English title: German for Self-Learners
By James Branam, Eva Hereinová, and Barbara Hochheim
Of all the stories I have to tell about writing books, this story has to be one of the most interesting. As with many of my other books, I thought that it would be a good idea to invite two of my colleague to help me write the book: Eva Hereinová and Barbara Hochheim. What a big mistake.
I was writing another book at the same time as this book, so I thought the collaboration was a good idea. Barbara and I would do the text, vocabulary, and exercises, and Eva would do the grammar. This was their first book project, so I understand having to explain some things to them, but I had to repeatedly tell Eva to improve the grammar explanation to include more information or examples. I got the impression that she wanted to do as little as possible and get paid for it. Barbara was also interesting to work with. She came to mz apartment and sat down and wrote the texts and exercises for the fist ten lessons together. I enjoyed working with her. The problem with Barbara was that her German wasn’t that good. Her mother was Czech and her father was German, and she spoke these two languages, but neither of them at a level sufficient for writing a language textbook. Simply put, there were too many errors. And I was constantly bombarded with questions like: “When do we get the money?” or “When will they pay us?” It was horrible.
What happened next really pissed me off. After the first ten lessons of the manuscript had been written and handed over to the publisher, the problems started. I returned to the U.S, to continue my education. They were upset by y departure and unable to comprehend that the further collaboration could be done via email. After I left, Eva and Barbara started working without me. Fragment, the publisher, sent me the texts they had written. I immediately recognized that something was wrong. Obviously, the reading texts had not been written by either of them. They had copied the texts from somewhere and were using them in the book. I had known Barbara for years and was very familiar with her writing style. It was easy to see that my colleague were trying to pass off plagiarized texts as their own. Understanding the potential repercussions, I immediately distanced myself from the two, refusing to submit any more material after lesson ten. I even had my name removed from the cover of the book, just a precaution. I still receive a third of the royalties from the first half of the book (the part I had written), and I am still listed as co-author if you google the book.
Author: James Branam, Eva Hereinová, Barbara Hochheim
Publisher: Fragment
Illustrations: Luděk Bárta
ISBN: 80-7200-841-2
Pages: 224
Year of publication: 2004/2007