Based on the collinear factorization approach, we present a comprehensive perturbative next-to-leading (NLO) analysis of deeply virtual meson production (DVMP). Our representation in conformal Mellin space can serve as basis for a global fitting procedure to access generalized parton distributions from experimental measurements of DVMP and deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS). We introduce a rather general formalism for the evaluation of conformal moments that can be developed further beyond the considered order. We also confirm previous diagrammatical findings in the pure singlet quark channel. Finally, we use the analytic properties of the hard scattering amplitudes to estimate qualitatively the size of radiative corrections and illustrate these considerations with some numerical examples. The results suggest that global NLO GPD fits, including both DVMP and DVCS data, could be more stable than often feared. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Funded by SCOAP(3).