Supplement Disaster

I was given my first opportunity to project manage a supplement for our math for elementary teachers textbook. For an assistant, project managing is the next step up to getting promoted to an associate editor.

We chose to contact the author team that worked on the highest revenue pulling activities book from our book list. We figured the material from that ancillary could be re-purposed.

The authors agreed to our terms and the payment we offered on the initial teleconference we had with the female author, who was married to the other male author.

Weeks later I was looking forward to my vacation to Costa Rica. I was going to leave early on Friday, when I received a telephone call.

“We are not going to do this. What does this mean in the contract that we have to do this by a year? It’s going to take much longer,” the husband and author, who over the phone sounded like a grumpy, miserly old man, maybe like Andy Rooney.

“But we told you that the main textbook was to be published in a year and you all agreed to write this.”

Complain, complain, complain. “No, we won’t do this. It’s off.”

And what did they want, of course, like most of the need-to-be-coddled type authors, the group wanted more money and more time.

I called up my boss in a panic, showing my inexperience (forgetting that in publishing although we have due dates, rarely are they strictly adhered to). "Don't worry about it," he said, "we’ll figure it out when you get back from vacation."