I work at a publishing house. I’m basically a
professional buffer for editorial and production – I work with our authors as clients directly
and catch their mistakes and questions before they bother people higher up the
food chain.
This particular author had been proving a nuisance from
the get-go, demanding things we don’t usually do and acting self-important the
whole time, so I should have figured this would happen. He submitted for
inclusion in their book images of paragraphs of text.
Me: Can you supply me captions for your images?
Client: I don’t
need captions. These aren’t normal images.
Me: We require
captions for all figures.
Client: Those
images aren’t figures. They should be treated a block quotes. They need to go
exactly where I put them with no other text surrounding.
Me: I’m afraid we
can’t do that. If the images get bumped to overleaf pages for design reasons,
there needs to be some way of identifying them.
This guy then throws a fit, ending with…
Client: …if necessary, I will rewrite the text around
the images after the pages have been designed so the the images will sit
properly within the text.
This is practically impossible to do from a financial
standpoint. Rewriting after type-setting and composition is HILARIOUSLY
expensive and extremely time consuming.
Me: I’m afraid we
can’t do that. It’s not practical from a financial standpoint, and it would
delay publication by at least a season.
Client: I want to
talk to your production supervisor.
I pass him to my production supervisor. They
have a phone conversation that lasts two minutes, during which time he tells my client politely) exactly what I told them. The conversation ends with the client calling my supervisor “incompetent.”
I get this e-mail the next morning.
Client: Dear
Underling: I had a very dissatisfactory conversation with your Supervisor yesterday,
in which he was very rude and dismissive of me. As I see it now, we have three
options: 1) Supervisor can do his job and accommodate the rewriting process, 2)
I will take care of design myself (NB: LOL this person couldn’t figure
out how to use Dropbox), or 3) I will have no choice but
to break our contract.
Lucretia came to every single one of Magnus’s games and at first it was just for chronicling purposes but by the Big Game she was up in the stands screaming her head off so much that her Journals fell off her lap
