Muhammad Ridwaan – Editor

Managing publishing projects across various academic disciplines at our client Oxford University Press, including their flagship and high-profile series in UK Academic Medicine and Law. Most recently, OUP’s annual law title Blackstone’s Civil Practice, for three consecutive years, comprising around 5,000 typeset pages across two distinct volumes.

Assessing manuscripts and artwork, scheduling and budgeting, managing freelancer services and author and client relationships, reviewing copy-editing, typesetting, and proofreading, and problem solving.

Assisting management and production teams, including troubleshooting pain points, developing and refining processes, conducting training, and improving quality and client satisfaction

Qalam Editing, specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, bring together over 20 years of professional experience in books and journal production management, copy-editing, proofreading, consultancy, project management, and translation services in the academic, trade, and educational publishing industry. We range from managing multi-million-dollar publishing portfolios for clients in the Middle East and South Asia and prestigious university presses worldwide, to copy-editing and proofreading for academic publishers and self-publishers across a wide array of subject areas.

• Overseeing the commissioning and (print and digital) production of over 50 scholarly works
in Arabic and English on Islamic and Western philosophy, theology, logic, science, linguistics,
and spirituality, for institutes, schools, and universities in the Middle East, Gulf, and the West.

• Implementation of commissioning and production workflows and processes, refining and
improving as needed; driving quality and process improvement.

• Managing editorial processes: commissioning authors, assessing initial proposals, arranging
peer review and manuscript assessments, coordinating related budgets and schedules.

• Managing production workflows: commissioning, briefing, and overseeing the copy-editing,
typesetting, proofreading, indexing, and printing for all titles, including quality control at
each stage and assessing final typescripts submitted for publication.

• Recruiting and training new members of production staff; managing their performance.

• Managing suppliers, including: tracking supplier performance, formulating supply strategy,
negotiating price and service level agreements.

• Issuing author and international conference contracts, while auditing reports and approving
budgets from conference organisers across Malaysia, Jordan, Pakistan, Germany, Bosnia,
Turkey, USA, and the UK.

• Acquiring foreign-language rights for selected Cambridge University Press titles, and
negotiating their co-publishing agreements with publishers in Bosnia, Jordan, and Malaysia.

• Commissioning, briefing, and overseeing the copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading,
indexing, and printing for every academic title, including quality control at each stage and
assessing initial typescripts submitted for publication.

• Acting as a key point of contact with authors and editors during production, and providing a
high level of author care.

• Managing costs and schedule to ensure titles are brought out on schedule, to budget, and to a
high quality.

• Simultaneously working on print and digital publications: overseeing quality control of
XML-first and -last workflows (QA probity reports), eBooks, and testing online platforms
Oxford Scholarship Online and Oxford Medicine Online.

• Negotiating bespoke manufacturing prices of key titles for Production Editors in the Science
& Medicine department with printers across Europe and the Far East.

• Overseeing the work of suppliers (and project managers) throughout the production process.

• Liaising closely with cross-departmental teams, such as Editorial, Design, and Marketing, to
ensure transparency and accuracy throughout the production process.