Copyright page or elsewhere may need a contributors list

[dormerod]

It might be helpful to allow authors/publishers a flexible way of listing who wrote and contributed to the book on the copyright page or else an early page of the book.

What do you think about adding something like a contributors property to copyright.json, which could be an object that looks something like this?

"contributors": {
"Authors": ["Bugs Bunny", "Elmer Fudd"],
"Technical Editor": ["Sylvester"],
"Go Wizard": ["Tweety"],
"Proofreaders": ["Taz", "Daffy Duck"],
"Cover Art": ["Marvin the Martian"]
}

The idea being that publishers can assign their own job titles and an array of one or more names when giving credit.

[artasparks]

Sounds reasonable. Not a terribly high priority, I think, but wouldn't be too hard to add. If we add authors in both copyright.json and the GC comment, then you risk having inconsistent data. We could have a precondition check for that though.

[artasparks]

Another thought: should this be part of the acknowledgements?

[dormerod]

It could be done that way, that was my first thought too. In practice though, after looking at a large number of the books in my house, it seems like the use case for acknowledgments is broader.

It's not uncommon to see authors, editors, typesetters, artists/cover designers and (sometimes) proofreaders listed in a short block of text at the bottom of the copyright page or the next page before the TOC.

Then, in the acknowledgments, people tend to thank the same people again, but in more generous written prose, as well as thanking people like their publisher, proofreaders and peer reviewers (especially when too numerous to list elsewhere), minor contributors or authors of prior works, their family, online communities that they're a part of, the readers etc.

For Go books, people might also want to thank the players for their art and possibly the sponsor of one or more tournaments. In Commented Games by Lee Sedol, Lee even thanked some guy for lending him a video camera :)

[dormerod]

I think we could close this if you want to. We can just use the Acknowledgments page for whatever we need to write. I don't think it matters that much if it's different to what people do in other books.