User:Mabailey48

My name is Marcus Bailey. I live in north Atlanta, Georgia most of the year and spend the summer and early fall in Westcliffe, Colorado. I've been involved in the book publishing business since 1991 when I bought a tiny business unit of BellSouth Advertising & Publishing Company (BAPCO) that did prepress production for The Yellow Pages. My business was originally located in Slapout, Alabama. . . I swear, that's the real name of the town.

I didn't want to be in that business; I wanted to learn how to use computers and software to produce books. I suppose I could have just taken some classes but that would have been too easy. Besides, ever since I'd met my masters thesis requirement in 1976 by publishing a local sports tabloid newspaper in my hometown of Lancaster, Ohio I'd had ink in my veins. I renamed my little company BaileyBooks and immediately began driving the employees crazy as I pushed them to produce more and more complex publications.

I started by selling BaileyBooks' services to Manhattan's trade book publishing community. Very quickly we were doing typesetting and graphic arts for Bantam, Doubleday, and Dell (before their merger), St. Martin's Press, Warner Books, and a few others. Success with those publishers led to new contracts with Oxford University Press, Macmillan, and Congressional Quarterly.

In early 1993 I realized the only way to remain competitive on our fees was to shift away from expensive typesetting systems and to adopt inexpensive Macintosh computers and Quark Xpress. My staff in Alabama balked at these changes so I opened a brand new office in Atlanta and hired bright young people who knew the Mac and graphics. Unfortunately, they didn't know professional typography. I went to my undergraduate alma mater's own press (Indiana University Press) and talked them into a bartering system: they would teach my staff how to do scholarly typography in exchange for free work. Things went very well, the staff at IUP was terrific and my new people learned fast. Within a few months we were ready do real scholarly prepress work and get paid for it!

Our very first revenue-producing job was Global Warming Unchecked by Harold W. Bernard, Jr. (1993) How has BaileyBooks fared since that first monograph went to print? We've done 792 other jobs for more than a dozen very prestigious university presses.

Throughout these last 20 years I've dabbled in my favorite hobby: copyediting manuscripts for aspiring authors. It's funny, I'm not a writer and I know it. But I'm pretty good at fixing the sentences of real writers; in fact, I'll borrow a line from a famous (but not so famous that I can remember his name) editor: I've fixed more sentences than most authors have written.

When I'm bored I love to come to Wikipedia and find an article of one of my favorite books or authors. If I think I have something to contribute I'll tweak the article. I hope that in some small way I'm adding to the discourse. Please feel free to contact me if you'd like to discuss my editing on Wikipedia or if you know an author who might need my help.