How An Omnibus Is Made

Another Saturday, another post culled from the archives. It almost sounds like a plan, when I put it that way. This one was originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 1/3/01, in response to a specific question from one person. I actually do get people asking me about this every so often (even people in the business), so it might be of interest to five or six folks out there:

The workflow goes vaguely like this (I'm simplifying, since I don't think anyone wants a mind-numbing explanation of my paperwork):

1) Decide a series might work as an omnibus -- this is relatively straightforward in the case of classics (such as The Compleat Dying Earth or the more recent John Grimes: Lieutenant of the Survey Service by A. Bertram Chandler) and sometimes more complicated if it's an ongoing series (since then we also have to consider how the series might break into several omnibuses).

2) Figure out how many books are in the series and what order they should go in (this is sometimes not as simple as it seems -- I had to repeatedly consult The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction when trying to figure out what should go in the aforementioned John Grimes book).

3) Get copies of the books (again, mostly a matter of haunting con dealers' rooms and second-hand booksellers for classics but usually more simple for new works -- we would then just call the publisher and ask to see the series).

4) Have somebody (one of our crack staff of freelance readers) read the books and tell us if they hold up in the first place and would work together as a single volume.

5) Read the proposed omnibus in order ourselves ("us" being in this case either me or Ellen Asher, the Editor-in-Chief and Ranking Poo-Bah of the SFBC) to see if we like it.

6) Assuming we did like it, do quick wordcounts to work out how big the proposed omnibus would be (this can get done earlier, especially if there's a concern about whether the omnibus would even fit between two covers at all -- though we can do some pretty immense books in the SFBC), and use that to work out rough ideas of costs, pricing, royalties earned, etc.

7) Call up whoever holds the rights (sometimes there can be an additional step of just tracking down the person who does) and make an offer. Dicker until both sides are basically satisfied with the deal.

8) Get extra copies of the books for the copywriter (who has to write about the books for the jacket flaps and the club magazine) and for the art director (who needs to send them to an artist to get new cover art done). Working with the art director to figure out what artist(s) would be best for the book -- and then dealing with sketches and other art concepts -- is probably my favorite part of the whole process.

9) Get yet more copies of the books to mark up for my book production folks (to say things like: "The ad pages in the back come out, I've got a new copyright page enclosed, and the acknowledgements pages need to be treated thusly").

10) A few months later, a book emerges.

I'm not sure if that's exactly what you wanted to know (well, it's probably more than you wanted to know, anyway), but there it is.