Yes. It's funny you mention that--there's this thread that's a complete bête noire of mine. (On a certain other forum that shan't be named). It's the "why I prefer using dots (ellipses, cough) to a long-dash (emdash, hack)." I can't take it. It drives me positively bats**t. That's not quite the name of the thead, but...it's the essence. I'm SPEECHLESS about that one, pun
fully intended.
My theory is,
if you don't know the difference, between what an ellipsis is to indicate (for dialogue, I mean, folks) and what an emdash indicates, you OUGHT NOT BE AUTHORING BOOKS. (n.b.: no, this does not necessarily apply to non-native English speakers, of COURSE.)
To be completely honest and fair, I'd say that 90+% of our clients
are NOT like that. They invest fairly heavily in covers, formatting (thank you, Odin, for our
meager daily bread) and if they can't afford a traditional edit, they a) buy Brown on Self-Editing, b) do a THOROUGH self-edit, and then c) usually critique-group crowdsource at least a proofread, if not a content edit.
We are lucky, in that we have a LOT of pros, as well. Most tend to be backlisters, but we've got some real go-getters in the "new to it" group, also. Those folks who've slaved to get 3-5-6 books up there, worked it, promoted them, and are now doing pretty great. Generally, they're all rewarded, financially, for those efforts.
I don't know (chicken-egg) if it's just that better writers tend to "stick," or if the power of three makes their efforts more noticeable, thus more buyable, thus, etc., but...it's true that we have very few clients with 3+ books who aren't at least making EXCELLENT grocery money, if not mortgage payments, etc. Once they get to 5-6 books, they are nearly ready to quit the ubiquitous day job. The one-bookers, though...man,
they struggle. No reflection, necessarily, on their quality of writing, it's just hard, hard, hard to find an audience with one book. People sure love the assurance of knowing what they're going to get, either with a proven author or a proven set of characters (series).
If it were me...I think, if I could face it, I'd finish at least TWO books, so that you would have at least both up. I think that would make it a lot easier to be found, to get sales, etc. OTOH, man...doing ONE book is a major job. Two? And having the discipline to wait, to have both ready? Oish.
I'm actually pretty fond of
most of our clients. It's just...some of those in the 1-2%, like this instance, that make me nuts. (And, remember, I LIKE this client, I do!). I respect and understand that, if everybody were tecchie, I'd have no biz. No dough. No work. That would sucketh, therefore, yes, I LOVE our not-tecchie clients. But things like this, with Word? Yeah, verily...something that went THAT wrong, that BADLY, for NO reason? Yup, turns me into a total raving psycho. As you all just witnessed.
P.S.: About that file:
Spoiler:
In case anyone is interested, I made a Word file out of the final ePUB we did for that client, and sent it to him. He'd "made" his Word file by copy-pasting out of either Kindle for PC or ADE, I don't know which, and of course, lost all the formatting (Styles, CSS, headings, yadda) that were there. I wrote him and the publisher a long, long email, and explained why it was better, faster, etc., to redo the whole thing from this NEW Word file, than to try to keep working on the existing one. With this new file, they could at least modify the styles, to LOOK as they wished, and have everything done, in, say, 30 minutes, including building a properly-working TOC that would auto-update the field codes. Not the index, but, everything else could be finito in 30 mins. Say, an hour if you're not that experienced.
I explained HOW to build the index properly; I told them that while it's tedious, it's not hard. The issue is, the curation expertise and the technical expertise reside in two different people who can't actually work together in any viable way. That realistically eliminates the "use the existing table of manually-typed indices as a list to build a concordance from which you'd auto-mark index entries" as a realistic option.
I calculated roughly...11,000 unwanted auto-marked indices would be created from the 1500+ listed items (using the concordance-auto-mark/index method). All of those would have to be removed, again, manually, and again, by someone who would know which needed to be removed. That seems absurd. It's faster to mark 1500 index items, by hand--remember, there's a curated list of the text/phrases, that you could use to search--than it would be to create a file, in Word/PDF, give it to the Curator/Indexer, have her mark all the ones she wants REMOVED, and then have some poor slob--in other words, ME--have to go through in code-view and take OUT the 8.5-11K that ought not be listed--one by one, mind you. It's utterly daft to go about it that way, IMHO.
Now, having said all that, I fully expect that what's going to happen is that the author will ABANDON the index. That's my take on it.
Hitch