Digging Ditches

When the printer completes the book run, he'll immediately fedex a copy to you, and then proceed with the packing and shipping of the books.  If there is something terribly wrong, best not to ship them here, pay freight etc.  work on the problem there.

How often do you see a gummed label on  book with the barcode and price?  Don't all books already have the barcode and price printed on the book?  If they expect to be sold in bookstores they must, since books stores handle inventory control with that universal bar code.  As you learned from the book, the bar codes is only the second half of the deal, the first half is to get the number, the ISBN behind the code, from Bowker.com, and then have the barcode produced, and then applied to the book in the printing process.  This is rather expensive, adding maybe $100 to he price of the book.

It is possible for there to be a slip twixt the cup and the lip, and the bar code is fouled during the book cover design process, and the bar code does not work when scanned in the stores.  For this reason alone you need a technically competent cover designer.  I paid $300 for my extremely simple cover (as you shall see) the motif just being a plain white sheet in a typewriter.  A commonly read people pay thousands, but that is a bit much....

If the bar code as printed does not work, out come the gummed labels, at your expense, to be put on the books.  In my case it would be 1000 copies, but of course I could get the bar code fixed for the next print run, insh'Allah.

For this reason, as soon as I had the real book by fedex, I walked into a bookstore and explained this was fresh off the press and would they scan it?  No problem, scan, and up it came, my book, there on the computer.  All systems go!

So now I am working on my next book.  It is like digging a ditch, which I did once, 165 feet, utility ditch, so, 18 inched wide and 30 inches deep, 165 feet from the house, across the yard, up the hill, along the fence, and to the street.  There as many routes I could take, but once I decided the route, I began by tracing the route with the blade end of the pick head.  and then it was a matter of going over the same route, time and again, ever deeper, dealing with what obstacles occurred, until the ditch was code-perfect.

As I advise, be open to the world with your work.  But Ogilvy says advertising is all in the headline, and anyone can write copy.  So it is with titles to books.  Titles are your best saleperson, and they must be directed to your audience.  David kindly intimated my title is a head-scratcher, and he is right.  As I was writing the book, it was directed at academics who would get the play on words.  Now my market is everyone, most of whom will just think I am advocating murder. O well.

too late now.

Titles cannot be copyrighted.  You can write a book and call it "Gone with the wind" or "The Bible" and there is no law against that.  On my present book, since it is heading into a crowded field (economics), I want to keep the title private, lest some person whose book is done hear my title and capture the same for his book.

I helped a cop write his book, and for the cover and title he and his artist son came up with something catchy.  So catchy, others had done it before.  His title and cover is 99% the same as another autobiography of a cop.  And his particular title is the same as hundreds of other works on amazon.com.  That makes it hard for customers to find you.  Search for your title on amazon before you decide on anything.  At least there is only one book ever entitled Perish Your Publisher, and it is mine

So, I hope you are all now digging trenches, tracing out your book, and find it such joyful activity, in spite of the suffering, that you jump to it first thing, with your coffee.

GMTA

Dr. North is offering this strategy for writing, one I recommend in the book, but only add that I cite all who contribute a correction.

I always release pre-publication PDF versions of my books to subscribers. I challenge them to find typographical errors. They find hundreds. This costs me almost nothing. Then I print the book.

With print-on-demand, I can update easily. But I put in the date of each updated version, so that future readers will know which edition is authoritative: the last one before I died.

I rarely get suggestions for changes in my arguments. Readers confine themselves to verifiable errors: spelling, grammar, dates, etc. Maybe someone says a section is not clear. But this is rare. I like to think this is because I write clearly.

I do get criticisms for my rhetoric: too confrontational. I always ignore this. Confrontation is my style. 

For another good writing and teaching idea of Dr. North's, with his good admission it is marketing, not control that matters can be had here.

An Honorable Profession

Teaching is often called an honorable profession, and as a youth I experienced that although my parents had a large family on a schoolteacher's salary, the fact that my father was a college professor put him in the same class as the doctors, lawyers, judges and architects who lived in the same neighborhood.  It was an honorable profession.

Today teachers are rather disrespected, and it has occurred to me the reason is that they are paid by the state.  In the west education (ex ducere, to lead out of, presumably darkness into the light) made its great achievements in an educational system quite different than what we have today.  From Augustine to Aquinas, teachers were paid directly by the students.  Great innovators could arise and challenge and move our culture forward.  Both saints were profoundly controversial in their times, but both prevailed given the educational system we had in place at the time.

Just a few centuries after Aquinas, when teachers such as Galileo were either church or state sponsored, we have rather petty arguments bogging down the system.  He who pays the piper calls the tune, and in the modern state, where so few people can take over the whole system, the market is cut out of the equation.  Look at medicine, law and education, all generally state sponsored, and all subject to such disrespect.  The program for restoring honor to these professions is to withdraw state support.

Selling Downloaded Books & IPR

I have been selling book downloads longer than Amazon.com has been in business, originally using something called "ftp."  I didn't invent selling downloads, but I might have patented it.  If I had, then Amazon.com would have to pay me to sell downloads.  I would be rich.  You would pay me for every book download you bought.  Do you see why IPR is so attractive?

This arrangement would be backed up by violence, something that is a violation for natural rights.  Do you see why IPR is wrong?

US Dept Of Ed Swat Team

Not only is it true Student Loans may not be bankrupted, now US Dept of Ed has a SWAT Team that does violent home invasions to capture non-payers.  At what point do we say "Police State?"

Jessie Childs

I read an excellent book by an author named Jessie Childs, and I reviewed it with five stars on Amazon.  I was astonished to see only one review when I got there, the book is way too good for only 3 stars.  Well, since there was only one other review, she is on average now at 4 stars.  Very strange for a world class book, and her sales are in the 700,000 range, at least today (meaning none...)

I googled her to email her to suggest she remind admiring readers to review her book on amazon.com.  She has a website, but all contact with her must be though her agent and publisher.

Two things wrong here... to sell books today you must offer "you" to the reader as well.  You can make them pay on a "closer you get, the more you pay" basis, but direct contact must be there.  Childs needs an email address she reads, a snail mail address she attends.  Childs cannot be contacted directly.  A reader wants to write the author, not the agent.

In my particular case, some of what I will say the agent will not like, so it is unlikely to be forwarded.

And her book is with limited access on GoogleBooks, another mistake.  If researchers cannot land on every page of the book, they are less likely to find what they are looking for and buy the book.

No doubt she believes her publishers, a world-class outfit, will take care of all of the necessary promotion for her. Well, several years into publication and just two ratings on Amazon?  She is an excellent talent.  She needs to perish her publisher and start making top dollar as a writer.

Working For Royalties

I just got a quote for printing my next book.  These will land at about $2.00, amazon sells for $16...  they take 55%, so $8.80 to them...  $7.20 gross to me, less $2.00 cost... is $5.20 gross profit.  Out of the $5.20 comes the expenses of running the business of selling the book. Self-employed,  it takes my time and creativity to sell the book.  It takes technology to do so, mine.  It takes travel and entertainment, etc.  Mine.  How much net profit is up to me. What the tax rate is, is up to the politicians.  Like Senator Reid said, taxes are voluntary.

People who rely on royalties may earn say 5%.  Say they get a check for $10,000 and the tax rate is 30%, so they net $7000.  

$10,000 is 5% of $200,000. So for an author to earn the $10,000 royalty, a publisher has to move 12,500 copies. For an author to earn the same $10,000 in the perish your publisher method, the author need only sell 1923 copies.

If I sold $200,000 worth of this book on Amazon.com, that would be 12,500 copies.  At $5.20 each gross, that would yield $65,000 for me.  I can spend that money on things I think need to be done.  Develop a business website in which you put the zip code of your best customers, and a program spits out other zip codes in USA with similar demographics, so you can keep finding where to prospect for your best customers.  I can develop white board technology for editing books that allows for 50 pages to be shown and edited at once.  I can spend a month in Hong Kong and London researching a book on free trade. All of this takes my time, creativity and the income from the sale of the books, but it is what I love to do.  It is all business related.  What is left over is taxed.

Now, a person earning royalties can also spend his $10,000 on whatever he wants as a business expense as well.  In both instances there is the subtle point that the money being spent is pretax.  (If you needed $65,000 to develop a new whiteboard, but if you had no business, and you were an employee, you would start with your own money, after tax dollars, so you'd have to earn say $100,000 at your job to net the $65,000 after taxes to finance your project.)

More: if I sold 12,500 in a year, I'd be buying at least at the 5000 copy level, so my landed drops to $1.00, and so my gross profit jumps from $5.20 to $6.20, from $65,000 to $77,500, that I must spend or have taxed, my choice.  Someone earning royalties still gets only $10,000.  (How do you think publishers afford those swank offices in New York?)

Why anyone would do all the work to create a book out and then leave all the profits to someone else, I do not know.  Authors mount lawsuits against Amazon.com and Google over copyright violations, when Amazon.com and Google.com can assist you in sextupling your income, or more, as a writer.  Authors desperately work to keep their incomes as low as possible, slavishly demanding that copyright laws be enforced.  Not only is there no basis for copyrights in theory or practice,  it is just plain nuts to write for royalties.