12-15-2012, 08:50 PM
Quote:In popular works the images are usually pulled together by picture editors - I regularly get trolled by them after stuff they have seen on my Flickr site and I nearly had one of the Verona tombstones in the SDC work mentioned above. It's a bit insulting to those of us doing 'real' books who don't get a picture budget and have to get by as best we can (the reason B&C1 & 2 are full of my drawings), but that's commercial publishers for you (think frog and scorpion); come the revolution, whilst the rest of you are up stringing up the politicians and the bankers, I shall be dealing with the publishers ;-)Nathan Ross post=326527 Wrote:I suspect it might be that the authors of the text were not responsible for the images or the production of the book as a whole.In lavishly illustrated books like this, the quality of the illustrations and the accuracy of the captions can be almost as important as the text. Others will know the answer to this better than I but can an author insist upon having some control over the choice of illustrations and the wording of captions to ensure that the value of his or her work is not diminished by the incompetence of a picture editor?
To get back to the subject, the authors' input to image choice and captioning etc will vary depending on the publisher and the nature of the commission: basically, if you took the idea to them, you stand a better chance than if they solicited you to write some copy to fill pages (it is much harder to write copy to fill 'spreads' than it is to write a whole book, trust me; I love the latter and hate the former). A lot of these sort of books are dreamed up around a table in a publishing house rather than thought out carefully by somebody who knows what they are talking about... but then is anybody really surprised by that? The results of such folly fill publishers' remainder shops.
Mike Bishop
