Reference no: EM133029191

Argus Publishers Inc. is a New York City-based publisher specializing in college textbooks in the Social Sciences and Business. One of their best-selling texts is Cases and Exercises in Marketing Management, now in its seventh edition. This book is the fourth-best-selling text in the field of marketing. Two of the authors are based in the southeastern United States(Professors John Sexton and Bruce Nystrom), and the third author is currently teaching at a British university (Professor Donna James). Six months ago, the authors agreed to prepare the eighth edition to their text and deleted some cases and exercises while adding some new ones based on reviewer comments. The reviewers were faculty members who had used the seventh edition of the book. Their comments reflected what they liked and disliked as well as case or exercise topics they would find useful in the eighth edition of the text.

For the first seven editions over the previous 23 years, the authors had worked with various editors in the United States to whom the publisher had outsourced the editorial work. After finishing the revision for the new edition, the authors sent the manuscript to the publisher and waited for the edited manuscript, which they would proofread. It was agreed that each author would receive edited manuscript only for his or her chapters. In addition, the edited manuscript always came with detailed instructions from the editor indicating what they needed from each author and by what date.

This time, however, all three authors received hundreds of pages of manuscript from an editor, a Mr. Reddy, who was based in India, with no instructions at all. Each author received all parts of the revised text including those written by his/her co-authors. They also noted that some of the sentences and paragraphs were in red type within these manuscripts, but no explanation for the red type was provided. The three authors then called each other and tried to figure out what Reddy, the editor, wanted from them since no instructions were provided with the manuscript. Reddy was then replaced by two new editors at various points who also emailed large quantities of edited manuscript without instructions. In each case, the new editor indicated that the previous editor had left the company or was on vacation. Continuity of the editorial staff seemed to be nonexistent. The three authors then emailed the managing editor, Sarah Shelly, that they had no clue what was going on with their revision, what the editors wanted from them, and what they should do with the hundreds of manuscript pages each had been sent. Shelly told them they had been sent the edited Parts I and II of the text and that five other Parts would be sent later to them. However, she was unclear as to what the Indian editors were asking of the authors. She further noted that a corporate decision had been made to outsource all editorial work to India for cost control reasons.

Further email communications between the authors and the editors continued to be muddled. The authors could never get the editors to clearly communicate what they wanted from them and by what date. So each author downloaded the electronic manuscript files that had been sent to them, opened only those that they had authored, and proceeded to make their edits and comments. This was frustrating since the authors had specifically indicated to everyone on the editorial team which author was responsible for which materials.

All three authors commented to the managing editor that they wished they could go back to the previous system where U.S. citizens had edited the text.

Questions

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of publishers and other employers outsourcing editorial work or other activities to Third World countries?

2. What changes, if any, would you suggest for the publisher to better serve their authors during the editorial process? Why?