue, which tends to be an adjunct to the first, is when the rightsholder wants to impose constraints on how you use the image. This might be a question of what formats you’re allowed to use it in, how many copies you can sell before having to seek permission again (and presumably pay another fee), or limitations as to which language editions the image can be used in. Each of these can be a nuisance, because they either seriously constrain what we can do with your book, or because they require a degree of book-keeping that for many publishers is not practical. It takes a lot of infrastructure for a publisher to track how many copies of a book (across all formats) it has sold and to trigger any permissions licensing when it reaches a given threshold. Especially if there multiple third-party materials with different thresholds. Figure 1.3 might require new permission after 500 copies, while 3.6 is after 750, and 5.4 after 400, and so on. Many publishers will simply not agree to such terms, because we know we do not have the mechanisms to ensure we obey them.
The third issue you’ll commonly run into is that you simply cannot identify the right person to ask, or that they will be unresponsive. This can be a real time-sink for authors and for editorial support staff. In many respects it can be even more frustrating than when there is a fee to be paid. At least when we know what the cost and the terms are we can make a decision and move on with our lives. The real danger in this scenario is we waste disproportionate amounts of time chasing those last few permissions and may never obtain them.
Next week we’ll talk about how to manage these copyright concerns, and what happens if you don’t…
As always, do feel free to get in touch on proposals@tbarnpress.com if you have a book project you’d like to discuss with us.
