The Evil Author of Doom and Destruction

[RayvenQ]

I've found that the thicker issues of Classic & Sports Car work better at smacking someone upside the head. They're cheaper, and they can be rolled up

Yeah, but with my book, they go down, and stay down (trust me i know, a friend of mine smacked me round the head with it once)

[Ben_Who]

Let me translate some of what he said from Authorese to English:

The Crimes of Evil Author (EA)

Time time time
His manuscript was two months late, even though he was repeatedly rung and emailed to remind him to hand it in. He kept saying it was finished but he was tweaking it.

Subtitle: "The book is a long damn way from done, but I'm sitting at home writing as frantically as I possibly can, hoping to keep a lid on the chaos I've created long enough to get you to honor the contract I signed..."

Worth a thousand words...
He was contracted to provide 40 colour pictures. He was three months late giving us any. They were too small. Those of you with IT skills will know that to print a picture in a book, it has to be high resolution, 300-600dpi, usually around 1MB in size. He had been told this many times. What did he send us? 20 pictures, none larger than 13KB. We told him to send us usable ones. He sent us 15 500KB pictures. We need more, still 25 short. He then sends us 40 400KB BLACK AND WHITE PICTURES. I give up. His book now no longer has a colour section.

Subtitle: "I shouldn't be trusted with any photographic device more complicated than a Polaroid One-Step and should never have agreed to provide photos in the first place. I also am incapable of following simple instructions. Still, I plan to blame this on you anyway."

Girl
That's what he called me on the phone several times until I made a point of telling him I didn't like it. I am 25. I don't wear my hair in pigtails anymore.

Subtitle: "I am six hundred years old and was hot stuff before electricity."

Proof protocol
From what I could gather from his scribbles, he was mostly putting grammatical mistakes back in.

Subtitle: "I am such an expert in my chosen field that I see no need to follow simple rules of grammar and spelling, because my expertise in my field, which is not grammar and spelling, is so huge that it'll have an osmotic effect."

Cover crap
He doesn't like the cover. He wants to use a different picture. The only copy he has is 40KB in size. Not usable. Turns out he doesn't have the rights anyway, so we would get sued or have to buy the rights for £1400 to use it. No deal. He wants a picture of himself on the back cover. No. He is ugly, and even attractive authors only get their picture on the inside right flap. He sulks.

Subtitle: "Gee, this always gets me what I want. Why is it not working?"

Phone etiquette
He proceeded to rant at her (as I presume he had intended to rant at me) and told her that she was working for a terrible company. She ended up sniffling for a good half an hour after that.

Subtitle: "I have no friends and my family hates me. My only contact with my ex-wife and kids is through child support. I think I might have grandchildren but no one will tell me. I have a small pet rock that I keep as a friend. His name is George. George is with me always so I don't have to die alone."

Acknowledge This!
He sends an email informing me that he wants to remove 'I would like to thank BookBint and 'Publishing House' for their help etc' from his acknowledgements section. Fine.

Subtitle: "I'm also an ungrateful thug."

[QUOTE=BookBint;838004]Pissing off everyone
He starts ringing up the finance department badgering them about when he will get royalties, even though the book is not yet published, and also harrasses the sales and marketing people about god knows what. They now refuse to pick up the phone when his number comes up on the display.

Too important to index
His contract states he has to provide an index, or accept that we take money from his advance to pay to have one compiled for him. He refused to do one. Fine, we pay a freelancer, and the finance department take the cost out of his final advance payment. When he gets the cheque he rings up demanding why it's less than it should be? I tell him. He rages that we've stolen from him. Oh for god's sake...

Subtitle: "I have no idea how to read a contract. Honestly, if I'm not going to follow simple instructions, why in the world would you think I'd read a contract? That's, like, the opposite of simple instructions."

Bite my schedule
Because the manuscript was two months late and the pictures were three months late, we had to move the book's publication date back 2 months. This itself was impressive, and meant we had to work our arses off to do 3 months of work in that time. When he realises it won't be out for Christmas he has a massive fit and writes angry letters to the CEO, Head of Publishing, Head of Finance and Head of Marketing, saying they are killing his baby. Only the CEO bothers to reply with a terse two-sentence letter back basically saying that since he was so late with the book we are not even contractually obliged to print it at all.

Subtitle: "I never want to publish another book again and want to completely poison the well against the possibility that I might. In fact, I want to sabotage THIS book because I'm terrified that someone might actually see it. Please don't buy this book, I beg you. I figure if I'm going to die alone, I might as well be penniless as well. ... Wait, what do you mean, if it doesn't sell I have to pay back the advance?"

It's weird where you find these movie-star egos. I'm visualizing some dried-up old professor from some lichen-encrusted college, with part of his breakfast on his shirt, trying to throw his ego around.

Flogging a book takes almost as much work as writing it, if not more. I dread to think what's going to happen when this...person...is expected to do something proactive to help sales.

[turing]

There was actually more than one Boer War. Basically, it was an uprising of Dutch settlers in English colonies in South Africa because the English wanted to outlaw slavery. The Boers won the first one, but had to go back under British rule when they started having problems with the Zulus. The second one was another uprising, one that was far nastier and bloody, and longer. The Brits won again.

If I may correct this slightly: In the 1830s and 1840s many Dutch settlers ("Boers") moved out of the British-controlled Cape Colony; one of the reasons for this was the abolition of slavery (throughout the British empire) in 1834. The Boers set up two republics - the Transvaal and the Orange Free State - in the interior.

In 1878 the Transvaal, weakened by conflict with the Zulus, was taken over by the British. In 1879 the British defeated the Zulus. In the following year, the Transvaal Boers took up arms and, massively outnumbering the British troops, kicked them out, returning to self-government in 1881. This was the "First Boer War".

Five years later, a massive gold reef was discovered in the Transvaal. The gold rush that followed brought a huge influx of miners, many of them British subjects, to the new city of Johannesburg. The Transvaal government, fearing the loss of Boer control of the government, refused to allow voting rights to these "Uitlanders" (i.e. foreigners). The Uitlanders had some legitimate complaints about their treatment, but the British government also used it as a pretext for war, issuing in 1899 an ultimatum to the Transvaal government. The Boers launched pre-emptive attacks on the British colonies, starting the "Second Boer War", which is often just called the Boer War.

The British won this time, but only after the Boers turned to guerilla warfare, and the British resorted to some pretty brutal treatment of the Boer civilian population to force them to surrender.

[Sapphire Silk]

I grossly over simplified it. Sorry

[2gigch1]

If I may correct this slightly: In the 1830s and 1840s many Dutch settlers ("Boers") moved out of the British-controlled Cape Colony; one of the reasons for this was the abolition of slavery (throughout the British empire) in 1834. The Boers set up two republics - the Transvaal and the Orange Free State - in the interior.

In 1878 the Transvaal, weakened by conflict with the Zulus, was taken over by the British. In 1879 the British defeated the Zulus. In the following year, the Transvaal Boers took up arms and, massively outnumbering the British troops, kicked them out, returning to self-government in 1881. This was the "First Boer War".

Five years later, a massive gold reef was discovered in the Transvaal. The gold rush that followed brought a huge influx of miners, many of them British subjects, to the new city of Johannesburg. The Transvaal government, fearing the loss of Boer control of the government, refused to allow voting rights to these "Uitlanders" (i.e. foreigners). The Uitlanders had some legitimate complaints about their treatment, but the British government also used it as a pretext for war, issuing in 1899 an ultimatum to the Transvaal government. The Boers launched pre-emptive attacks on the British colonies, starting the "Second Boer War", which is often just called the Boer War.

The British won this time, but only after the Boers turned to guerilla warfare, and the British resorted to some pretty brutal treatment of the Boer civilian population to force them to surrender.

What an interesting story! Do you think someone might write a book about it? With pictures too?