Tag Archives: fiction editing

Recent project: _Feels Like the First Time_, by Shawn Inmon

September 7, 2012 jkkblog Leave a comment

Inmon’s first foray into print (if that link doesn’t work: http://www.amazon.com/Feels-Like-First-Time-Story/dp/1479258946/ ) is deeply personal, telling about how he lost and later rediscovered a true love. I was his proofreader, for which he has lauded me way out of proportion to my contribution, Shawn being a fundamentally generous and thoughtful guy.

I came to the project in a very interesting way. As some of my dear readers know, I cut my comic writing teeth at Epinions (a product review site) just after the millennium. One fellow I met there, I sort of stayed in touch with him and spouse, in part motivated by a mutual small-town-Washington-1970s upbringing. A few years back, I happened to touch base with the lady I did not then know was his widow. She caught me up. I tried to provide what inadequate support I could to her, and in the process, met some of their high school friends. One was the author of this story, Shawn Inmon.

So, when Shawn had a book he wanted proofread, I was glad to sign on. I liked him and his attitude toward life, and was pretty sure I could help him achieve his goal. He wanted to publish a book to a higher standard than the avalanche of self-published dubiousness that is the rage today. How could that not resonate with me? I quickly found Shawn a very coachable and soulful fellow, with a lot of guts to put this very personal story out before the world. I probably did a little more than your standard em dash and comma police work, but I’m glad I did. He was dead serious about publishing the story and I was glad that the final set of eyes would be mine, because proofreading is something I can do. We had a rollicking good time, bantering and discussing passages as I sent the chapters in.

I believe that Shawn’s book will succeed because its fundamental honesty will resonate with the readership. For one thing, I’m not a big true-love story enthusiast, and I found myself wanting to know what happened next. This is remarkable. For another, yesterday I handed my wife the printed, red-spattered, sticky-noted manuscript with which I worked. (I really needed to get it off the office floor, where I had stacked up the pages as I finished dosing them.) Today I asked her how she liked it. “I can’t put it down! This is great! I want to find out what happens!” (And, be it noted, that was the unproofread version, which may have improved before printing thanks to Shawn’s tolerance and endurance of my dry, occasionally caustic notes.)

The reason Shawn’s book jazzed my wife is easy for me to see. Honesty. If you read love stories, you want honesty, candor, the real deal. You want the author to damn well come across, be s/he overjoyed, embarrassed, bored, frustrated, furious, whatever. For what do you read love stories, if not for authentic emotion? As I proofed the ms, my most common sentiment was: “This will ring honest. Readers can spot a phony or a candy-ass, and they would and do barbecue those kind. They will feel the reality here, and it will grab them as it grabbed me.”

Link posted earlier is to the print version, but Shawn’s with the times, also providing a Kindle version (search Amazon on ‘shawn inmon’). If you resonate with honest love stories by a man unafraid to share what he truly felt, you’re going to like Shawn Inmon’s writing as much as I liked working with him.

Entertainment and music, Scumbag studies, Social comment, Sports

The Pac-12 Networks, a.k.a. the Not-works

September 3, 2012 jkkblog 2 Comments

In July 2011, with many college sports programs playing musical conferences and engaging in games of chicken with each other, the recently expanded Pacific-12 Conference (UW, WSU, the Zeroes, OSU, Utah, Colorado, Cal-Berkeley, Stepford, ASU, UA, USC and UCLA) announced plans for a TV network like what the Big 10 (which has more than ten schools) has deployed. Great, we said, we want to see more football and have our conference doing what big-time conferences do. Revenue sharing would help the smaller market schools, etc., etc. Let’s see the show!

The assumption, which we could not know was flawed, was that we would be able to see the show. In the words of the immortal, unbearable Lee Corso: “Not so fast, my friend.”

Fourteen months later, the 2012 college football season kicks off. The Pac-12 has failed to reach agreement with just about everyone, which is a pretty good sign the conference got very greedy. A number of games are televised on the Pac-12 Not-works, but very few people can watch them on TV. A few clever souls find other ways, naturally, but only the hardest core of fans would do that. Those who do, find out that the Pac-12 Not-works have sold zero advertising, so the not-work fills the space with commercials for itself. Yes. I must have seen the Stanford swimmer’s segment a dozen times. Every few minutes, its ten viewers are treated to advertising telling us how fantastic the not-work is.

That isn’t marketing. It’s masturbation, and comical masturbation at that. Seriously: while having failed in your most basic mission, which is to get on TV so you can sell advertising, rather than spare me a bunch of commercial breaks, you are going to go on and on about your virtues? Do you not understand that when the only advertising content you have to offer is to rhapsodize yourself, you have failed? You are a conference comprised of twelve research universities, all with educational claims to fame and pride, which attract some of the best and brightest people in the world, and you leave the house without your pants? Mr. Larry Scott, you are a Harvard graduate. For the gods’ sake, put some trousers on. No one needs to see you this way.

Not that the satellite and cable providers are any prizes in the area of doing what’s best for viewers. DefectiveTV, which is what I have, engages in a ‘playground recess hair-pulling skirmish of the month’ with some content provider just about every month, taking its message to the blacked-out channels to explain how those nasty stupids at (insert network name) have been unreasonable, pulled their content, and tried to force us all to pay through the nose, but only DefectiveTV stands Promethean in defense of our fair prices and sweet reason. Yeah. When every recess, the same kid is always in a fight with someone, always comes whining, and never takes any responsibility for even being half the problem, guess what. It’s obvious where most of the problem lies.

The much-vaunted Pac-12 Networks are Not-works. They are a failure. At this point, we would be better off without them, since the games they show would otherwise be picked up on other channels, all of which seem not to consider themselves too ultra-special to get a deal worked out and be on the air.

Every year, it is a little more about pure greed and big money, and a little less about athletics and education. I will always wish UW well, but I can see a day where, if this trend continues, I simply won’t care about watching the sport. At which time I will cease to be an advertising consumer, be it for idiotic pickup truck commercials appealing to my machismo, idiotic insurance commercials appealing to my gullibility, or idiotic beer commercials appealing to my pedestrian tastes.

Mr. Scott, you and your networks are a failure.

The best ass-covering you could come up with was to blame it all on the other side, and sick your athletic directors on the public, encouraging them to switch providers. (For some of us, with no provider in our areas that carries the Not-works, a non-starter.) “Waaaaaaah! They started it! Waaaah! Punish them!”

It’s looking positively Congressional.

Just another area of America in which the stupidity of the public is taken on faith by the wealthy and powerful, and where, if said public notices something wrong and complains that ‘this is bullshit,’ the public is fed a line of crap and told to stop being difficult.

I’ll give you difficult. Mr. Scott, so far you have boloed this exercise. You are a no go at this station. You snubbed BYU/Utah, the perfect regional, rivalry and research fit for the conference, simply because a Mormon school icks out Left Coast schools, with all that honor code and right-wing political stuff–as if that were relevant at all to research or athleticism. Instead, you brought in Colorado, which is about as Pacific as Wyoming and has a minimal existing rivalry relationship with Utah. Mr. Scott, if this is how you roll, I wouldn’t hire you to manage a Division 5 conference, much less a I-A BCS conference. You have failed. The results speak for themselves. You are the John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi of collegiate athletics. Enjoy that prestigious distinction.

In the meantime, Commissioner Scott, go to hell.

Married life

“I’m the Have-Nots for the week.”

August 22, 2012 jkkblog Leave a comment

This morning I was brushing my teeth while Deb attempted to blow-dry all that hair. I brush my teeth reliably, but I dislike it. The mess, the taste, the gagging that will happen when I do it for the proper length of time. Deb is going camping with friends, and I’m going to go hang out with friends, staying with the delightfully hospitable McCall clan. (And no, I have not opened a can of dumbass posting on the blog that we are out of town. There’s still a family of five living here in our absence.)

When I’m trying to brush my teeth with Deb around, she takes advantage of the fact that I can’t talk by heckling me. When she found out I was going to Steve and Melissa’s, she had visions of culinary delights, so the Heckling-of-the-Day concerned the fact that I was varying unflattering epithets for going without her. I should also mention that we sometimes watch a trashy reality show called Big Brother, in which people live in a sound stage that the show calls a ‘house,’ compete for food and powers, and try not to get evicted. If they are Have-Nots, they have to eat ‘Big Brother Slop,’ a nutritious but unappetizing wallpaper paste.

So I’m brushing my teeth. “You are such a faecolith for this,” she groused. “I’m on slop. I am the Have-Nots for the week.”

As hastily and poorly as I set that line up before leaving, it probably won’t do to you as it did to me. I was overcome. Ever try laughing with a mouth full of toothpaste while brushing? I was doubling over, causing toothpaste foam to come dripping down my beard (which I hate), pouring out down the toothbrush onto my hand (which I abhor), messing up my orderly brushing routine (which annoys me). The whole mess made it funnier, my fastidious brushing turned into a hydrophobic-looking FAIL.

Have a good weekend.

Editing/writing life

Literary collaboration: adversarial?

August 15, 2012 jkkblog 8 Comments

I have a friend who’s a real smart fellow. Can’t see his blind spots, but is fundamentally a good man and a capable writer. Some years back he was thinking of publishing a book about this or that. I talked to him about it a bit. He was eager to work with an editor so that he could fight with the editor. Evidently my friend was not so excited about printing his book, but about engaging in debate with his editor. He was eager to be toe to toe, at drawn blades, battling for every word.

Pardon me. What the hell?

I thought about that recently as I entered into a proofreading project with a first-time author. His work was unpolished but honest and passionate. Early on, he expressed a strong ability to withstand harsh criticism. Bring it on, he basically said. Good attitude. (It’ll stand him in good stead when the Amazon reviews arrive, and people totally miss his point, saying mostly stupid things, and he has to refrain from answering them at all, much less with “You vacuous cretin…”.)

That writer lacked much ego, and had a desire to improve. Respect for that. But having not really worked with a lot of editors, evidently, a part of him assumed that the critique process would be serrated and twisting the blade. At least that’s what I made of his statement.

The author had a surprise coming. Why would I do that? Only very weak literary professionals hurt your feelings for fun, and thus are questionably even professionals. I never had a real editor treat me that way. I had them send my stuff back for rewrites, ask for clarification, bluntly tell me what I needed to fix. I never had a single one set out to hurt my feelings. Pros don’t have a need to stomp on your soul. They’ll just tell you, this must be fixed. That’s it. If asked, they’ll explain why. They know their trade well enough that there isn’t going to be a bunch of debate.

His surprise: literary collaboration wasn’t adversarial. It was fun. Everyone wants the end product to be its best; if not, they don’t belong on the job. Everyone wins when the end result is something great. Trust builds through working together. You can have a good time while writing a good book. You can banter, kid, laugh, jest. That’s not unprofessional. That is simply making work fun. Writers should like to write. Editors should enjoy editing. Proofreaders should adore catching typos. The relationship should be congenial and collegial. A relaxed attitude is simply the literary equivalent of the special shine on weapons that are obviously in regular use by people who get paid to pull their triggers. If you’re really capable, you can do it without sweat beads popping out on your forehead. You can take time to smell the red ink.

If anyone’s pissed off, You’re (plural) Doing It Wrong.

Homeownership

Firing DefectiveTV

August 14, 2012 jkkblog 4 Comments

That, of course, is my name for DirecTV. We can choose between DoucheNetwork (DishNetwork), Cheater (Charter) and DefectiveTV.

We are not big TV watchers, which makes sense because much of what’s on there doesn’t interest us. The ‘History’ Channel is torn between antique dealers and paranormal research. The regular networks are a big faaaaaaaaaaa, except for my trashy reality shows. A&E is bearable. ESPN thinks poker is a sport. Half of what’s on is infomercials, especially late at night.

Here’s what I hate. At any given time, some channel(s) that we paid for and expected to receive are not available. If one navigates to them, one gets a DefectiveTV-slanted pitch as to why. Basically: “The mean people of this channel want to raise your price to the stratosphere, but we, your defenders at DirecTV, stand firm to protect your lower prices! Write to them and tell them to cave in to us and stop being unreasonable!”

Yeah. I don’t think that’s credible. My prices for DefectiveTV keep going up. When they are bickering over prices, I never get any refund for the content I didn’t receive. The end result, therefore, is that DefectiveTV engages in a lot of pissing matches, but they don’t keep my prices down, and at any given time I’m not getting some of what I pay them for. I think it much more likely that DefectiveTV demands a much bigger piece of the pie, and the content provider balks, and DefectiveTV says, ‘fine. We’ll stop carrying you. Let’s see how your advertisers like that.’ I think DefectiveTV is playing the Wal-Part in this production, and I do not like it. Another good example is the brand new Pac-12 networks. Out here, failure to carry these is not allowable. What is DefectiveTV doing? Bickering with them, of course. What else do they know how to do? Maybe we’ll get them, maybe not. Maybe by the time that’s resolved, I won’t give a damn. Even their satellite reception is crappy, often cutting out just when we want to watch something.

Suppose you are dealing with a child. Daily, the child has a tale of woe. Every day, something goes wrong. Child’s explanation: this person did this, that person caused that, someone dropped this, she is a big meany, he is a jerk. At some point, if the child does not say “I caused this. I messed up. This is my fault,” we tend to think that the common factor in all problems is this child, and s/he is not taking responsibility. DefectiveTV is starting to look like the child.

I think I’m ready to spend my money with adults. I’m sick of second grade recess messing up the few programs and networks I care to watch.

DoucheNetwork isn’t a viable option. I hate going back to regular cable, but so far as I’m aware, Cheater doesn’t spend all this time fighting over content. It’s time to do some research.

Here’s an analogy. I have a grocery store. You shop there. You get used to the products I carry, but now and then there’s some item you cannot find at all. One week, no coffee of any kind; I’m putting the squeeze on my wholesaler. The coffee section is covered over with a large screed pleading my case as to why I am defending your low prices by failing to sell you coffee. Next week, no dairy; I’m bickering with the cow-milkers. Big poster explaining why this is actually to your advantage that you can’t buy sour cream and yogurt. The week after, it’s salsa: none on our shelves, just a large placard blaming the salsa manufacturer for trying to make you pay too much.

But wait: there’s more. You sigh and buy your groceries, minus whatever I was having a bitchfight about. You pay your bill in full. The cashier reaches into your grocery bags and randomly yanks out some of your merchandise, returned to my store’s inventory. No refund. Sorry. This is our policy. You pay for things that you sometimes don’t get. You complain. My employees explain that we do not guarantee that you will get anything at all for your money, therefore we have the right to take back any or all of what you paid for. You call this larceny. My store doesn’t care.

How do you like my business practices?

If you didn’t shower me in vile language, condemning my ancestors as the obvious products of canines fornicating with swine and camels, you either have no passion or weren’t paying attention, or are a nun who doesn’t use that sort of language. One might argue that you should come back to my store and rob me at gunpoint. After all, I robbed you. I took your money and stole back your merchandise. You’d just be getting your money back.

So that’s where we are at with DefectiveTV. We are sick of being robbed. We tire of explanations transparent in a seven-year-old troublemaker. We think the Robin Hood spin is a crock of crap. When we see our DefectiveTV bill go down, when we see a monthly rebate for the content we are denied, we might believe the spin. Until then, it just looks like DefectiveTV waterboarding its content providers for maximum profit, happily hosing its paying customers.

Everyone hates cable companies, but I am hard pressed to divine how they could be more scrofulous than this. I think it’s about time to vote with our wallets.

Editing/writing life

My proofreading jackboots

August 11, 2012 jkkblog Leave a comment

Current gig, a small but enjoyable one: proofreading again. (I can talk at length about the book once it’s published, but until it is, it’s my basic obligation to keep any comments very general.) I like proofreading, as it appeals to my closet fascist.

This book is a true-life love story, one to which I relate on numerous levels. It begins in small-town Washington, in a time when I was also in school in small-town Washington. It passed through UW, enabling me to offer obsessive nitpicks on places, distances and such. The author and I had some similar youth pastimes, such as Strat-o-Matic sports games. The connections often border on the eerie.

What is eerier: I’m seeing the very intimate details of the histories of people I will likely one day meet in person. It makes me feel a little creepy, which it should not. I’m hired and paid for this, and it is work. It’s not like I set out on my own to compile a dossier of two people’s lives I’ve never met; I just read the dossier provided by one of them, and provided feedback. Even so, I can’t escape feeling like I’ve somehow stalked them. I know much of them and their lives; they of me, in one case a modest amount–in the other, far less. It was above board, with full informed consent, even invitation. I still feel a bit as if I have been nosey. I shouldn’t; it’s unjust to myself. I do anyway.

It makes me marvel at the author’s guts in publishing the story. I had never before considered that, despite all the autobiographies I’ve read. Be it Churchill, Malcolm X, or a relative unknown, they had the sand to put their lives’ details out there for public examination. I certainly haven’t done the same (and there is no way). This has brought me close and personal with the question. If I feel voyeuristic just working with the author to tape, mud, sand and paint the drywall, how must he feel knowing that my reading is one of the first few of many? I may just be such an intensely private person that this rocks my world more than it would other people. (So naturally, what do I do about that? Why, blog it to share with the world! That’s like worrying about Treasury defaults, thus fleeing to a financial safe haven–Treasuries! D’oh!)

The project has gone beyond simple proofreading, which is fine by me. Someone comes to you and says, “I want to work with you because I think that will make this the best possible book.” Are you going to cruise idly by something you know is incongruent with that goal? I don’t see how anyone can. I can’t. It’s one thing if I’m ordered to: “I’m happy with every word. Just catch the spelling and punctuation, doubled words, missing words, and so on. Otherwise shut up.” I’d comply. However, only a very foolish first-time author would give that direction, and my client is not a fool. As a result, I’ll walk away from the finished job feeling that it’s better for my input, and that’s my real payoff.

One perception my client had, I think, is that I’d spend a lot of time skewering him. I think most people who have never worked with editors or proofreaders have the vision of us as people you argue with, people with whom you’d better have an alligator skin because they’ll cut your work to doll rags, people who wield their eloquence like a hot poker against your psyche. Maybe in some cases that’s how it goes down. I never had an editor treat me that way, not a single time. I had them send back things I didn’t feel they should; I had them ask me to rewrite things; I had them ask me dumb questions; I had them screw up their own recordkeeping and then send me snippy messages asking if I was ever going to turn in any work, when I’d been patiently awaiting assignment. I never had one critique me in a way that was meant to discourage me. I never even got a rejection letter that was meant to harm. I had some tell me they didn’t like my material, but I’m still waiting for the first literary professional to make a deliberate effort to be a jerk. Fact was, I came to like most of my editors. Literary collaboration–described here as any process where two or more people are actively contributing input to a publishable work–should be as fun as you can make it.

If not, I think someone’s doing it wrong.

Investing

GESA Credit Union shows us the Stipper

August 9, 2012 jkkblog 2 Comments

If you get the reference, then you at least once played BaFa-BaFa. The latter is a cultural awareness game that divides a group of trainees (in my case, dorm resident advisors) into two cultures. Both are briefed on their cultural norms, which they are expected to roleplay. In one culture, anyone who breaches the accepted social rules is shown a card called the Stipper, meant to convey disrespect. (In our game, the women naturally resented the sexism of that culture, and began to show all us males the Stipper.) If you think this sounds stupid, consider this: of those who played the game that day, one is very highly placed at Starbucks today. Another is a successful film producer, another a pediatrician, another a captain of police, and so on.

As thrifty people, Deb and I keep savings reserves in multiple banks. We had a low five-figure sum at GESA Credit Union for some six or seven years, a relationship that ended this morning. Like most savings accounts, it had low activity–simply the periodic pittances of interest. That was fine; its purpose was to act as a reserve, not earn money. A few days ago, we received a mailed notice containing this text:

Dear Member,

Our records indicate that there has been no activity in the above referenced account for a period of 24 months or more. Gesa Credit Union’s policy states that an account that has been inactive for a period of 24 months or more is considered dormant and subject to a dormant account fee of $5.00 per month for notification of the status of the account and for continued maintenance of the account at Gesa. Accordingly, if your account is still dormant on 08/31/12, we will begin to impose the $5.00 per month dormant account fee as required by our policy.

This fee will continue until you either initiate a transaction to re-activate the account, or until the account reaches a zero balance and is closed.

Sincerely,

Deposit Operations Department

Well, we’d hate to burden such a fine institution with our inactive money if they don’t like it. Business is business and we understand that; they have to do what they have to do for the firm. If they aren’t satisfied with having our money laying around, for them to lend out so people can buy Hondas and pay them interest, the last thing we’d ever want is for them to suffer. So, after closing the account, I gave the assistant branch manager a letter to forward to her CEO:

Ms. Christina Lethlean
President and CEO
GESA Credit Union

Re: mailed notice re account #4xxxxx

Dear Ms. Lethlean:

We have for some years maintained slightly over $10,000 in a money market account, plus just over $460 in a savings account, at GESA. This holding was a cash reserve, earning us minimal interest (but certainly funding some lending by GESA). We had no intention to touch it except in an emergency.

This week, we received a frigid notice in the mail from your Deposit Operations Department. It advised us that our account was dormant under GESA’s policy, having had no transactions for twenty-four months. If we did not initiate a transaction by 8/31/2012, the account would be charged a $5/month dormancy fee. To comply with GESA’s policy, we have withdrawn both balances and closed both accounts.

This transaction will avoid the $5 dormancy fee for August, and in fact for the next twenty-four months. Our household’s policy states: never reward a vendor for a policy or action so comically ridiculous that it has us laughing too hard to get suitably angry.

Thank you for your institution’s service to us over the years. We wish the best of success to you and GESA in the future.

Sincerely,

J. K. & D.M. Kelley

The assistant branch manager’s explanation was that this was not GESA’s fault, but the state’s. You see, if accounts go ‘dormant’ for a certain period, the credit union is required to package up the money and send it to the state treasury. I didn’t bother answering her with the obvious: if that is so, the logical action is to send a notice advising of this and blaming it all on the state. The illogical action is to threaten a $10K depositor with a $5 monthly fee if s/he doesn’t come in and perform a transaction. She warned me that it would be this way at any institution. I didn’t bother arguing with her about that, either, because it really doesn’t matter. If it is, we’ll see how it’s handled when the time comes, and if it’s handled stupidly, we’ll leave. If it’s handled intelligently, we’ll stay, as we would have stayed had this situation been handled with the intellect of at least a fern.

Of course, I neglected to mention to anyone that it was going onto the blog.

I too have a Stipper.

==Ps., 17 August 2012==

Credit where credit is due. Ms. Lethlean picked up the phone and gave me a call herself. She told me that this sort of ‘culture’ had been a problem at GESA in the past, and that she had worked to change it, and was disappointed to find that it still had pockets of resistance. I didn’t inquire about specifics, but my own guess is that the culture was one of ‘stupid policy.’ From speaking with her, I believe she was more than mildly annoyed at whomever authored that letter, and that someone had a bad day over it. It turns out that there doesn’t even need to be a transaction, just some sign of motion, respiration or at least a pulse from the consumer. I didn’t take our money back to GESA, but we had a cordial conversation and I’m satisfied that someone had her bell rung over this, so I won’t rule them out in the future.

Married life

Waxing my ears

July 30, 2012 jkkblog 8 Comments

No, I don’t mean the stuff that gathers inside them. I’m talking about the plague and annoyance of male middle age: not that your hair falls out your head, but that it takes root in your ears thereafter.

You can’t really shave the inside of your ear. You can use a clipper, but it’s annoying and imprecise. I can’t stand this stuff, and after watching a few shows where people had large amounts of hair ripped from their bodies, I thought: why couldn’t I wax my ears?

I fiddled around with the idea quite a while before I took the plunge. At the grocery store:

“Dear, where is the wax stuff women use to take hair off?”

“Over here somewhere,” puttering past the toothpaste.

“But you’re a woman and this is a woman thing. How can you not know where it is?”

“I don’t use the stuff, you goober!” In a few minutes, we found some Nair face wax strips. Cost about $6.

I waited until everyone else was gone before I decided it was time to give this a whirl. I didn’t want any help, or if it came to that, any witnesses; I was going to do this my way, without any wisdom. Went into the bathroom with the Nair stuff, opened it up. It said that I was supposed to use it on shorter hair, and that when I pulled the strip off, to rip against the direction hair was growing. What direction is hair growing in your ear, for gods’ sake? I read the instructions, deciding which ones to heed (rub it first to soften the wax with warmth; wash the ear first) and which to ignore (most). Soon it was wax or die time. The effort at washing my ears was a moderate success given that it’s not that easy outside the shower.

The strips came in pairs, which one pulled apart: great, one per ear. (I think the ones I chose were the ones intended for women’s mustaches, not their chin hairs.) Of course, the transition from inside the ear cup to the outside is anything but a flat surface, so I somewhat pinched the strip in there. How long do I leave this on? Evidently not long at all once it’s slicked down. Okay: rippppppppppppp! That hurt, leaving my ear bleeding a little. The strip left a gummy residue all over my ear, and didn’t get all the hair (especially the long tresses). By the way, this is not wax. Wax is what drips down a candle, or you use to shine your car. This was stickum, about like duck tape. In fact, I think duck tape might do a better job.

Fine, I decided, let’s scissor off the flowing locks and see if a second pass will work. Disregarding the admonition never to do this to the same skin within 24 hours, press, ripppppppppp. It got more of the hair this time, though there were some whiskers left. Now time to apply the lessons to the other ear. Trim dainty curls, press on strip…rippppppppppppp! You know, ears are pretty sensitive. I saw no need to make a second pass, since the second ear went rather better. Only then did I note that you could use a given strip several times, so for fun, I put it on the moderately furred back of my left hand. Rippppp. Slick as a whistle.

My ears felt traumatized, but not horribly so, so I passed on the ‘soothing wipes.’ That may have been a bad decision, especially if they would have taken off the excess glop. I certainly wasn’t going to GooGone my ears. I guess they worked, imperfectly but maybe as well as one could hope for given the terrain.

Since I was using a female-specific product, I waited all evening for Deb to notice the Tremendous Change and give me Lavish Compliments. Nothing! Crushed that she failed to notice. I finally showed her, including the bloody part. Her reaction: “Oh my god! You are such a fucking dork!”

Always there for me.

Investing

Selling at Alibris: why it’s pointless

July 28, 2012 jkkblog 6 Comments

One suspects that most people who flop selling at Alibris didn’t do their homework, or had unrealistic expectations. I can give you a better reason why.

The whole thing is geared to make money only for them. You are far, far better off just taking the books to your used bookstore for credit, or to your library, or just recycling them. Seriously. Unless they are rare, that is.

Alibris has two tiers of sellers. For the one, you pay $20 to get started, so you are already in the hole. For the other, you pay a monthly fee, so you are already in the hole on a monthly basis. Let’s walk through selling a typical hardback book in Fine condition.

Your shipping costs are: $2.80 for media mail, $1.50 for the bubble mailer, net $4.30. You will get paid $4.00 for shipping. So far you are down ($0.30). Okay, but you should take that into account with your pricing, right? Go ahead. You will also pay Alibris $2.25 (cleverly split up in the description of their pricing scheme so you won’t add the $1.00 and $1.25 together) for the privilege, plus $0.50 as a commission, net loss there ($2.75). So your total costs are ($3.05). This accounts for every factor here except the price tag you put on the book.

There are 100 of the same book in Good condition listed for $1.00, and some in Very Good and Fine. If you sell for that you will lose ($2.05). Suppose it’s in Fine condition and you say, well, I have to get $3.05 for it. If it sells for that, you break even, but Alibris gets its $2.75. You can’t win. Price it higher than that, and you wasted your time listing it–no one’s going to pay more for it. Price it lower and you may well sell it, losing money. The one constant with every such transaction is that Alibris makes money and you can not.

Notice we didn’t even discuss the actual cost of the book. It is, you know, an item of merchandise that once had a cost? Clearly, you will never get back a fraction of that; this is accepted. However, the above model considers the book to have zero cost value. Assign it some form of basic cost of goods sold, even a pittance of 10% of original price, and you’re even further in the toilet.

Okay, but some books are surely worth more? Yes. A few. A very few. For that same reason, they won’t sell very often. Plus, the higher the price, the pickier the buyer, for which I don’t blame them. There is a good chance of a return, which puts you in the hole, or a nasty comment that damages your seller rating. You could miss some flaw on the book when describing it, though you tried your best. If the book has that much value, why not put it on eBay and really see how much you can get for it?

Their seller service is friendly and responsive enough. Well they should be, considering that you’re handing them pure profit and doing all the work. If you come over to my house and perform work at a net cost to you, from which only I profit, I promise you, I’ll treat you very courteously.

The other two major competitors are Amazon and Abebooks. Why not them? Not only is there less money to be made at Amazon, they themselves will directly undercut you. They’ll give people free shipping and charge them $3.99. You will only get $3.99 shipping reimbursement plus a minimum price of $0.01 for the book. You can’t win. Abebooks has a monthly fee, I think $20, which it would take a lot of books sold to cover.

The model is useless. You can’t make any money. You donate your labor to a for-profit entity.

I’m just going to start taking them to Adventures Underground for store credit, a box at a time. I’ve shut down my operation at Alibris. Two hundred thirty books, all described with careful honesty and listed with great pains taken to assure a representative image and the right edition, probably forty hours of effort, all for nothing but profit for Alibris.

Live and learn.

The Editorial Maverick