Publishers v. Published, round 1

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out the chasm that exists between the world views of authors and publishers. Most of my job is to build bridges between their visions and ours.



Rarely do the bridges hold up.

I am leaving soon to begin life as a graduate student in art history. What I know from working at the Press is that I will not be learning about A) design or B) image quality. I was telling a fellow student about how wonderful the Helvetica documentary was. She looked at me quizzically.

"It's a font," I said.

"Like a French fountain?"

?

"No, no..."

After seeing so many cover mock-ups from art historians featuring comic sans and tahoma, I should have been mentally prepared for such a conversation. I have spent hours of my life explaining DPI, dot patterns, and printing processes. I have pored through thousands of images, good and bad. I have written and rewritten our author guidelines, adding boldface where necessary. Still, I can't get over exactly how wide that chasm is.

In a different life, I may have talked people down from ledges high above cities. In this life, I am convincing them that navigating a rickety bridge is just what they need to experience book publishing nirvana. When you get there, you'll see that everything makes sense. But you still might want to leave the cover designs to the nice lads and ladies who reside on that side. You've got nothing to lose except a curmudgeonly, fist-shaking future.

P.S. Be nice to us or we will publish your book in Webdings.