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General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Why Dragonlance's Margaret Weis Left TSR: A Slaying the Dragon Excerpt
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<blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 8703913" data-attributes="member: 28003"><p>Great point.</p><p></p><p>Most of the fiction manuscripts we got at TSR were paper copies up until the early 90s, at which point we required both printed manuscripts and discs, from those who could provide them. Editing notes were indeed sent back to writers as handwritten notes on the 400-page physical manuscripts, with some general notes typed and printed on a dot matrix printer unless it was important enough to use the one laser printer in our area of the building. Lots of manuscripts and editing notes and page proofs heading around the country via the post, or with Ed Greenwood, international post to Canada. Occasionally editors did phone reviews, once the authors got the edited manuscripts in hand, but most of the communication was written and sent via snail mail. (This was the state of publishing into the 2000s.)</p><p></p><p>Some authors worked on computers in the late 80s, but even then, with TSR you had to type the formatting codes into the manuscript (<bi> for begin italics, </ei> for end italics, and so on), and there were file formats TSR could not translate into the line editor program we were using circa 1989 for final editing (yes, whole 100,000-word books edited one line at a time). It was easier and cheaper for TSR to have a typist retype an entire 400-page printed manuscript onto a disc in a format we could use than pay to translate, say, a TRS-80 file. And TSR was actually years ahead of many of the publishers in New York, when it came to computer use. </p><p></p><p>(Even then, not without screw-ups. The TSR mainframe was, I think, a VAX, but at one point in late 88 or early 89, upper management all got brand new Apple II-somethings, which could not produce files that could be used anywhere else in the building. I ended up writing a file translation program we used around the office for a bit. I am not a computer guy and was not on any tech team; that says a lot about how seat-of-the-pants it all was.)</p><p></p><p>So, yes, all this added weeks to every book schedule with the writers and the publisher, sometimes months if the project was complicated enough.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="JLowder, post: 8703913, member: 28003"] Great point. Most of the fiction manuscripts we got at TSR were paper copies up until the early 90s, at which point we required both printed manuscripts and discs, from those who could provide them. Editing notes were indeed sent back to writers as handwritten notes on the 400-page physical manuscripts, with some general notes typed and printed on a dot matrix printer unless it was important enough to use the one laser printer in our area of the building. Lots of manuscripts and editing notes and page proofs heading around the country via the post, or with Ed Greenwood, international post to Canada. Occasionally editors did phone reviews, once the authors got the edited manuscripts in hand, but most of the communication was written and sent via snail mail. (This was the state of publishing into the 2000s.) Some authors worked on computers in the late 80s, but even then, with TSR you had to type the formatting codes into the manuscript (<bi> for begin italics, </ei> for end italics, and so on), and there were file formats TSR could not translate into the line editor program we were using circa 1989 for final editing (yes, whole 100,000-word books edited one line at a time). It was easier and cheaper for TSR to have a typist retype an entire 400-page printed manuscript onto a disc in a format we could use than pay to translate, say, a TRS-80 file. And TSR was actually years ahead of many of the publishers in New York, when it came to computer use. (Even then, not without screw-ups. The TSR mainframe was, I think, a VAX, but at one point in late 88 or early 89, upper management all got brand new Apple II-somethings, which could not produce files that could be used anywhere else in the building. I ended up writing a file translation program we used around the office for a bit. I am not a computer guy and was not on any tech team; that says a lot about how seat-of-the-pants it all was.) So, yes, all this added weeks to every book schedule with the writers and the publisher, sometimes months if the project was complicated enough. [/QUOTE]
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