The Process of a Print Run

At My Father's World, we try to use the best resources available in our curriculum, so your children have a high-quality, age-appropriate education. We scour hundreds of books to make recommendations in our Recommended Book Lists and review dozens to select the best of the best to incorporate into our curriculum. Some of the books we use are classics and have been around for decades, but are still the best choice for our courses of study.

There are approximately 500,000 new titles printed in English each year. With such a plethora of new titles on the market, publishers annually cull their backlist. A publisher's backlist is the list of older books that the publisher continues to print. A publisher will keep a title on its backlist as long as it is profitable. Once the sales of a backlist title fall below a certain level, the book goes out of print and the publisher sells off its current inventory.

There are times when My Father's World's choices and a publisher's backlist collide. Our desire to use the best resources regardless of age and a publisher's need to keep in print only those titles that are most profitable are not always compatible goals. Each year, we may be informed that a title we have used for years is going out of print. When this happens, there are a number of steps we take to insure that you continue to have the best curriculum available.

The first step we take when this occurs is to evaluate the book in question. Does Marie want to continue using the book? Is there another book that is in print that would be a suitable substitute? If Marie is committed to continue using the book in our curriculum and there is no easy substitute, we move to steptwo.

In this phase, we ask several questions. Will the copyright holder license the book to My Father's World so that we might print it ourselves? If not, will the current publisher order a print run just for us?

If the current publisher does not own the copyright, an attempt is made to track down who owns the copyright and make contact with that person or organization. Even if the copyright is held by the current publisher, some agreements stipulate that if the publisher decides not to print the book, the copyright then reverts to the author. In that case, we begin an investigation to make contact with the original author.

Also, during this phase of the process, we consider if there are changes we want made to the text. Sometimes we will delete chapters in the book that are never assigned in the lesson plans. Further, at times we desire editorial changes to the text to make it better align with our values.

As you can see, this entire process is somewhat a decision tree with the direction we pursue being based on a number of possibilities and decisions. If the copyright holder is open to licensing the book to us, we begin the negotiation process in which agreements are proposed, revised, agreed upon, and finally signed. Also, there are times when there is a second contract needed for images that are contained in the text.

Once the contract is signed, the files and images are either transferred to us or the process of file development begins. Digital files for printing are relatively new and many books that are still in print have no digital files. The files for these older books are “on plates,” meaning that the image for each page or set of pages exists on metal plates and are stored at the printer location. In these cases, the book has to be digitized in order to create a digital file for us to print. This task is completed either by the copyright holder and transferred to us or our team creates a digital file here at My Father's World.

While developing the files, other questions are considered and decided. Will the book be printed at our facilities or will it be more cost effective to outsource the printing to one of the several printers we work with across the U.S.? Also, an ISBN is assigned and registered for the new printing. An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is the unique 13-digit number that identifies a book and distinguishes it from all other books published.

Finally, the day arrives when cases of the new book are delivered to our warehouse and we begin selling them to you. As you can tell this entire process takes months of research, negotiation, and preparation. Often it is close to a year from the time we are first informed that a book is being dropped until we receive the licensed edition in our warehouse. I believe the record for the longest time it took was 18 months. So, as you unpack your order and hold those books in your hands, know that some of them have had a long journey and the My Father's World team has worked diligently to bring you what we believe is the best Christian curriculum on the market.