file formats

TRX
July 18, 2012
15:
@13:
> But her editor insisted on edits in MS Word.

The first book I sold, the publisher insisted that I send it to them printed on paper. They then paid someone to key it all back in to their compositor by hand. I guess I should have been grateful they didn't require I write it on parchment with a quill pen. For extra points, I had to airfreight the manuscript to their London group, which cost about US$100.

By the time I sold the second book, the publisher (a different one) would accept a computer file. And not only that, they were savvy enough that they'd take it online instead of mailed on a diskette! Fortunately I had a Compuserve account so I could talk to them, those being the days of the big time-share systems. Like AOLers later, they thought CIS was "online." They insisted I send it to them all preformatted with WordPerfect, and were astonished and confused when I told them I didn't own a copy, nor was I willing to go out and pay several hundred dollars for one. After several days of negotiation, they agreed to take the ordinary 80-column ASCII files my text editor put out.

For all I know, they printed it out and hired someone to key it all in to WordPerfect...

I ran into something similar selling to a couple of magazines, including PC Tech Journal, which had an absolute policy of only accepting submissions in the current WordPerfect format, no exceptions. I eventually sold most of that stuff to Computer Shopper (not the same one Charlie wrote for) during the Stan Veit era. Computer Shopper's editors were apparently computer geeks instead of journalism grads, and they'd probably have cheerfully accepted files on hard- sector floppies in EBCDIC in some arcane word processor format...

Word, though... blech!