In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 7stud <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >It's nice to hear about an author who cares enough about the end >product that bears their name to insist on quality. I'm so tired of >hearing authors whine that the publisher screwed up the book.
In all fairness, my co-author and primary partner (Stef Maruch) is a technical writer and editor as a profession, and she used to work at Yale Press. So we had more expertise on hand for knowing how to deal with publishers. Like law and sausages, the publishing industry does not bear close examination, and yes, if an author does not know what to expect, it's easy to get a book screwed up. For that matter, even when you *do* know what to expect, books still get screwed up, though that happens more in fiction publishing (go look in rec.arts.sf.composition for some horror stories written by experienced multi-book authors). On the gripping hand, I've tech edited three or four other Python books, and several of them were clearly written by people who didn't know Python and didn't want to learn enough to write a book about it. And they ignored my edits. (This seems like another opportunity to thank our tech editor, David Goodger.) So your larger point about careless authors is essentially correct. -- Aahz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "as long as we like the same operating system, things are cool." --piranha -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
