Am I sharing my work with Word 365?

I submitted a sports biography to the publisher and found out 3 months later, after they finished the "copyedit" that they have no experience with sports. They made 9,336 "corrections" to my book, 98% of them were not grammatical errors, they insisted on using Chicago Manual of Style, whereas I preferred to follow style of New York Times, ESPN, etc. and all other sports publications in America.

They did give me copy of my work with their corrections, in Word365 .docx format. I spent a month getting up to speed on Word 365 (I use OpenOffice). My question is, since the files seem to be stored on the cloud, how do I tell who else has access to it, and how do I keep it from being stored on the cloud? I only want to store it on my local desktop. Thanks.

 

You can turn off saving to One Drive and have the file saved locally. You can also go into One Drive and see who has access to the file--no one else should if you haven't given access.

You may want to swap OpenOffice for LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, because it can open and save in .docx format. You won't have to use Word 365 if you don't wish to.

 

I use OpenOffice and it can also save in .docx, just FYI.

 

Lake Vostok? Lake in the East? Vladivostok...

I submitted it in ODT format. I was assured they (we) could work with that. But the publisher gave it back to me, after the copyedit, in .docx format. If I save it as an ODT and open it in OpenOffice, all the red and blue copyeditor's "corrections" are missing.

I need to have the red and blue copyeditor's suggestions visible, so I can glean the 1% of his marks that highlight true grammatical errors or misspellings, and keep them separate from the 99% of the copyeditor's "corrections" that are style alterations. There is that 1% that is useful.

 

I wonder if you could upload that to Google Docs and it would all show up there? Worth a shot. Then you could download a copy in a different format. Or just work with it from there.

 

Not sure what you mean...if you save it to a different location, like the "C" drive, does that mean that it does not save it to One Drive, or does it now save it to both those locations? Where does it save the regalur, every-5-minutes saves?

How can you tell who else has access to your One Drive?

 

I have to find another publisher. The one I previously chose because I thought they were more honest. They may have been honest, but I never thought they would go off on this wild tangent and make sweeping, systemic changes to my content ands style. The problem could have been easily solved with good communication, but they refused to let me talk to the copyeditor, and the agent was always 2-days lag time to complete one cycle of communication.

The copy-editor must have noticed some "oddities" in style, but did not communicate. Instead he "corrected" the whole book. I paid them $3200, but I got most of it back. Does that sound about the right amount of money? How do you choose a publisher? Every publisher I looked at, the reviews, there are always a lot of people complaining about the publisher cheating them...

Next time I will listen to my intuition, which sent up a screaming red flag, when I first talked to the assigned "agent." It was yelling at me, "Do NOT go forward with this. This whole deal is going to go south!" Although the agent had the proper tone and sounded welcoming and interested, it seemed, subliminally, to me, she was not interested, it was just a job to her. Or maybe it was like an attitude of "I'm the professional, you;re just a newbe writer..." Instead of backing out, I rationalized continuing on, there was nothing tangible I could put my finger on. But your intuition is usually right...

 

The Prime Directive would apply here: if you pay them, they aren't a publisher. I'd call $3200 grand theft.

 

But what's the alternative? I am doing the copyediting myself now, have the cover photo, the back cover blurbs, the page one intro, the promo material, the website with teaser, etc.

But things like Distribution - that's a big confusion for me. And print on demand seems to be what everyone is doing.

Are you talking about sending it out to agents?

 

Could be I misunderstood about exactly what you're doing, so let me say that I believe there are two, and only two, viable ways to get a book published:

1) Traditional publishing, where you submit your manuscript to a legitimate publisher (usually through an agent) and said publisher decides it can make money printing and distributing your book, and pays you royalties for the right to do so.

2) Self-publishing, where you write the book, edit it, design the cover, etc. and submit the finished product to something like Amazon KDP for publication as an ebook.

Print-on-demand services exist, but I'd be surprised if the typical self-published book ever sold any print copies.

Marketing and distributing book is a difficult and specialized process. The traditional publishers are good at it and have access to the channels that make it possible. The outfits that want to charge you $3200 aren't, and don't.

Just my two cents worth, and there are folks here who know more about publishing than I do who may disagree with me. Mostly, I'm tired of seeing people who want to write being ripped off by criminals posing as editors and publishers.

 

Off soapbox, the answer to your original question is that One Drive is just another way to back up your work. 'The Cloud' is a marketing term, not a technical one, and just means 'someone else's computer somewhere that you have no control over'. To my mind, it makes more sense to save copies of your work to your local drive and to another location, like a USB drive.

 

Agree. I've had to deal with at least one of these so-called publishers on behalf of a client. This sounds like a scam to me. It's not how legitimate publishers operate.

 

I selected this publishing company because they had the word "Christian" in their name. I figured I would be getting an honest company. Turns out they are not only dishonest, but also incompetent. In one BBB complaint, "According to a former employee, the Editors are not required to have any training, credentials or college degrees; not even a high school diploma." I noticed that they change my style, too, inserting commas or deleting them, to change the pace. There's another company I was considering with the same type of "appearance" but they want about the same $3500, with about the same procedure - I am not allowed to communicate with the copy editor. I asked them if they would accept copy-edited version for reduced price - no. Would they write me a letter that I can present to my credit card company attesting to the deplorable copy-editing the other company did? - no. The only people with good communication skills are the two front-office sales agents.

What's the way forward here?

I have 400 emails from people commenting on a website which points to the book. So there seems to be interest in it , especially in certain geographical areas, and with older people who would want a hard copy, not an e-book. The subject of the biography is slated to have a Hollywood documentary done later this year, I was hoping to time the release of my book with that.

I have a confusion on distribution or how to arrange sales if someone would want to get a hard copy. The other thing is a couple of copied (attributed) newspaper stories - but both of the "Christian" pubs read the book and did not report any problems, unless their incompetence extends to not knowing what is legally allowable.

I haven't done any SEO on the web site promoting the book, I don't even have a "contact us" page, or pre-order page. But I want to be prepared in case the book would be successful, and I am caught with no copies printed and a 6-week delay from the printer. That's why I thought Print-on-Demand would be a solution.

Any ideas?