Re: What's the definition of a published author

[Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>]

Quoting Wade Courtney <courtney -at- hsq -dot- com>:

> 
> Am I published by virtue of having written user guides for a software
> package.  I'm filling out a questionnaire and whether I was published or
> not was one of the questions.
> 

I don't know if there's any standard, but, personally, I don't count technical, 
business, or marketing documentation as published work. The reasons are:

- I don't own the work
- My name usually isn't on the work
- The work has not been accepted and reviewed in the same way that it would be 
if submitted to a magazine, web site, or publisher. It may have been reviewed, 
but internal reviews in a situation in which the owner of the document (the 
company) intends to publish sooner or later is quite different from meeting the 
standards and requests of a professional editor. For one thing, the owner has a 
vested interest in publishing. An editor doesn't have to publish a submitted 
work unless it meets certain standards or needs.

(On a slightly different matter, I wouldn't count work for which payment is non-
monetary, except for academic journals. Yes, it's published, but, since the 
rise of the web, anybody who hasn't been published for free has no interest in 
seeing themselves in print. Being paid for being published is much harder, and 
means that your work is held to a higher standard. Or usually, anyway)

And I admit it: I'm a snob. Like many people, I hold technical, marketing,and 
business writing in less esteem than I do journalism, journalism in less esteem 
than poetry and fiction, and short works in less esteem than longer ones. 
That's not to say that I'm not please when I can express a complex procedure 
concisely, or write a clever bit of ad copy - just that I'm more pleased when I 
write something that's harder to do that gets published.

-- 
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604-421.7177

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