Re: What's the definition of a published author

Subject: Re: What's the definition of a published author
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 15:59:15 -0800


Quoting Wade Courtney <courtney -at- hsq -dot- com>:

>
> Am I published by virtue of having written user guides for a software
> package. I'm filling out a questionnaire and whether I was published or
> not was one of the questions.
>

I don't know if there's any standard, but, personally, I don't count technical,
business, or marketing documentation as published work. The reasons are:

- I don't own the work
- My name usually isn't on the work
- The work has not been accepted and reviewed in the same way that it would be
if submitted to a magazine, web site, or publisher. It may have been reviewed,
but internal reviews in a situation in which the owner of the document (the
company) intends to publish sooner or later is quite different from meeting the
standards and requests of a professional editor. For one thing, the owner has a
vested interest in publishing. An editor doesn't have to publish a submitted
work unless it meets certain standards or needs.

(On a slightly different matter, I wouldn't count work for which payment is non-
monetary, except for academic journals. Yes, it's published, but, since the
rise of the web, anybody who hasn't been published for free has no interest in
seeing themselves in print. Being paid for being published is much harder, and
means that your work is held to a higher standard. Or usually, anyway)

And I admit it: I'm a snob. Like many people, I hold technical, marketing,and
business writing in less esteem than I do journalism, journalism in less esteem
than poetry and fiction, and short works in less esteem than longer ones.
That's not to say that I'm not please when I can express a complex procedure
concisely, or write a clever bit of ad copy - just that I'm more pleased when I
write something that's harder to do that gets published.

--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604-421.7177

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References:
What's the definition of a published author: From: Wade Courtney

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