What kind of books does he write? If it's pure text then he probably does not need the power of LyX but on the other hand if he's doing something complicated like writing technical books then you can laugh if he's doing it in Word. And come to think of it. if it's pure prose then he does not need WYSIWYG anyway.
I would not expect many mainstream writers of novels and gardening books to use LyX just as they probably don't use LaTeX. They would be unlikely to have had any acquaintance with the tools of technical writing and so not even know they exist. When the most complicated layout you ever need is an MLA template for first year English you don't usually turn to LaTeX or LyX. Their instructors won't know about it and so they cannot suggest it. Even if LyX were the best tool for the job authors can get by with what they know and may not even realise there is a better way or just don't see a reason to put themselves out for what they may perceive as small gains. After you have seen intelligent people write CVs in Lotus123 and Excel you can expect anything. Your best-seller author probably is arguing from a position of absolute and invincible ignorance. He's probably right but for the wrong reasons. You might want to look at the best non-fiction sellers at Amazon's best-sellers' list. The first one is The Algebra Survival Guide Workbook by Josh Rappaport It might be a LyX or LaTeX book. Hopefully it was not done in Word. It's hard to know what tools authors use to write books, most dust-jackets don't mention it. A bit of googling seems to suggest that Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling use pens, at least for a first draft. George Bernard Shaw wrote everything in Pitman Shorthand. That is definitely not WYSIWYG. The same thing applies for bibliographic management. A student at the local college told me that she had asked her instructors (Nursing) about software for managing references. Their answer was they knew such things existed but had no idea of how to find or use them. I talked her into using Zotero (with Word, sob) and she's saving an hour or so per paper in the handling of citations and reference lists. Maybe next year for LyX and APA6. ________________________________ From: Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> To: "lyx-users@lists.lyx.org" <lyx-users@lists.lyx.org> Sent: Sunday, June 9, 2013 10:36:15 AM Subject: Anyone know of a best-seller written in LyX Hi all, On one of my writers' mailing list, after I said I used LyX, a guy who really does have what once was a best-seller wrote this: ======================================= "As for Lyx, you need to know that, with very few exceptions none of which immediately come to mind open source programs have great appeal for people who want to tinker with computers but almost none for those who actually want to do something. Such apps tend to have butt ugly interfaces and stupid names like Lyx and Snort and Gimp and Phlegm. Last I saw, Lyx wasn't even WYSIWYG, for crying out loud. Forewarned is forewarned. Or something like that." ======================================= I already wrote back mocking his position and pointing out that if Open Source got his undies that tight in a bundle, maybe there's something interesting there, maybe everyone should try LyX, after all, it's free, and gave the www.lyx.org URL. But I can tell you this guy is going to come back and say he's a great and mighty best selling author, ask how many books have I sold. While books provide a part of my income, I have no best sellers, either now or in the past. So, when he comes back and asks that, it would be *wonderful* to give the writer's list one or more best seller books (I think something with an Amazon rank of less than 5000 would do it), to refute his statement, by counterexample. I'll say one more thing. A lot of writers seem to be proud of their technophobia, and say mean and stupid stuff about LyX and other Open Source. On their behalf, please allow *this* writer to apologize. And as always, keep up the good work producing a great book writing software (and perhaps now a web authoring software). Thanks, SteveT Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance
