THUMBS RULE THE WORLD

I used to put these sort of indignant exhalations on Medium, which has quite a different readership than Blogger.   But I pulled out of Medium.com, so I'll just park this here.

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Some time ago smart publishers began to realize that it’s much easier to bully writers rather than readers, so they began to push off functions that had been part of the job of publishing onto the writers, who were often desperate to be “published”.   You can ask any ordinary worker who never reads and never got past the eighth grade, you can ask your grandmother, you can ask a little child, is a “published” book better than an unpublished book?  They will all assume that it is.  But they will have little notion of what publishing really is.  Dozens of organizations for writers require “having written a published book” as a prerequisite.   They can't agree on whether self-published books count or even whether eBooks count.  Most severely, the academic world requires published books and articles as part of qualifying for employment and tenure. But they can’t quite explain what a published book is,  much less scholarly, except that they are thinking of paper pages with bindings.

In the days of advances, writers had money to go to locations for first line research, or at least not to have to make a living while developing a book.  Part of the cost of preparing a manuscript for the printer goes to charts and photos.  These must now be supplied by the authors.  The publisher expects the writer to supply a plan for promotion, even if they have no intention of using it.  (A secondary industry is promotion privately contracted by the writer.)  And they want the writer to suggest reviewers who will be quotable for the cover.  Hopefully those will be friends who will be positive, but the NYTimes has been accused of deliberately assigning enemies to review each other's books in hopes of stirring up something exciting that will be presented as “news”.  And hilarity.

This morning there were two relevant stories in my email stream.  The first is about Amazon, who will sell anything (that’s where I get my cats’ laxative gel) getting upset that writers, fighting back, have asked their friends and relatives to post glowing responses to their published works (possibly also self-published since publishing these days only cares about sure profits).  Some resourceful writers have posted their own reviews of their own work, so Amazon will “sue” them, though they don’t know who they are, at least not provably.

Amazon to Sue a Thousand Fake Reviewers

It's giving them zero stars. The retail titan is suing 1,114 John Does - their identities are currently unknown - who offer to write false reviews for as little as $5 on Fiverr, a site where people can proffer minor creative services for little pay. Amazon says fake reviews could undermine its reputation and render product ratings useless. While it might be tough to legally discipline the writers, many of whom likely live overseas and outside America's legal net, Fiverr says it's working with Amazon to resolve the issue.

How does Amazon qualify to review books or manage book reviewing in the first place?  I thought it was a shipping service.  There are still library services and universities -- we used to have review sections in newspapers.  What about all those book clubs and purported friends?

I’m getting increasingly bugged by demands to review shipping.  I recently bought a paperback from a lesser author, that doesn’t really interest me after all, but I think others will like it.  So I’ll give it to the local library unread to spare wasting time and effort.  Not that Amazon cares.  They want me to rate the SERVICE of ordering and shipping because they are doing something like publishing the existence of the people who sell books through Amazon.  It’s a useful service, but I’m sure governed by the same laws that control the shipping of vacuum cleaner filters.  So why am I required to monitor the quality of shipping the books with the implication that it’s the same thing as reviewing books?  Many of them are USED books with published prices and a brief description of condition.

Hello MARY SCRIVER, 

We just wanted to take a moment to thank you for your recent purchase on Amazon.com. We REALLY need your HELP with POSITIVE feedback to show amazon and other customers how reliable a company we are. 

If you have any trouble with the arrival of your order or its condition please contact us by replying to this email. We will resolve any issue swiftly and to your satisfaction with no inconvenience to you as the buyer. PLEASE Just let us know by replying this email. Your purchase is not complete until you are satisfied!

Please keep in mind that 4-5 are positive and 1-3 are negative feedbacks. If you feel the experience is negative PLEASE first respond to this email so we may resolve the problem ASAP.  [Evidently I have to be instructed how to manage my thumb scores.]

If all went well (or when we have resolved any problems that occurred) and you have not had a chance to leave feedback for this order yet we would appreciate it if you would click on the below link to do so.  

Thank you very much for your great support

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Was this message useful?

If yes, click here:

If no, click here:

For Your Information: To help arbitrate disputes and preserve trust and safety, we retain all messages buyers and sellers send through Amazon.com for two years. This includes your response to the message above. Amazon.com uses filtering technology to protect buyers and sellers from possible fraud. Messages that fail this filtering will not be transmitted.

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Somehow the publisher already has the writer by the throat, Amazon has the publisher AND the writer by the throat, and is working on getting the shippers by the throat, even if they are selling used books written a century ago.  The whole thing is built on convincing the buyer that they are somehow saving civilization by telling Amazon if the post office delivered late or somehow tore the wrappings.  I don’t see any real remedy for this -- outside of starting a rival mail order company.  Or hoping that our version of “civilization” will begin to include a little humility instead of stoking the conviction of so many that sitting in the kitchen with a laptop, making the little thumbs and hearts do this and that, is equivalent to being a Roman emperor.

I’m at fault myself.  I live in a tiny village on the prairie where the closest book store -- quite a good one -- was run out of town because he was also a rancher of organic cattle and made a fuss over his roadsides being sprayed by the county in spite of being posted.  It was a first rate bookstore that specialized in books about the West but refused to be online.  

Maybe we’re getting what we deserve.  I’ll try to deserve better.  The word for World is WACKED.

SEND THEM PACKING!

Today I received a box of copies of “Bronze Inside and Out” which I can sign and sell to those who want personalized signed copies. I need forty bucks up front plus five more if I must mail the book. (I know some people are close enough to swing by the house.)

BUT the box was sent by a new competitor to UPS, called DHL. They have no delivery system in Montana -- they just take it all to Billings and mail it. It arrived with the box broken open, no bill of lading to tell me how many copies should be inside, no insurance, no addressee, and no post office box number. The post office is not supposed to deliver packages with no post office box number in towns where people get the mail at the post office rather than through home delivery, but the postmaster is on my side. He figured it out though it was marked “return to sender.” Just the same, he tells me that this practice of using the post office to deliver packages is one of the reasons the post office is losing money.

All this makes me think about the days at Scriver Studio when we were shipping and worrying about packing some very strange objects: like a moose head. Bob’s theory was that if the crate looked fragile, most people would be careful, but that if it looked armored and fortified, the handlers would feel free to throw and drop it, stand on it, and spill water on it. So we built strong but open-sided crates with heavy-gauge plastic sheeting around the actual head. I drove them down to Great Falls, steering right around behind the airport to the loading dock and then spending a LOT of time filling out papers. At the studio we had our own 4-copy recording system to create a bill of lading that showed contents, value, insurance info, times and dates, cost of shipping, and other details that I don’t remember anymore. We never had problems.

The sculpture was trickier, esp. in the days of shipping Hydrocal™ castings which were as fragile as china. Once I ran across a letter from Jeanette, Bob’s second wife, after she was living in LA, giving him detailed advice about how to pack them. Basically, they were immobilized in puffed rice. Popcorn was too oily. We’d clean out the supply of puffed rice in every small town nearby. Sometimes the castings were suspended in a web of string, but the string tended to stretch, allowing the figure to bump on the sides of the crate. And we packed in Zonolite, inhaling asbestos all unawares, and it was dusty stuff. On our end we had a constant supply of compressed air, piped through the building from a compressor out in the foundry that held the air in what Jeanette claimed was “her” propane tank (because she bought it to replace the old oil tank), so that it always smelled of the oniony additive that indicates a propane leak. We never would have detected a real propane leak. But what about the guy faced with all that carcinogenic dust on the other end?

The bronzes were a different problem: they are so heavy and some pieces have so many sharp points that they could destroy packing from the inside. Thin parts, like “blankets” or “flags” could bend. We bought a lot of cheap foam rubber and wrapped them in that with bungee cords. Or later we evolved a system that David Cree Medicine had to teach the Montana Historical Society crew when it came up to truck Bob’s estate to Helena. It was a custom plywood box equipped with rope handles, rather like a coffin, just big enough for the casting. Then the bronze was immobilized from side-to-side movement by adding small wooden “bumpers” screwed to the bottom. The biggest danger to an art bronze is scraping and scratching the patina, so sometimes the bumpers had bits of old inner tube between the bumpers and the bronze. The box had to be kept right-side-up, which is part of the reason for the handles so that lifters wouldn’t try to roll the box.

I’m always interested when I get books from the private booksellers who work through Alibris or Abebooks. Some just use boughten padded envelopes, which have evolved from messy shredded paper to bubble wrap, and almost everyone wraps the books themselves in plain white paper before putting them into the mailer. When I’m doing it, I sometimes repeat the mailing address on that plain white paper so that if the envelope is torn open, the address will still be there. Most people put a business card or a fancy little bookmark in between the pages of the book so it could be at least returned to the sender. Some insure, some do not. Few track unless the book is very valuable. Some have invented their own way of packing with recycled corrugated cardboard and newspaper wrappings, which tend to be inky.

There’s a certain kind of woman who loves to send “care packages.” I am not that sort and rather dread receiving them since they have more to do with the fantasies of the sender than the receiver -- some of whom don’t really know me. So foods I can’t eat, objects I never use, books I would never read, and so on arrive and I must invent tactful ways of responding as well as finding some new receiver victim.

But what I ponder more than anything else when it comes to shipping is what will happen as time goes on and this petroleum-fueled delivery system becomes more and more expensive. Even now I often pay twice as much in shipping as for a book, esp. when I order from Britain. Probably the book problem will be solved by the Espresso machine, which is sort of like “Beam me up, Scottie.” That is, the directions for printing the book are sent via the Internet and the book prints for you while you enjoy your cappucinno. (Everyone seems to assume these machines will be in coffee shops.) But that's if you insist on a paper book instead of an ebook, which means no autograph.

Even then how will anyone get books signed by the author, except by going to the author’s book-signing? Driving to my house takes gas, too! And what if the author can no longer afford the gas to drive to a book-signing? Can I get away with sending a gum-back bookplate that I sign, the way Whisky Prajer does? (His are custom-designed: very nice.) A good entrepreneur might speculate that the value of signed books can only go up.