Cookbook Proofs Arrive
In Your Face, Food Nazis
The proofs for the cookbook arrived yesterday, and generally, they look great. The publisher chose to follow a couple of weird typesetting conventions, but they're not a big deal.
My only concern is the pizza recipe. I want to replace it, but they'll charge me money to do that. As far as I'm concerned, that's about like returning to publish-on-demand. I'm not shelling out $4500 in order to get some low-level tech to spend three minutes cutting and pasting in Adobe.
I suspect that the publisher outsources this stuff, because they don't seem to understand how easy it is to change a manuscript. It's just a PDF file. You can switch out a chapter as quickly as sending an email. Publishers are generally pretty backward when it comes to technology. It's surprising. If they sent me the PDF, I could do it myself and have it back to them in a few minutes. Maybe an outside contractor is robbing them, pretending it's a big deal, just to get more money.
You want proof that publishers aren't up to speed on technology? My book's proofs arrived in the form of a printed-out PDF file. They paid Fedex to bring it to me. They could have emailed it to me, free of charge, and I could have printed it out here.
Working with publishers is like having sex through a keyhole. Everything is done by email, and you never know how long it will take to get a response. It's a very crude process. There is a lot of confusion, and emails disappear, and in the end, you have to be satisfied with an extremely limited amount of control.
The net result of all this is that books end up with problems that should have been easy to fix. This is not the end of the world, but it's still annoying.
I'm wondering if I should eventually go back to self-publishing. It's a huge step down in prestige, and there are marketing problems associated with it. Bookstores and people in the press don't take you seriously. On the other hand, with a POD, you can get the book exactly the way you want it. And making changes is slow, but easier than changing a book put out by a conventional publisher. I thought a conventional publisher would provide me with a big marketing machine to help me get noticed, but it turns out that isn't true. I have to do all that stuff myself. So the advantages are limited.
It's also surprisingly hard to get help with editing. Publishers give their editors so much work, they can't really do much to help authors with things like structure. My editor is great, but he can't sit around poring over my book for a week, making detailed suggestions about the way it's organized. He is as helpful as time constraints allow him to be, but in the end, the big changes are in my hands. They say Max Perkins virtually rewrote the books he worked on. Those days are over.
If bookstores and media people ever begin taking POD books seriously, publishers are going to have a big problem. It will be like Wal-Mart v. mom and pop. When Wal-Mart moves in, mom and pop can only survive by ratcheting up service and doing things Wal-Mart can't do. Right now, the conventional-publisher edge is that POD books have a bad reputation and are hard to push. That won't be true much longer. When that edge disappears, publishers are going to change. Or they may just vanish. Anyway, I'll be keeping an eye on changes in the industry.
I'm starting to wish I could do radio instead of writing. I'll always write, but there are problems associated with it. You never know how much you'll get paid. It's easy to get yourself sued. And your words have a permanence that words spoken on the air lack. It's harder for people to take what you've said in the past and use it against you. It's more work. And it seems like no one ever gets sued successfully. They just get fired and end up working somewhere else.
Speaking of radio or the next-best thing, I'll be doing my Nowlive show today. I never fixed my technical problem completely, but I have things running reasonably well. I've managed to regain the ability to edit sound files. People are telling me my problem was caused by a feud between Adobe and Microsoft. Whatever. My answer is to quit using Media Player. I never needed it anyway. There are a million other programs that do the same thing. If Microsoft wants people to use their stupid program, they can damn well publish a software update and fix it. I checked their website, and as is nearly always the case with Microsoft, they offered nothing beyond moron answers. "Reboot your computer and see if this fixes the problem." "Make sure your files are associated with Media Player." Okay, retards, thanks. I'll pass. I know this is Bill's way of trying to force people to pay for Indian tech support. Forget it.
The whole Microsoft business model seems to be based on publishing bad software with useless help files and no documentation whatsoever, and then charging people to tell them how to fix it. They still charge, don't they? I'd rather save the money and use it to buy a Mac. I hope Microsoft goes out of business and all its employees end up on bread lines. It might stimulate other assholes in the tech sector to try to be a little more responsible and compassionate. I doubt that will happen, however, given the controlling, smug, heartless nature of tech nerds. It's really sad that this warped segment of society has gained so much power over the rest of us. We used to give them wedgies and take their lunch money, and then they went on to become harmless underpaid math professors. Now they're turning into all-powerful Morlocks who run our lives. And they have no ethics and no empathy.
Viva Vista. That's all I can say. That product is turning out to be a red-hot brimstone enema for the Microsoft Corporation, and conclusive proof that they are very bad at what they do. I hope it helps their competitors bring us better stuff.
To get back to the book, I'm very excited this time. It was nice when the proofs for the other books arrived, but this time I nearly shook as I proofread. There are some chapters that I could never hope to improve on. Some chapters are weaker, but when people see the best chapters, the world will finally find out what I am capable of doing. Maybe it will sell. Maybe it won't. Either way, I'll get the satisfaction of putting some of my very best work in front of the public.
I'm sure the parasites at Publishers Weekly will pan it, because frankly, they are too stupid to understand my writing and too biased to tell the truth about it. I'm sure I'll get my share of unfair and dishonest reviews. But I got to say what I wanted to say. Finally. They can't do anything about that.
