Friday, September 16, 2005

Disaster averted

The geniuses at UPS (a wretched company, one I have had no end of problems with) lost the copyedited manuscript of The Amber Wizard when I sent it back to HarperCollins. They had no record of it being scanned into their system even though I confirmed it had been picked up from the shipping center. I was freaking out until it finally showed up in New York a day late. Somehow it made it all the way without ever being scanned.

I had no idea what we would do if it remained lost. I'm thankful I'll never have to figure that out.

6 comments:

David Forbes said...
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Anonymous said...
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David Forbes said...
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Simon Haynes said...

My editor, copy-editor and I use an electronic manuscript with 'track changes' enabled. Only once did I have to use a marked-up printed manuscript, and I took the thing down there and hand-delivered it. (Not an option in your case, obviously, but I do sympathise.)
Incidentally, you might want to switch on the anti-spam feature so you don't get garbage like the comment above.

David Forbes said...

Hi Simon,

I e-mailed the copyeditor a few times and he told me that HarperCollins does not ever use electronic copyediting, that it's always a hardcopy. Go figure. I would have thought the track-changes feature would be perfect for that, but I guess they have their reasons.

I will have to find the spam filter. I haven't really paid much attention lately.

And congrats on your launch party! It looked like it was a huge success.