Working With Thomas Hill of Launch Pad Press

Back in August I wrote a post about the editor I hired, Thomas Hill of Launchpad Press.

Here is the follow up.  Now, some of you may notice this post is rather... dry.  There's a reason for that.  While it is always acceptable to write the truth and facts, it is not always acceptable to write opinions or draw conclusions.  So, since I have no interest in a business libel case heading my direction, I will stick with the facts.

As Joe Friday would say, "Just the facts, Ma'am."

On July 25th I returned the contract to him.  It stated Thomas Hill of Launchpad Press would be "Copyediting for grammar, punctuation, word usage, style; adjustment and manipulation of text for clarity; conform manuscript to Chicago Manual of Style; style sheet for commonly used terms."  This would be finished by August 24th.

On October 4th, 41 days late, the second half of my manuscript was returned to me.  As Thomas Hill said, the manuscript still wasn't finished, he needed to work more, especially on bits from the beginning, to fix mistakes he had made earlier.

By October 14th, I had finished reading through and working with all of his edits.  I did not think the quality was high enough and had lost confidence in his ability to fix the problems in the earlier sections.  I sent him an email severing our business relationship. I was rash in that email, asking for most of my money back or saying I would blog about this.  I realized that was a mistake and sent him another email on October 16, rescinding my request for my money back.  Thomas did not respond to either of those two emails, or the one that proceeded them, asking about a collection of sentences I thought were grammatically incorrect.

If you click here, you will be taken to twenty pages of bits and pieces of my manuscript.  They are verbatim copies of the Word final version he sent me.  Some of the mistakes are ones he made.  Some are ones I made that he didn't catch.  I don't think it much matters which is which.  And, while I did pick areas with the most mistakes in the smallest spaces, there is not a single three page long span of the entire story without an error in it.

The documents he sent me did allow for change tracking.  Word date and time stamps every change in the document.  There is not a single date or time stamp between August 20th and September 17th in any of the  three documents he sent me.  If he worked on the project between those two dates, he never sent me that work. 

Thomas knows that I am a blogger.  He knows that I am writing about writing and publishing.  He knows it was my intent to write about him.  He's a follower on this blog.  When our business relationship was just beginning I asked if he might want to write a guest post for me.

I will leave my comments field open.  If he so desires, he can respond.