The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Paula Lieberman:

#132 heresiarch

Not all businesses would be slime if unregulated.

That said, not all would not be slime. It depends on the cultures involved, in depends on the ownership, it depends on goals, perceptions.... the thing about community-based businesses is that they are more likely to be tied into the community and have a continuing and concerned stake in the community.

For that matter, the term "stakeholder" which showed up in business terminology some years ago, is one that reflects the concept of people having a personal investment, often emotional even if not financial, in the business and in issues--and the importance of making people "stakeholders" and having them be personally involved and concerned and forced to be responsible participants.

That's the opposite of the carpetbagger-type approach that Wal-Mart often had used as strategy and tactic--(Wal-Mart's not the only chain pulling that. There is a remaindered book chain which according to an indie bookstore owner, goes out of its way to rent storefronts near independent booksellers and try to drive them out of business apparently....)

Sometime chains have come in and taken over a local or regional store/collection of stores, and cleaned things up--putting money into the storefronts fixing up the facilities, changing nd improving the merchandise mix, being more responsive to what people buy and don't buy (merchandise people don't want sits on the shelf being an expense and taking up shelf space tht merchandise the might sell, can't get space on...), and contributing funds and enthusiasm and support to the local community.

In the case of e.g. Trader Joe's, it didn't replace an existing storefront when it moved into Burlington, MA, but it provided merchandise which filled a hole in the area, and the bulletin board towards the back of the store has a bunch of letters from community agencies and organization thanking Trader Joe's for its participation and generosity.

There's a new chain store down the street a few hundred feet in what had been a storefront empty for months since the demise of Decathalon which was a sports goods chain. H-Mart went in there, an Asian groceries superstore, full of kimchi made in-store, fresh fish (originally the store apparently was going to have people pick out live fish to purchase, however there was a sign by the fish tank that had had had live fish in them the first day the store was open, indicating the the local Board of Health was objecting to that and not allowing it... the tank were gone from that area a few days later), frozen fish and meat, fresh vegetables particularly Asian ones, consumer products including Korean-style grills, lots stations cooking Asian specialties offering samples.... there is a large in-store bakery with its own cash register, a food court.... the store is pulling large crowds, from people in at least two other states apparently. The parking lot may have stopped being too small--opening day there were signs at the adjacent mall parking lot that there was no parking there for H-Mart and a police detail doing traffic management in the H-Mart parking lot, and the police detail continued being present during open hours days after the opening, and the parking lot packed--but the store had been doing a -lot- of business. It especially seems focussed on Korean foods, as opposed to the smaller Asia grocery stores around Burlington, which include Indian subcontient, And Chinese/other-East-Asian/some-Indian-subcontinent.

#60 Dragoness

a) There actually have been cases where the US Government has looked at contractors writing proposals and said, "We don't believe you can do this work for the price you are bidding."

b) There are businesses, chains even, which pay more than minimum wage to entry-level employeess. The epitome of unfair Wal-Mart practices regarding labor, include 1) giving employees instruction on how to be on Medicare instead of Wal-Mart providing affordable to employees health benefits and insurance, and 2) Wal-Mart being taken to court and convicted of deliberately hiring cleaning companies which use undocumented aliens paid sub-minimum-wage wages.... I also think that Wal-Mart got convicted of employing minors to operate equipment minors are banned from operating, such as forklifts.

Regarding crowd control--I came home at 10 PM or later a few years ago, and there was a long -line- in front of a Circuit City--people were queued up in an orderly fashion, some with blankets for warmth and sleeping, similar to Line Fandom at SF conventions coming prepared to be in line for big events waiting for the doors to open.... store which encourage mob scenes... ugh.

#62 Earl

Non-unique evil is still evil. Cogent line.

#65 Jacob

Also, other chains sometimes go out of their way to support the localities and areas they are in. Most supermarkets have places for people in the community to post notices of lost animals, nonprofit organization craft & such sales, local houses for sale by owner, moving & yard sales... sponsor coloring contests for local school kids, furnish space for local organizations raising funds to set up selling raffle tickets to support children's sports, social services, etc. --

I refused to shop at Wal-Mart for years, until the local chains were out of existence--Bradley's, Caldor, even Jordan Marsh. I still refuse to shop in Macy's, and after the congloberate which owned Macy's also whacked Filene's... it's left me with a dearth of places to get clothes.

#345 Juli

Have you considered getting a food dehydrator and dehydrating carrots and potatos and such?

Dung from a white elephant in the living room with the living room owner hving been persuaded to pay for by a con artist, who convinced the buyer that the elephant was a prestigous pet bestowing celebrity status and fortune upon the buyer....

http://blog.writersdigest.com/norules/CommentView,guid,1fe314c8-e939-49b1-b324-5960abc3ce9f.aspx#commentstart

#170 David

Succinctness is rarely one of my virtues.

Twitter not into temptation....

#167 Green

Paula @157, I understand the temptations of that business model. However, book buyers are repeat customers, and there are a lot of them. The pool of people willing and able to pay for this package is small-and-shrinking, and once the scheme has been running for a bit and the promised dreams weren't delivered, getting further people to pay will become harder. Also, you are continuously looking for _new_ customers. And you're competing not just with all the other divisions of ASI (who don't care which of their divisions you go with) but with Lulu and putting out an e-book on your website with a PayPal button.

The US population is 300 million. Doing a gross simplification, dividing that by 60, there are 5 million people in each age bracket 1 to 60 (I did type "gross simplication"). If one percent of them are susceptible to deceptions such as ASI publish, that's 500,000 new scammables per year coming into prime scammable age . If one out of 500 of the scammables wants desperately to be a Published Author, that's a thousand -new- people per year who'll bite on the baited hook.... A thousand new rubes per year is "a market" for producing a revenue stream, at the rate that ASI charges....

It's the same basis as spam runs on--a fraction of one percent, provides far more than enough return on investment to continuing spamming. ASI basically is a spammer...

So yes, short-term profit. Temptations galore. However, it seems to me as if ASI is running out of easily found marks, which is why they're now targetting major publishers to bring in new writers.

ASI has been getting hit with lawsuits which is has been losing. At the same time, it has expanded its sales operation.... Until and unless the management at publishers, particularly conglomerate ones, tell ASI to take their business model and walk off the side of a freight ship into the Pacific over the Marianas Trench, or someone manages to put the principles of ASI into a situation banning them from it on threat of rotting in a jail cell if they don't, I expect that the ASI principals and their backers are going to persist in their noxious scam behavior.... I sincerely wish they would suddenly and magically cease being shysters, but based on past history and behavior, I don't expect them to. I expect them to be sleazy slimy sales and marketing weasels, hawking inferior services at inflated prices, and conning the gullible and the greedy into collusion with them.

Give it ten years, and the number of new people you can successfully dupe into the venture is going to be very low.

Ponzi schemes haven't gone away, and again, there are fresh crops of gullible aspiring authors arriving daily....

On the other hand, today's bestselling authors are not unlikely to still be money spinners in ten years' time. It's a different business.

Craig Shaw Gardner was at Readercon, and is back working as an SF/F/gaming store store clerk, which is what he was doing before becoming a bestsellling author....

Regarding the efficiency of delivery services -- I think it was The Franklin Mint, that when I was doing market research studies (paid commercial research, that is....), I was told has the production lines terminate into a substation of a delivery company--the products go DIRECTLY from production line into the delivery service station and from there onto delivery service trucked headed out to delivery to the purchasers.... If retailers and wholesalers etc. are included in the purchasing, they get to do their own warehoue and merchandise storage on store shelves or in warehouses or in storerooms... the producer sends quite literally the merchandise all down the line to the freight company to deal with.

Oh, Bah! I messed up on the simple arithmetic [never trust the simple arithmetic of someone with a math degree....].

Anyway, the bottom line nonetheless is that return on investment is the ratio of the income, compared to what the business had to spend of its OWN money, as opposed to using OPM-- Other People's Money. The loan cost is the fraction of employee's time and travel and phonecalls for getting the loan approved, and the cost of money pying the interest on the loan, the rest of the loan "cost" evaporates if the company pays it all back-- the income pays off the loan principal and that gets listed as a business expense in the profit and loss statement--but for the purpose of Return on Investment, it doesn't exist.

That also is part of what drives e.g. Just In Time business practices, and "outsourcing -- somebody ELSE is paying the day to day salaries and the day to day warehousing fees and for the warehouse space, and the inventory and real estate taxes. The business is paying its partners service fees for services, which are completely expensible and tax deductible in the USA for the year the services occur in, and paying rent rather than owning, the cost of the facilities is fully expensible and deductible.

Tax laws drive a LOT of things....

#149 Green Knight

Simplified arithmetical case:
Assume each of 300,000,000 people in the USA buys 1 book per years Assume that a print publication book needs 50,000 copies to sell to be commercially profitable the the author get the next contract. Divide 300,000,000 by 50,000, ad the result is there there is a viable market for 6000 books published per year in the USA.... How many of these is Harlequin publishing?

Now look at shyster vanity press (SVP)--EACH rube spending at least $600 is donating money to the shyster. If there are 2000 rubes per year, that's a minimum of $120,000 that SVP is getting. Some of the rubes are going to drop more than $25,000 on SVP "services" without SVP necessarily providing two cents in royalty payments.... And for every disillusioned rube suckered by SVP, there are new rubes lining up to replace... SVP's expenses for getting the money, are the time and effort for advertising, for making partnering deals with publishers who are debasing themselves, and for the cost of providing such services as they actually provide--but first except for the advertising and partnership arrangements, the money comes -in- from the wannabeepublisheds....

Meanwhile, just what are the profits that the book publishers are getting from publishing the books?

There is a term, "return on investment" that is the true bottom line in big business--it's what the business earns, compared to to what it spends up front. It's why businesses paying what used to be apparently usurious interest rtes of 18% per annum borrowing money for production and such, were willing to borrow money at those rates -- the basis was they borrowed money for a few months, to pay for production, and paid back those short-term loans with money from product sales when the products got sold..... one big issue with the liquidity crisis at the moment is that stores couldn't get loans for Christmas Sales Season merchandise in the amount and at rates that they used to be able to get, and the result is that there is a lot less stock in stores than there used to be... yes, stores were deliberately cutting orders, but part of it, again, is not only the expectation that consumers are being parsimonious, but that the retailers had much lower and nastier term borrowing limits available, with which to order/buy merchandise for retail sale....

The plurality of retail goods sold in the USA, sell in November, December, and late October. Retailers borrow money to pay for orders, and then get their revenue when consumers give them money... the retail prices take into account that consumers use credit cards and pay over time, and that credit card companies charge percentage fees for the service, and that the retailer has to pay back the loans... if the sales fail to cover the loans, the business goes the way of Circuit City or Borders--either out of business outright, or renegotiating terms and loans with creditor and cutting back on merchandise available for sale,
shutting down stores, laying off people, etc.

The successful business does more accurate forecasting of customer spending months ahead of when the merchandise actuaally arrives and is available for purchase by consumers... in the case of "traditional" publishers, the buyers for Borders, Barnes and Noble, etc., make order decisions from the publishers' catalogs, which the publishers decide, years earlier, whether to offer an author a contract for a book or books the author is proposing to write, or has written and has submitted the manuscript to the publisher for publication consideration.

The "traditional" publisher therefore is making a bet usually at least two years in advance, of what the public is going to buy, and a bet more than a year in advance, about what retailers nd wholesalers will order in what quantities....

Now consider loan economics.... 20% loan for six months, means that the business will have expenses of the total loan value plus half a year's interest, or 110% of the value of the loan, to pay to the loan company if paying off in full at the end of the six months.

The publisher is paying more than that, because the loan is for longer period of time.

However, looking at "return on investment," the economics are somewhat different-- the retailer takes out a six month loan for say $20,000 for merchandise, and sells the merchandise for $40,000. Assume that the expenses are the $2000 in six months' of interest at a 20% annual percentage rate, and store running expenses of $16,000... $40,000 - ($4000 + $16,000) = $20,000 -- the return on investment is 100% !!! What the store -actually- spent of its own money was $20,000.... it leased the use of $20,000 from the creditor loaning it the money. Also, the store gets to deduct the $4000 of interest payment as cost of money expense, from its taxes....

Meanwhile, SVP is forward financed, the money comes -in- from the suckers, before any money actually gets spent on book production and such--so SVP has the use of the suckers' money for investing, in, loaning it out to agencies getting that 20% short-term interest.... if the SVP is brainy. If the SVP is typically greedy, it's busily hiring more marketing and sales weasels people and spending money advertising looking for more suckers, and then hiring people to do the increased expected workload from the more suckers....

Soylent Green!

I thought of Z but couldn't remember the name....

Harrumph.
More germane viewing
* Dr Strangelove
* High Noon
* Catch 22
* To Kill a Mockingbird
* The Crucible
* A Man for All Seasons
* Murder in the Cathedral
* Mr Roberts
* Lysistrata

#128, me

Make that, were IBM to enter into a major business deal partnership arrangement for a new division with.... Companies do business with the disreputable all the time, selling products to them so long as the check doesn't bounce and the FBI etc. doesn't come in investigating. Partnering with fraud convicts, however, tends to be bad for business (and for the partner... )..

Hmmm, -does- Author Solutions pays its bills on time or anything approaching on time?

#120 Julia

Harlequin was behaving a -bit- like IBM--waiting for other, smaller companies to prove there was/is a market large enough for the thousand ton gorilla's while to be worth. Unlike IBM, however, Harlequin entered into a business arrangement with an corportate entity having a shyster reputation and unsavory history and antecedents.... if IBM entered into business deal with a computer company with a reputation and legal history congruent to Author Solutions', I suspect that its existing suppliers, partners, and customers would rapidly examine their options for cutting loose from IBM and realign their businesses to deal with other organizations instead--and there would be an exodus of people looking for new positions, retiring, and starting up their own new businesses, eager to distance themselves from shitstorm, likely lawsuits, and business drops.

Believe it or not, Carmen Miranda's Ghost was not in my mind at all... I do tend to write in ballad form when doing verse or song. Tunes don't however show in ASCII.... often I have original tunes, not TTTO (To The Tune Of)--tunes get made up inside my head on a fairly frequent basis, with or without words, and verse with or without tune....

Ballad form is one of the more common forms that verse spontaneously comes into my mind in.

He's ill, he's had a highly unpleasant relapse, he's on drugs, he was in the hospital, he's upset and angry, and lashing out....

I remember when my father destroyed several discs in his back--he yelled at me for two weeks, I yelled back, and the arguments went on until he went into the hospital for back surgery.... surgery which the prognosis was 50/50 if he's be able to walk after it. The pain was so bad, though, that he was willing to take the risk, simply to lessen the pain.

He's ill, he's had a highly unpleasant relapse, he's on drugs, he was in the hospital, he's upset and angry, and lashing out....

I remember when my father destroyed several discs in his back--he yelled at me for two weeks, I yelled back, and the arguments went on until he went into the hospital for back surgery.... surgery which the prognosis was 50/50 if he's be able to walk after it. The pain was so bad, though, that he was willing to take the risk, simply to lessen the pain.

#201 Earl

I won't say here what I think patent trolls deserve....

#110 Julia

Polyamory and GLBT have been around in SF/F for a long time in the mainline publishers, going back decades, and including Heinleing (including Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough for Love, All You Zombies), Sturgeon, "Leonard Daventry," Diane Duane (The Door into... series), Chip Delany, Elizabeth Lynn, Melissa Scott and Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnet, Sharon Green, L. Sprague de Camp (though Jorian doesn't keep all the wives he starts off in the series with), Fritz Leiber (A Specter Is Haunting Texas), Marion Zimmer Bradley, Esther Friesner ("Mustapha and his Twelve Wives"), Tanith Lee (Don't Bite the Sun; Drinking Sapphire Wine), Thomas Burnett Swan, and anyone writing accurate historical or mythological fiction about the likes of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hadrian, most Asian emperors and Pashas and Khans and Sultans and such, Jacob with his two wives and two concubines, Pharonic Egypt pre-Ptolemy I (but then there's the field day with the Ptolemaic inbreeding....)... anyway, explicit sex scenes including GLBT ones, were around in SF/F long before Ellora's Cave ever showed up.... (There was at least one explicit though brief interspecies sex scene in The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, published back in 1954 or so. )

Ellora's Cave hit a resonant chord and proved there was a market for porn aimed at women explicit "lush" erotica aimed at women (though Anais Nin was writing a long time ago.... and while I have never understood the appeal of The Story of O by whoever wrote it, that too predates Ellora's Cave by decades and decades). Perhaps the equation is that Ellora's Cave demonstrated that the market was large enough for the triumph of commercial capitalism over social control fanatics taking public offense and action....

There remain issues with covers of various printed books that go beyond social acceptability for a lot of US citizens (double standards remain in effect, comparing gazonga covers on various Bane books, with large amounts of male skin showing, and entwined nude or nearly nude couples on "spicy" romance covers), but generally, the level of "spice" in especially trade paperback books from Berkeley Sensation, Avon Red, Brava, Aphrodisia, Berkeley Heat, Harlequin something or other, etc., would have gotten the books trivially "Banned in Boston" (or most of the rest of the USA) decades ago.... the reality is that finding romance novels without explicit scenes, other than in non-adult parts of bookstores and libraries, has gotten difficult--the reader looking for such, needs to do something like look for the terms "inspirational" or "sweet romance" in pursuit of explicit sex scene avoidance....

The ghost of Roger Elwood glides
To Harlequin alights.
The ghost of Roger Elwood haunting
These November nights.

The man who killed anthologies
Of science fiction tales,
And now he's come to kill romance,
I hope that spirits fails--

The publishers who dealt with him
Those many years ago,
They outsourced books as packaging,
Creating reader woes--

A tidal wave of books came though
Of quality most low,
It killed the readers' interests
And caused the writers woe--

The harvest from the outsourced books
Was readers who refused
To purchase more anthologies
Because they felt abused

The stories in the books they'd bought
They felt quite cheated by,
And so they would not purchase more
And thus the market died.

And authors who had earned their fees
From stories writ for pay,
Bereft of income from that source,
Their livings gone away.

But that was not the only market
Elwood got involved,
For Harlequin contracted him
And details they resolved.

A line of science fiction books
All uniformly cast
With Harlequin distributing
The line did not long last. .

The SF readers of the time
They wanted novelty
And not a packaged product shelved
So interchangeably

Each month another one set out
Upon the retail rack,
The readers did not buy the books
Most covers got sent back.

And so the giant publisher
It then shutdown the line
And ended the experiment,
Like throwing out bad wine.

And for a generation
It's gone past thirty years
The focus stayed upon romance
Despite abundant sneers.

But hark the change crept in in time
And vampires' Nocturne nights,
The publisher revamped its lines
With paranormal sights

And then it's taken more steps out
From its former ways,
And now the horror full has struck
To authors' appalled gaze--

The ghost of Roger Elwood roosts
This time in subsidy
"You rejected aspirant,"
"We have a deal for thee,

"We are not going to buy your book
"Nor give you any fee,
"But if you pay Horizons now
"Then published you shall be!"

"Horizons is a brand new arm,
"Of our company,
"We have a partner who will handle
"Ev'rything you see

"Just hand in lots of money and
"They'll print your book and say,
"That you will be a published author,
"Career well underway."

"And for some money extra,'
"We've other service which,
"Will help you to promote your book,
"And might help find a niche,

"And if it does quite well enough
"With all that you have spent,
"Then Harlequin might possibly
"Let you get in its tent.

"A contract possibility,
"For those who do the best
"A paying contract for a book,
"Unlike most of the rest

"For those of you we raise a hope,
"That you could be the one,
"Who having paid those many fees,
"Shall come into the sun."

The ghost of Roger Elwood glides
To Harlequin alights.
The publisher it sees revenue
And authors and readers spites.

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