Word as a book-writing tool (was Re: EndNote)

From: Ronald Florence (ron_at_18james.com)
Date: 01/01/05 

Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 08:49:55 -0500

John,

The passion of your defense of Word is impressive, but your description
of the workflow of writing a book suggests to me that you're talking
about long corporate/NGO/government reports or self-published books --
both of which may have the printed size and format of a book, but are
not what I and other book-authors mean by the term "book." The missing
ingredient in your description is the publisher. Authors write books;
publishers handle the copy-editing, design, production, printing,
marketing, sales, distribution, publicity, and promotion. Word might be
a fine tool for long corporate reports, and it might even be an
acceptable tool for a self-published book or for specialized publishers
that accept camera-ready copy, if the author does not mind Word's
relatively crude output (compared to a real typesetting program like
LaTeX). As a tool for authors to write books for trade publishers
(Random House, Viking, HarperCollins, etc.) or for university presses
which market to a general audience (Oxford, Yale, Wisconsin, etc.), Word
sucks! I can honestly say that I do not know a single professional
author who writes trade books and does not detest Word.

Why do we detest it? Because an author writing for a trade or
university press is not trying to produce a finished book. He or she is
writing a manuscript. The publisher will strip out any formatting when
the manuscript is input into their editing and design software. Indeed,
most publisher submission guidelines actually tell an author to not
gussy up the headings, subheadings, chapter titles, or other details --
since it will all be stripped out. So, what the author wants is a tool
that will transparently and easily allow the combination of
chapter-files into a complete manuscript; that will produce a complete
table of contents that adjusts itself to inserted chapters and changes;
that for non-fiction will produce properly punctuated endnotes or
footnotes; and most importantly, that will not "hassle" the author who
is trying to focus on content, not on addressing the quirks of the
program. Read our long exchange in this newsgroup on getting Word to
accept chapter files as links and the inability of Word to do something
as simple as adding the endnotes section into the table of contents and
you'll understand why book authors hate Word.

Why do we use it? I resisted for a long time, writing book manuscripts
for Random House, HarperCollins, St. Martins, and other trade presses in
troff, LaTeX (using emacs/auctex), and finally in LyX, which is an
elegant front-end to LaTeX. The manuscripts were beautiful -- if you've
never compared LaTeX output to Word output, you may not recognize how
ugly Word output is -- but as I've explained above, trade and university
publishers are not interested in beautifully typeset output. The house
software that trade presses use for editing, design, and production
in-house increasingly accepts only PC word-processing formats as input.
  This is, no doubt, a consequence of the Microsoft/PC monopoly of
corporate computing. The big trade publishers are now all parts of
large conglomerates, and the corporations have consolidated IT until it
reaches down to editorial and design departments.

I'd be delighted to read about the "techniques" you use to write what
you call books and why you think Word is the "best" tool for writing
them. I, and I suspect most other professional authors I know, would be
particularly interested in hearing how to make Word behave as a
functional tool for the workflow of an author preparing a manuscript for
a trade or university publisher -- which seems to be a very different
process from the workflow of your writing. 

-- 
Ronald

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