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.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
