The book project – latest

by Elizabeth on 11/06/2010

It’s amazingly different working with a US publisher this time round.  My new book, Social Media for Project Managers, is already available on Amazon.co.uk (where my name looks funny) and Amazon.com (where my name looks OK) which seems very early, although I am not complaining.  And the process for reviewing the proofs is also different.

I knew the text would get revised to US English, but I had thought that meant taking out words like ‘analysed’ and replacing them with US equivalents with a z.  I hadn’t taken into account that there are larger linguistic differences.  The funniest that I have found in the proofs so far is a note from the editor about my use of the word ‘senior’.  I use the term ‘senior stakeholders’ all the time, on this blog and in other articles.  Over here, people will interpret that to mean ‘most important, just under the Board or Board level executive stakeholders’.  In the US, it could be interpreted to mean ‘old’!

Chapter 10, Winning over Management, starts with: “Not all senior managers will embrace the opportunity to adopt social media tools to support the project activity in their companies.”  That’s not supposed to be a comment about managers nearing retirement! Many executive stakeholders are mature in years, but in a book about cutting edge technology I can see how there could be misunderstandings. I feel another round of editing coming along…

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  • Jason

    I have lived my whole life in the US and never would have thought that “senior managers” referred to someone who is “old”. Every place I have ever been referred to senior management in the same manor that you defined – I would guess that your editor doesn’t have much business/consulting experience.

    • http://www.elizabeth-harrin.com Elizabeth

      Hi Jason. I think it’s context driven – some of my uses of the word ‘senior’ could be a bit ambiguous, but other times it reads clearly to mean the most important executives.

  • http://www.kathyschwalbe Kathy Schwalbe

    I can tell you lots of stories about working with publishers, editors, reviewers, translators, and now self-publishing. I really like self-publishing since I have so much more control. It helps that it’s the third edition of a fairly popular text book, so I had an established markets. For my first book, I didn’t have much say in the cover until I happened to see a preview of it. It had a man on the cover from the early 1900s – definitely not what I wanted for an IT Project Management book written by a woman! They did modify it after I complained.

    • http://www.elizabeth-harrin.com Elizabeth

      I haven’t seen the artwork for Social Media for Project Managers yet – but I hope it’s good! I’m glad you got your cover changed.

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