Math for Grownups
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Math at Work Monday: Andrea the book editor

Another book editor? Well, there’s a lot that goes into this process — from figuring out layout to determining what which book will be profitable. 

Andrea Rotando has been a book editor for Barnes & Nobel and Sterling Publishing since 2001. She’s also an experienced travel writer and the editor of Luxury Cruise Bible. In our interview, she talks about calculating the profit/loss for a book — a reality check for any book author!

Can you explain what you do for a living? 

I always knew I wanted to be in a creative field, but I never guessed that I’d end up in book publishing. I moved to New York City in 1991 with a music degree under my belt. I worked at recording studios until I segued into the magazine business by way of Pro Sound News and Musician magazines. Those experiences jump-started by passion for publishing and in 2007 I segued from magazine publishing to book publishing.

I joined Barnes & Noble in 2007 as a senior editor. I acquire, develop, and shepherd the production of projects for the Sterling Innovation and Fall River Press imprints. Both of those Sterling Publishing imprints exist with the express mission of creating proprietary books and kits (book + components) for the value section of Barnes & Noble stores.

I look to acquire books that will appeal to a broad section of Barnes & Noble’s customers and I also license existing content to create new packages of old favorites from third-party vendors. I work on a wide variety of topics, from crafts to cookbooks to light reference to military history.

As a hands-on editor, I’m involved in every aspect of a book’s creation, from contract negotiation to manuscript development to supervising copy editors and proofreaders and being the liaison with the production, design, and sales teams. I also supervise and mentor junior editors on the team.

Andrea Rotondo

When do you use basic math in your job?  

Basic math comes to the rescue in so many ways in my job. One major way I use math is to devise and monitor project schedules. One of my responsibilities is to make sure books arrive at each Barnes & Noble store on time. This is incredibly important since promotional tables for our products are set up at the front of each store on a certain date each month and a new batch of books are displayed. If a book doesn’t hit that table on time, the company loses sales. Not only don’t we earn money for that book, we’ve undersold the capability of that table and that means our department will be under its revenue goals for the month.

I use math to calculate the length of time each part of the book creation process takes and I assign those tasks accordingly. When something goes wrong, I look at the timeline and see where it can be expanded or contracted.

Do you use any technology (like calculators or computers) to help with this math?  

Sterling Publishing uses a proprietary online profit and loss (p&l) system. This is where we can log on to create or update the p&l statement for each book. The p&l includes fields for costs such as the advance to the author and his or her royalty rate as well as hard costs like editing, design, printing, and freight. The system automatically calculates the margin of the product. If the project doesn’t hit a certain acceptable margin, we don’t move forward.

I have to admit though that I often whip up “back of napkin” p&ls before going to the official system. This helps me get a sense of where the product margin is and where I have to work to trim expenses before committing to official paperwork.

How do you think math helps you do your job better? 

Math is like insurance. As long as I have the raw data about a project (advance, royalty rate, number of first printing units, print costs, etc.), I can calculate if that project will be a financial success (i.e., “make its margin”). Without math, there would be a lot of guesswork as to which projects would earn out and which wouldn’t.

How comfortable with math do you feel?  Does this math feel different to you?  (In other words, is it easier to do this math at work or do you feel relatively comfortable with math all the time?) 

Math has never been one of my strong suits but I like numbers, especially as they relate to the economic health of a project. I love being able to look at a project’s data and see where the opportunities are for the author and company to make a buck.

What kind of math did you take in high school?  Did you like it/feel like you were good at it? 

I don’t feel that I received an adequate education in regards to math while in high school. The courses were very basic. In college, I struggled with calculus. I’ve definitely become more comfortable with math, but I wish I had a more solid foundation from which to build.

Did you have to learn new skills in order to do the math you use in your job? Or was it something that you could pick up using the skills you learned in school? 

A basic knowledge of addition/subtraction is really all any editor needs.

Any questions for Andrea? Ask in the comments section!

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In Math at Work Monday

Math at Work Monday: Craig the writer

Welcome week three of our month devoted to publishing and media. If you haven’t previous posts, what’s stopping you? So far, we’ve looked at book publishing and on-air meteorology (television weatherpersons). This week, it’s time to look at writing. Today you’ll meet Craig Guillot, a freelance writer in New Orleans, who specializes in finance writing, among other things. Craig is the author of Stuff About Money: No BS Financial Advice for Regular People, an ebook, which he says will be available in April. (I’m a source for one section!)

Bottom line? Math helps keep Craig profitable. So if you’re a budding freelance writer–or looking for ways to leave more on your bottom line–listen up.

Can you explain what you do for a living?

I’m a non-fiction freelance writer. My specialties include business, personal finance, retail, real estate, travel and entertainment. I’ve written for publications and web sites, such as Entrepreneur, CNNMoney.com, Washington Post, Nationalgeographic.com and dozens of trade publications. I also have a personal finance book Stuff About Money: No BS Financial Advice for Regular People.

When do you use basic math in your job?

In the actual writing, not much. Just like any other writer or journalist, I interview sources, research, take trips out in the field, gather information and write. I occasionally do a little photography and video too. I do use math on occasion in some of my personal finance work to demonstrate and calculate different things related to retirement and investing.

But I use math a lot in the background. Writing just happens to be my trade. Like any other self-employed person, I am ultimately running a business. As a freelancer I sell my services to editors and corporate clients. I have a lot of regular clients, but I’m constantly taking on new projects and new deals. I need to be able to carefully estimate my time and expenses to give a client an accurate quote.

To me, everything is about the hourly rate. I need to use this as a basis for building my income. And while my overhead isn’t much, I do have to know what’s going out to pay taxes, what’s going into savings, retirement and everything else. It may seem like part of my personal life but I consider it all part of my job. When you’re self employed, you have to constantly think about all of these things.

Do you use any technology (like calculators or computers) to help with this math?

I’m not sure I even have a calculator in my office anymore, but my main tool is Excel. I use it for everything, and I mean everything. It’s a calculator but so much more. There is no problem that can’t be solved, no analysis that can’t be made, in Excel. When you learn how to use it and how to write the formulas you need, you can do anything with it. I use it to analyze my revenues, analyze the profitability of certain assignments. Like everyone else, I use Quickbooks, but I also use Excel for background stuff.

I break everything down to a formula or percentage. This includes my monthly income goals. It doesn’t have to be that way. I don’t imagine it’s that way for many other writers but it works for me and helps me make the optimal decisions. I’ve used Excel to track, analyze and compute things in my regular life as well. I used it in the remodeling of our house, in tracking my net worth, in monitoring my investments, planning retirement, planning trips. I sit down, make up a spreadsheet, build some formulas, input the data and then use it to help make decisions. I run marathons and even use it to track my training runs and races. The more you learn how to use Excel and write formulas, the more uses you find for it.

How do you think math helps you do your job better?

One way it helps me is with analyzing my hourly rate and profitability. Whenever I take on special projects for a corporate client or a custom publisher, I use it to give a quote. I prefer to work on a project rate. I give them a single number but behind that is a lot of math that I have used to arrive at that number. They don’t need to know any of that.

I may also build in a variance. It will let me know if I might be able to live with a cut in that number. So if they want to try to negotiate that down a bit, I know that I can drop by 5%, 7%, 10% or whatever it might be for me to still make what I need to make.

I also need to factor in opportunity cost. That is what else I could be doing with my time. Do I take this project which will tie me up for three weeks or do I decline it and go after smaller but potentially more lucrative projects that will make my time more flexible? I use math to figure all this out.

How comfortable with math do you feel?

In relation to personal finance and business math, I feel very comfortable with it because I use it so much and see the value in it. But all the standard stuff you learn in school? I really don’t remember any of that. I’d have to pull out a book and look up some formulas if you wanted me to calculate cubic volume or something like that.

What kind of math did you take in high school?  Did you like it/feel like you were good at it?

Just the basics. Algebra, geometry, standard high school stuff. I wasn’t particularly good at it, I was just average. But I majored in business in college and took a lot of accounting, finance and business math classes. I always excelled at those and had a stronger interest in them. Math dealing with money just felt real to me. There was an instant connection of “Oh, I could actually use this someday.”

Did you have to learn new skills in order to do the math you use in your job? Or was it something that you could pick up using the skills you learned in school?

I did pick up some new skills, but a lot of the business and personal finance math I used today can be traced right back to college. The fact that I actually enjoy this kind of math really helps.

Anything else you want to mention?

Yes. I believe that many of our growing financial problems in this country—like people getting into mortgages they couldn’t afford, our lack of savings, our failure to put enough money away for retirement, our problems with credit card debt—can be traced partly to our failure to use math in our financial lives. People buy homes and cars on emotion but rarely run the numbers. They wouldn’t use debt to overspend if they really knew the long-term consequences. There is a numerical answer for everything in your finances. You have to know why that number is important, how to calculate it and how to use it.

Any questions for Craig? I’m sure he’d be happy to answer them!

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In Math at Work Monday

Math at Work Monday: Tony the on-air meteorologist

Quick! What do you have to know before changing from your jammies into something a little more work appropriate? The weather, right? Tony Pann is an on-air meteorologist for WBAL-TV 11 in Baltimore, Maryland. Math helps him predict if there are sunny skies ahead or if you’ll need to pack your umbrella. Here’s how.

Can you explain what you do for a living?

I have been a television meteorologist for 22 years. Since 2009, I’ve been working as part of the morning team at WBAL TV.

When do you use basic math in your job?

I use math everyday! The computer models that we use to forecast the weather, are based on very complicated formulas derived from fluid dynamics. The atmosphere acts very much like a body of water, so the same mathematics can be applied to both. Each day, over a dozen different computer models are run predicting the state of the atmosphere at different time frames. An initial set of data is entered at a specific starting time, then the model shows us it’s interpretation of what the state of the atmosphere will be at certain time intervals. For example, the data might be entered at 7 a.m., then the model will predict the temperature, wind speed, and barometric pressure at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. Some of these models are short range, and only extend out to 48 hours, while others go all the way out to 365 hours from the starting point!

So let’s say there are 13 models that do this same thing each and every day, two or three times a day. It’s my job as a meteorologist to interpret all of that data, and translate it into the very understandable and reliable seven-day forecast that you see on TV. With so much data out there, the intuition and experience of the forecaster is very important. Since each model takes in the same starting data, but is run on a different formula, they all come up with different answers. For example, one model might say the high temp for today is going to be 45 and another could say 50. Or one could predict 6 inches of snow and the other says 1 inch. It’s my job to decide which one is right and why.

Sometimes I don’t trust any of them, and I’ll do a quick calculation on my own.  Here’s an equationthat I can use to calculate the high temp for the day by hand:

T_max =  (Tk_{1000 – 850}*0.36)-422

where T_max is the potential high temperature and Tk_{1000-850} is the 1000mb to 850mb thickness in meters.

I then go on TV, and try and explain it all in an interesting manor — at least that’s the goal.

Did you have to learn new skills in order to do the math you use in your job? 

In order to get a degree in meteorology, you actually have to learn all of the math that the computers are doing to give us those answers. It’s not easy! By the time we are finished, we’re just a class or two short of having a minor in mathematics. It’s great to know what the computers are doing, but I’m glad we don’t have to work it out by hand anymore. If not for the wonderful training in the world of mathematics, I most certainly would not be doing this job.

Do you have questions for Tony? Ask them in the comments section, and I’ll let him know to peek in!

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In Math at Work Monday

Math at Work Monday: Jennifer the book editor

Photo courtesy of shutterhacks

So you’ve got a brand new book on your nightstand or electronic reader. Or maybe you have a book idea that you’d love to get published. How on earth does an idea get translated to pages or bytes? A book editor could play a big role. Jennifer Lawler was my editor for Math for Grownups, and these days, she’s the imprint manager for Adams Media’s new direct-to-ebook romance imprint. Today, she answers the big question we have here on Mondays: How do you use math in your job?

Can you explain what you do for a living?

I’m an imprint manager for a book publishing company, which means I acquire books from writers based on what we think our readers will want to read. Then I shepherd the books through the entire editorial and production process, which includes everything from negotiating contracts to approving cover design to making sure the publicity department is doing its job. My job constantly switches from big-picture items like “How  does our imprint differentiate itself from other imprints like it?” to nitty-gritty items like “did that copy editor ever send over her invoice?”

When do you use basic math in your job?

I have a set budget for producing each title, but not all titles are alike, so they require different amounts of money. I have to make sure that each book gets what it needs without going over the budget as a whole, and also without being really out of whack for any one title. This is very similar to keeping a household budget and balancing a checkbook.

For nonfiction print books, I have to calculate how to make them fit into the allotted page count we have for them. At my company, page count is determined at the time a book is signed, based on the type of book it is, what the cover price will be, and other factors. Since nonfiction books are sold on proposal, not finished product, the finished product can vary significantly from what we assumed it would be at the time of signing. So I have to figure out what we can do to make the book fit. Can we add pages to the index, or subtract pages from the index? Can we add or subtract front matter? Can we go up to 2-page chapter openers or down to 1-page part openers? We can’t go over or under more than 16 pages for any project. Usually it’s not a big problem but sometimes you should see my desperation!

Do you use any technology to help with this math?

We use a special calculator based on trim size to estimate how many words per page, taking design considerations into account (lots of sidebars or illustrations mean fewer words on each page). For the budget, I just use a spreadsheet. This just helps make sure simple errors in addition or subtraction don’t through the whole process off.

How do you think math helps you do your job better?

On a fundamental level, if I don’t do the math right, the company and everyone in it suffers. We miss our projections, we overrun our budgets, we even screw up our earnings. That’s a big deal. It also helps me be creative and to make better judgment calls. If I find myself saying, “Well, it doesn’t really matter if this one book doesn’t fit the page count, I can just get the publisher to change the page count,” I know I’m being lazy. Maybe that is what has to happen sometimes, but that type of change directly impacts our profit-and-loss statement for the title, so it has to be the last resort. Same with the budget. “Well, the publisher isn’t going to kill me if I go over by a little bit.” That’s true, but it’s a lazy way of thinking. Doing the math makes me think about what I need to do differently to hit the budget. In some instances, yes, the budget simply needs to be bigger. But it could mean I need to watch what I acquire so I’m not picking up things with potential but that require a ton of editing. It could mean I need to streamline a process somewhere or develop a template instead of doing some type of custom approach each time.

Math adds a lot of clarity to my work—something I never thought a book editor would say!

How comfortable with math do you feel?

I am pretty comfortable with math except when I am put on the spot (like someone asking me point-blank to answer a math question). I find the math at work to be easy in the sense that I’m confident about not making mistakes with it. I do it in the privacy of my office, so if I have to check my calculations five different times to make sure I’ve got them right, I do it.

What kind of math did you take in high school?

I got as far as Algebra II and felt like a complete idiot by that point.

Did you have to learn new skills in order to do the math you use in your job?

I had to get over my fear of “oh my god I will screw up the math and they’ll kick me out and I love this job!” Other than that, though, the math is straightforward—definitely something a high-school kid could do. Probably a third-grader could do it

Thanks for playing with us today, Jennifer!  If any of you dear readers are interested in writing and publishing a book, check out Jennifer’s great book proposal class.  (I can recommend it from personal experience!) Or feel free to ask her a question in the comments section.

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In Math for Writers

Welcome March! Media, publishing and math

Sometimes information comes in these big, boring stacks — and without the coffee. Media professionals crunch it, so you don’t have to. (Photo courtesy of misspudding)

In 1998, I landed my first real media job — as a content producer at PilotOnline and HamptonRoads.com, websites for The Virginian-Pilot, a daily newspaper in Norfolk, Va. My first assignment was to develop and launch a schools section, featuring interactive content like a lesson plan database, information about local schools and the results of statewide test scores.

Each year, I’d get notice that the Standards of Learning test scores were about to be released. I’d have three days to download the data, organize it into a database and then output it on the site. When the information went live, visitors could look up their school and see results in a variety of subject areas. They could even answer sample questions to see how they would fare.

I had a blast. Seriously.

For the first time in my career, I was combining my degree (math) with my passion (journalism). And it was fun.

Fact is, there’s lots and lots of math in publishing and media. But every single day, some poor English major is shocked to find out that he needs to add, subtract, multiply, divide or — oh my! — even employ an equation or two in order to do his job well.

But math and media go together like the Pope and his funny hat. Math helps readers understand complex information, and it helps writers and producers create content that people want to read or watch or listen to. Math helps publishers save money. Math helps readers scan the newspaper over a bowl of Cheerios — and get the gist of the story.

Here are some examples:

1. Instead of publishing the entire Census results, a newspaper crunches the numbers and creates colorful charts that are easy to read and understand.

2. Meteorologists don’t guess the weather forecast; they review previous data and apply what they know about weather to predict when we’re about to be hit with 17 inches of snow.

3.  When you read a book, the text is arranged so that the number of pages is divisible by four — and you’re not skipping over blank pages.

4. A website will average the starred reviews of a movie so that you don’t have to read each and every reviewers opinion.

And then there are the countless examples that most readers, viewers and listeners aren’t even aware of.

Here at Math for Grownups, March is devoted to publishing and media. Throughout the month, you’ll meet folks in these industries and learn how they use math in their jobs: like Jennifer Lawler, who is an imprint manager for my publisher, Adams Media, and Tony Pann, on-air meteorologist at WBAL-TV. And of course we’ll delve into a variety of topics — from making graphs to critically analyzing a reporter’s numbers.

Whether you’re a writer or broadcaster or just a consumer of media, make sure you come back this month. You just might learn something — or discover that you use math all the time.

Is there a topic you’d like me to cover this month? If so, drop me a line, and I’ll see what I can do. Or just post a comment with your suggestions.

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