RE: What does $3 a page mean to you?

["Van Laan, Krista" <KVanlaan -at- verisign -dot- com>]

>From Jim Jones:

> From what I could read from some of the facts presented in this thread,
> and I'm not an attorney, Bonnie might have a legal point. I remember
> reading here that 'page' is usually considered a 'manuscript' page in
> the industry, and if this really is true, then this case, if viewed
> through a legal lens, might look like the company tried to change the
> meaning of 'page' to their own special meaning of 'book page' with their
> internal memo.
>

Is there even such a thing as a 'manuscript page' in the world of 
online writing and editing?

When my writing partner and I were working on our book, we were given specs
for how to space our lines and what size font to produce, but the page count
differed between her version of Word and my version -- or maybe it
was a difference between XP and whatever OS she was using. Then we sent the
manuscript to the publisher's editors, who notified me that the manuscript
was
about 1.5 times as long as it should be and they were cutting all of that
out. I was stunned, since I had very carefully counted "pages" and made sure
that I gave them about a 10% overage so they'd have something, but not a
lot, to cut. It 
turned out that the editors were using Macs and when they opened my Word
files,
it turned into *many* more pages than I had on my machine. After I insisted
that
they resolve this problem, one of the editors commented that this must have
been what had happened with their previous author, whose work, when they 
finished cutting all the excess, had come up really short of the book 
page requirements. For some reason, no one had noticed this problem until 
I pointed it out and made them put the content back.

I don't know why publishers don't use word counts, especially since they
like
to use Word. In my experience, they created a
ridiculously complex method for us to count our pages, all in an effort to
make it as
much like an old typewriter as they could -- asking for a manuscript in
courier,
double-spaced, not taking advantage of word counts, etc.

 Krista

============================================== 
Krista Van Laan
Director of Technical Communications, Security Services 
VeriSign, Inc.  http://www.verisign.com 
487 E. Middlefield Road    Mountain View, CA 94043     
tel: (650) 426-5158     fax: (650) 426-5195 



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