No matter the size of your publishing company, when you have responsibility for overseeing the creation, management, and distribution of multiple products, complete editorial control can sometimes be illusive, as can the ability to compile enough of the right kind of data to generate meaningful insights. With so many available distribution channels, even something as basic as identifying your most successful author can actually become an overly-complicated and time-consuming task.
However, the right software can provide a straightforward way to take back editorial control and leverage data-driven insights.
What is editorial control, and why is it important?
Editorial control in publishing involves the overall control of resources and processes involved in the production of a text within a publishing house. It includes the right to set and review standards over content and how and where it is shared.
It’s important to ensure that your organization maintains standards in published materials, across multiple platforms. At best, any inconsistencies or errors could be harmful to your business and brand reputation. At worst, incorrect information could lead to legal proceedings.
Effective editorial control ensures everyone working from inside, or in collaboration with your company, follows standardized and hygienic publishing practices. For some publishers, that could mean thousands of authors, editors, and products. So they need a solution that can provide a complete and clear overview – software that’s easy to use and removes the need for editors to handle the process through multiple spreadsheets.
Taking control of the publishing process
The right technology provides better visibility, so it becomes much easier to understand processes and workflows and see where efficiencies can be made. Coupled with a solid strategy, greater clarity over content creation and publication also helps to set standards in terms of quality and keep down costs.
Most publishers work with writers and editors from outside, as well as inside, their organization. With so many moving parts, it’s essential to manage the publishing process effectively, especially when content creation and editing is outsourced. Transparency and oversight can help you ensure all parties maintain the same standards, and that content is of a consistent standard. Ideally, you need to keep onboarding to a minimum so that writers and editors can focus on their core and most valuable work.
When you’re dealing with tens of thousands of authors, it’s even more important to uphold editorial standards. For instance, law publishers may use external writers who are judges, legal partners, or professors to write and update content. Editors, who are not legal specialists, then validate the style, correct typographical errors, and check referencing. In these circumstances, it’s vital that everything is verifiable and up to date.
In certain types of publishing, the structure of the text is important but does not require heavily designed pages, such as those of a glossy magazine. Professional journals in particular are often best-suited to a less complicated layout. This means that with the right software, you can use templates and automate production, including improvements and edits, saving money, and decreasing time to market.
The real benefit of bringing a layer of software-based editorial control of your entire publishing operation is that manual or spreadsheet-driven processes are by their nature error-prone, and can be expensive and time-consuming to put right. The right software can ensure a smooth process which maximizes automation.
When the workflow becomes digitized, every aspect of it becomes more measurable. So you can start to get a top-down view of the time spent on projects, how long certain individuals spend on it, where the bottlenecks are in your workflows, how long a process actually takes and where to find the content created.
Transparency, accessibility, and visibility over what’s involved can help you find efficiencies – no matter how small. Anything that can have an impact on the button line is worth investigating.
Clearer visibility leads to data-driven insights
It goes without saying that complete editorial control is hard to achieve. But the right software can help provide the visibility and control you need to maintain editorial standards, and ensure that nothing gets out of the door without meeting them.
PublishOne works with your writers and editors’ existing publishing tools, so it’s simple to put it at the heart of your publishing process. With all your writers, editors, products, and distribution channels connected to a single publishing platform, you have all the transparency you need to make the most of your data. You can see the end-to-end chain from creation through to distribution, giving you complete overview and control.
Integrated with a business intelligence platform, such as Microsoft’s PowerBI, you can use data from PublishOne to identify actionable insights and help with data-driven decision-making at every level. So the next time you need to know the names of your current best-selling authors across multiple channels, you can find out in just a few clicks.
Interested to see how PublishOne can give you total editorial control? Request a demo.
