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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
For the record, Pages can save files in DOCX format, for compatibility with Word.
(Not that I expect your clueless customer wannabe to know that.)
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Oh, hell, yes, I know this and you should have heard him
howl when I said he would need to do that. I even finally offered to do the conversion to docx, ourselves (of course, we have some Macs and Pages, etc. in the office), if he'd put the poems into even just TEN lousy files (one .pages file with ten poems) each. Unbelievable. I just don't want to convert 100 files, first, and then concatenate them (to get the word count and paragraph count, hard returns, soft returns [we're talkin' poetry here, ya know?]) just for the privilege of quoting him. I mean, what happens when he doesn't accept the quote, to those 10 hours of work? I'll tell ya what happens, I eat them.
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I'd just tell him you take a customer's completed manuscript and transform it into an eBook. Making it a completed manuscript (in Word format, thankyouverymuch) is his chore, and he should contact you again when he's done it. Doing what he needs next is not a service you offer.
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It's for print layout
and ebooks, but the reality is the same. I told him to go ask 5 other formatting and design houses and see what
they'd say about receiving what are effectively 100 manuscripts, to be made into two books, and receiving them in a format that's unusable for print layout (in any real print layout/design program, mind you, not just InDesign). It's
boggling. I mean, it's too much work for him to do, but not for us to do.
That's the thing that just keeps running around the inside of my (very tired and irritable) skull.
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(I don't think I want to know about his poems. I try to avoid "gouge out eyeballs with a spoon after reading" material.)
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Dennis
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I haven't seen them yet, but one of the real downsides to Indy publishing and playing a part therein is seeing this very sort of thing. Indy poems and OMG, Indy children's books. Both reach new levels of Offal. You have not lived, my brother, until you read the sort of...rhyming and cadence (for lack of better words) that I see in children's would-be books. It's bloody painful.
And that's a rusty spoon, my friend, not just any clean old spoon, for the eyeball-gouging implement.
Hitch