Groundhog Day

On 6 January of this year I submitted the complete text of my biography of Dorothy L. Sayers to the editors at Oxford University Press, including the editor of the Spiritual Lives series, my friend Timothy Larsen. Tim promptly returned to me a list of queries and corrections, which I responded to, also promptly. It was now late January.

Then we had to wait for the response of the “clearance reader,” a role I admit I do not understand. But eventually I was told that the cleaned-up and corrected typescript had been sent to Newgen, a production company that OUP works with.

When I heard this my heart dropped into my shoes. When I published The Year of Our Lord 1943 with OUP-USA, I had a nightmarish experience with Newgen: I kept making corrections only to have the original errors restored; communications were maddeningly unclear, with pasted-in answers to questions I did not ask; someone at Newgen had written an MS Word macro that queried every sentence that had quotation marks but no footnote, which increased my workload roughly tenfold; and so on. I could continue for quite a while. I will just say this: If I had known that OUP-UK also uses Newgen, I honestly don’t think I’d have agreed to write the book. For some reason it didn’t occur to me to ask.

On 16 April I finally got an email: “I am writing to introduce myself as the Project Manager from Newgen KnowledgeWorks, one of the partner production companies of Oxford University Press” etc. etc. The message included a PDF describing the Production Process, with an arrow reading YOU ARE HERE near the top of the page. I replied that day.

On 12 May I got another email from the same person: “I am writing to introduce myself as the Project Manager from Newgen KnowledgeWorks, one of the partner production companies of Oxford University Press” etc. etc. I also received again the PDF describing the Production Process, but with no arrow. Apparently we are now Nowhere.

It’s like Groundhog Day, but for book publishing. I’m expecting to get the same message again around 7 June. And whether anyone will ever see this book … well, don’t get your hopes up.