1. Introduction to Editorial Manager

Welcome to Editorial Manager! This module allows you to track a book from the germ of an idea to a possible product. It is a place to record manuscripts received or ideas that may never make it into reality. It is a point in the system to manage next actions and any correspondence related to possible projects. Items that are entered into this part of the system will stay here until you manually move or delete them. Think of this section of your system as a sandbox for new ideas.

The Editorial module only links through to the system when you are ready to move a title from an 'idea' to an actual product that will be managed by the production department.

This guidance will assume that you are brand new to the Editorial module, and will therefore demonstrate how you can create a new Editorial record and take it through the process for the first time. 

What does an Editorial Record allow you to do? 

As with other modules within the Stison system, once you have created a project within the module, you will have access to a host of tabs that each manage a different aspect of your Editorial process. 

A blank project within Editorial would look something like this: 

The Title, Subject, and Chapters tabs are where you can start building out information about your prospective title. What genre does the idea fall into? What theme is it covering? How will the book be structured? As you start to scope out answers to these questions, you can log your ideas here. 

In order to help you ascertain the financial viability of a project, the Editorial module also allows you to generate a Profit & Loss report that can be printed and taken to your Editorial meetings. This report is populated by information that you log in the Costs and Sales Forecasts tabs, and will be updated accordingly.

The Editorial Checklist and Editorial Schedule tabs are where you can schedule and track tasks associated with your Editorial project. Here, you can get an overview of who is working on which active task and see a record of what has already been completed for each project. 

Reporting

The Editorial Module also has a variety of reports that can be pulled from information that you log within the system. 

The Editorial Management Report provides an overview of all the projects that your Editorial team are currently working on and can be filtered by Editor, Imprint, and so on. For example, you can view the number of titles your team are publishing per month within a specified time frame: 

The Editorial Checklist Report shows an overview of the tasks that have been completed against each of your projects. This list of tasks is configurable to your organisation. From here, it is quick and easy to check things off when they have been completed. 

Enhanced Functions

There are also a number of more advanced functions within the Editorial module that can further streamline your processes, but are not mandatory for you to use the module. 

The first of which is our Workflows tool. This function can be useful for larger organisations, as it allows you to manage who can update the status of a certain project, as well as how many of the aforementioned tabs can be viewed whilst a project is in a particular stage of the editorial process. 

The Workflows tool also enhances our Meetings function. Within the Editorial module, you have the ability to track meetings from different teams and keep notes on the titles that have been discussed. With the Workflow function active, the list of titles to discuss will be automatically populated when you go to set up a meeting, making the process all the more streamlined. 

This "Getting Started" guidance will take you through the necessary steps to configure your Editorial module, as well as provide a basic overview of how it may look to take a title through the Editorial process within the Stison system. The articles in this section are numbered, and they are intended to be read in order.

First, we'll look at how to add your editorial tasks and costs to the module.