So, I’m sitting in Karachi, sweltering in the oppressive heat, while my client shivers in a frigid Boston apartment. Mowing her pristine lawn, one of our editors lives in London. While a large number of our authors actually live in the Subcontinent, we have honorable mentions for the US, Australia, Europe and South America.
We keep in touch via Facebook, but, really, Skype and Google Hangout are our virtual best friends. Without them, our phone bills would rival our respective national debts (hold on—I’m exaggerating a little. We don’t quite make it into the trillion dollar range).
There are challenges to working like this. When it comes to discussing a book with an author, for instance, you can’t just flip to a page in the manuscript and point out mistakes, or take an author through a word for word rewrite. Files need to be shared, tracking needs to be active (in Word), and long explanations are needed just to get on the same page, line and word. And, there are days when we’re up at ridiculous hours, just to make a meeting—we had one author, for example, who was up at three am to make a three-way call between Australia, the US and Pakistan.
As a publisher of e-Books, we’re doing our part and saving the environment by not printing out pages and pages of multiple drafts. But every once in a while, it would be great to sit face-to-face with my client, or an author, or an editor, and have a little gupshup over chai and samosas.