While most of us enjoyed some time off over Christmas and New Year a small team of dedicated editors, production and procurement staff, customer service managers and printers were working hard on the CCH end of year book program.

The book program is an intensive period where annual and first editions of most of our key titles are edited, produced, printed and distributed in time for the start of university semesters. Planning starts in mid-August and the program ends in February. Dedicated teams work exclusively on the book program and it is always both demanding and rewarding.

Getting the books written and edited on time is the first challenge. Our authors and editors manage to do this every year but there are more than a few late nights and stressful moments. The next step is to ensure that the right titles are ready for the right universities and orders are fulfilled correctly. The university term start dates range  from the 15 February to the 1st March and dispatch has to be prioritized accordingly. What can increase the complexity is the communication between CCH, the printer and the bookshops – we talk a different language at times!  We use an internal code for each book, the printer uses a reference number and the bookshops use the ISBN. Luckily this is not a problem when you have such experienced coordinators as Merilyn Murphy and Sue Rooker: Merilyn has been with CCH for over 20 years and Sue has been CCH’s Relationship Manager at Macpherson’s Printing Group for over a decade. Merilyn and Sue are an integral part of ensuring the book program always goes to plan and so far it always has.

To give you an idea of the size of the book program, in 2009 we printed 240, 000, 000 pages and it will be even more this year. To take a look at the latest 2010 titles just click here.