Collaborating with Editors question

Question

Hi,
I did a complete book layout in InDesign.
The publisher now says he is not happy with the editing (my side of
things -- the design work -- is fine) and he wants the entire book to go
through another round of editing.
The book has already been through several rounds of proofreading (ie
checking the PDF for mistakes and keying these changes into InDesign),
and they don't want to lose that work. What this means is that I, as
typesetter, am the only one who has the very latest version of the text.
As there are going to be extensive changes (I'm not sure what) and the
publisher wants to work off the latest version, he wants me to export
all the text as a Word file and then the editors will work on that.
However, the publisher is aware that in such a case I'll have to redo
the layout, and he wants to avoid that extra expense, so he asked me if
there is any way that the editors can work on the text without my having
to redo the layout.
My immediate thought was InCopy (which I've never used, only heard
about) -- the publisher could use the 30-day trial (at this stage,
obviously if they like it they may purchase the thing). But
(1) I'm on CS4 and the downloads of InCopy are all CS5.5. That won't
work together, right?
(2) Can I get hold of InCopy CS4 anywhere?
(3) Is the learning curve (both for me and the editor) going to be too
steep to do this in 30 days?
(4) Are the editors going to mess up my styles? I mean, if they need
some italics, how will they know to use my italics char style? And if
they need a subtitle paragraph style, how will they know to use that? If
I'm going to have to go through the entire book figuring out what
they've meddled with, I think it will be more trouble than it's worth
and I'd rather use the Word workflow.
Thanks for any advice,
Ariel

Answer 1

I think a lot would depend on how complicated the design of this book is. If there's a lot of formatting, dozens or hundreds of character and paragraph styles, etc., that's probably not something you're keen to re-do.
However, InCopy does have a bit of a learning curve for editors who are used to using Word. The learning curve for you shouldn't be too steep -- you'll need to learn how to create InCopy stories and export them so they'd editable by the editors, but otherwise InCopy is basically just the text editing features of InDesign, with a few extra writing tools (such as the thesaurus) thrown in. As the designer, you'll hardly ever use InCopy, if at all, but you can probably answer most questions for a new InCopy user as most editing elements are the same in both programs.
There are other things to consider too - if the editors don't have the fonts installed, they aren't going to see accurate line breaks or copyfit, and may do damage attempting to "fix" something that isn't really wrong. And as you noted, it would probably be best to provide a spec sheet showing what styles to apply where.
InCopy is a great tool, and in the hands of editors who have been trained and who have adequate support, it can save a lot of time on a project, particularly if it's planned for upfront. But I think that training needs to happen as the project is starting up, not at the stage you're currently in. Perhaps they could stick with the PDF mark-ups and send you patch files in Word for any sections that need signficiant changes.
BTW, you might want to post your question over in the main InDesign forum if you haven't already. I'm sure you'll find other InCopy users there, or others who have faced the same kind of dilemma. The main forum tends to get more traffic than the scripting one does, and you'll reach a broader range of users there.
Good luck!