ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the production process and also some of the steps one can take to help market the book. It focuses on trade books, but the process closely resembles that for academic books and for textbooks, with the difference that the latter are more heavily illustrated and more complex. Book production has become shorter and more streamlined with the advent of computers. Large trade and textbook publishers have refined production into an assembly-line process that turns out books like sausages, many of them sharing similar design templates. Many production departments are not even in the same building as the editorial department. Production editors are the anonymous heroes of publishing and some of the most important people in our writing life. Archaeology is about obscure places, so good maps are essential. Archaeology is a visual discipline, which means that books on the subject are more heavily illustrated than others.
