We lost a few, but over a dozen new LJs, feeds, and comms have been added to The White List. Enjoy!

Making books? That's the easy part.

Finding authors? Way more difficult.

We're in the process of creating work-for-hire agreements for new supplements authors. We've never done work-for-hire contracts before, but because we're engaging some new writers for supplements, we'd like to have the agreement with them in writing.

Does anyone know of a good source for Canadian boilerplate writer-for-hire agreements? We know we need to set the fees, the payment schedule, establish idemnity, standard of work, and absolve ourselves of any requirement to publish sub-standard work, we want to ensure that we own all rights to the writing, and the the writer does not come in for royalties (lest anyone think we're horrible grasping creatures, I'm pretty sure that this is standard for writer-for-hire agreements). Have we forgotten anything?

Does anyone else have any experiences creating this sort of agreement that they'd like to share?

Thanks!

Hello all,

I'm hoping that someone more experienced than I has worked in an InCopy/InDesign environment. As I've mentioned before, I think, I work for a small educational publisher, and we're trying to develop a flexible workflow for editing, formatting, and indexing our books. Right now, the InDesign/InCopy indexing feature is kinda perplexing me.

It seems that one can only tag terms for an index in InDesign. So an editor, working in InCopy can't tag terms for the index. Furthermore, the tagging only works when the InDesign files aren't linked, but the editors can't work in InCopy unless the files are linked.

Ideally, I'd like for my formatter and indexer to be able to work on the files at the same time, in InDesign and InCopy, respectively ... is this possible, at all, or does the software not permit it? And if the software doesn't permit it, how do y'all handle the need to create an index and to edit? (I know that traditionally speaking one doesn't start the index until the pagination is set; my boss has a bee in his bonnet about everyone doing everything at the same time, and, given our really short production schedules, it'd be nice to tag all the index terms in the editorial stages.)

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Dear Office Manager cum Vice-President,

Did it occur to you that having a new server installed just as we were going into final production throes on our biggest project (the one you and your husband, PublisherDude, have been working to bring to press these past three-or-more years), when PublisherDude and I were away on business might have introduced some glitches in the production process?

Also?

You cannot ask people to work over the weekend in the holiday season on Friday of that weekend.

Also?

I know you're the vice president, but you're not an editor. Language has changed since you went to school, commas are no longer profligately sprinkled around every modifier, compound nouns are not invariably hyphenated, and we don't capitalize nearly as frequently. Moreover, final production stages are not when we change sentences around because we think it would sound better our way. If you would keep your hands and your pen off the books, things would go much more quickly and we wouldn't have to consider working this weekend.

Why don't you do the books-as-in-accounting, and the chatting up of authors, and let me and the editorial staff do the editing and production. I bet things'll work a lot better that way.

Sincerely,
Your Managing Editor

I confess I've let this poor community languish: things are just such a mess that I don't quite know where to start.

So I'll start with the current query.

We have a book with OMG so many photographs of students doing athletic stuff. Most of these were taken on school property, and we're getting signed release forms from the kids and their parents (this should have been done when the photos were taken, before I started at this company, and we shouldn't be rushing around putting the paperwork in place now when we're overdue to go to press, but that's another story.) Most of the schools, which are partner schools, have signed releases, so it's a matter of photocopying the schools' paperwork.

We have several other photos that were taken at off-site sports events, in public venues. I remember hearing somewhere that it's okay to print photos of people in public places and at public gatherings ... can anyone verify this for me? Otherwise I'm going to have to track down lot of anonymous people.

Any pointers to where I can read up on the legalities would be appreciated.

(This is in Canada, BTW.)

Hi!

Thanks for stopping by. This is the official welcome-and-introduction page and thread. I'll forward-date it so that it stays at the top of things for a while.

I've set up this community because I'm the newly appointed managing editor for a small textbook publisher, charged with setting up an editorial department where there's never been one before. The company is family-owned, and my boss is the owner and publisher. My job is to establish an editorial process for future books, and hire enough editors to keep most of the work in-house.

I'd really like this to be a community where we mostly, but not exclusively, discuss stuff specific to managing groups of editors and editorial processes. I have a couple of requests for getting things rolling—once they're rolling merrily along, we can see what moss they gather. Or don't:

Please if you're new and you want to become an editor or a managing editor or whatever, don't ask. I'll start a "how I got my job" thread for folks, and put it in the memories, and those of us who have foundour way to managerial positions can tell our stories there. When I have a moment, after this durned book gets out of my hair, I'll collect some of the other "how I got my job" posts I've seen around LJ and the blogosphere. I'm sympathetic to people just starting out, but you have no idea how often I get asked the question.

Please refrain from serial-comma/non-serial-comma flame wars. The serial comma, like politics and religion, is often an ideilogical position for editors, who are sometimes more vehement than civil in defending their preferences.

Likewise, feel free to discuss style choices, but be aware that different industries and different media have different conventions, and treat your fellow managing eds with courtesy. We all have enough problems.

If you feel the need to diss your authors, minions department members, trained apesformatters, or publisher, please protect yourself and lock the post.

Please refrain from snarking about members' tyops and fingerslips. We're typing with our pants down here. We don't need to be perfect.

So who are you and what do you do? Any authors pulled crazy-ass stunts lately?