In an unexpected bolt of Internet honesty, I got a reply from Satori Publishing containing answers to the questions I asked. This was so unusual I re-read their home page and I see they emphasize they have been around since “before the dot-com bubble”. My kind of people. Plus, the man in charge is very well-educated. It is refreshing to deal with professionals. Consider this. One of his first questions was whether or not the puzzle contained the answer key, as opposed to the key in next day’s paper. I would not have thought of that; the customer buying a second paper to get the answers. My thinking is still at the post-card flyer level. There you go. I consider that “Jumble” puzzle to be an outstanding success and Yoikers! has the same potential.
My financial review of y’day reveals I no longer have any system in place to handle an influx of new money. Satori gave me two options, 25% of all sales or 50% of their sales. I opted for the latter, since I don’t have their experience or facilities. The codicil is that the puzzle must be patented and copyrighted, and I was unaware that a puzzle could be patented. I contacted my attorney.
Either way, it has been five years (Oct. 23) since I’ve had a “yob” and my planning department has gone to ruin. I’m no better prepared than some hillbilly winning the 6/49 [lotto]. Time to clean up my act. I suppose my concern over this is laughable to the people who think no plan is necessary, that they’ve got it all in their head. You know, broke people. Losers, or in the term I popularized on Craigslist, “loosers”.
I am (again) running into the thick-as-a-brick “advice-givers”. Around 20 people are aware of the puzzle, but not one of them has ever created one. Yet they are all suddenly experts on what to change, what to add, what to take away. The point is, these suggestions are still at the retard level, like what color of paper to use. They seem collectively unable to understand that things are progressed light years beyond their thinking abilities. I can tell them I am dealing with a patent attorney now, but they still want to talk about the color of the paper. And you wonder why sometimes I get impatient.
It’s a good thing Theresa called from Wilmieville, although we didn’t have much of a chat. She is receiving my mail, a confirmation I needed badly. She does not yet know about the puzzle negotiations. It was a real stroke of luck to find a reputable firm to deal with right off the bat, this Satori Publishing. Their contact person gave me today’s trivia. A few years back I commented here on the disappearance of the Sudoku puzzle creator. The supposition was that he grabbed his millions and ducked out.
Not so. He failed to secure the intellectual property rights to Sudoku. In the end, he never made a thing. It is notable that Satori would volunteer this information early in our relationship, which instills confidence that they are square dealers. I also received an e-mail of basic criteria concerning all puzzles and was glad to report back to Satori that it matched my personal values. For example, I would never use words like “melanoma”, “prostitute” or “diarrhea”. It just isn’t done, old boy.
At any rate, projections show that the puzzle will never make me rich unless it becomes an outstanding success. That isn’t likely as it is, in the end, just a word puzzle. But I was attracted years back by the residual payments I recorded for that out-of-print book dealer. Authors who wrote things decades out of date were still receiving royalty payments from China and India. I mean, I knew about it, I just was not aware it was such an enduring cash flow. Recall how back in Texas the major dividing line between college and joining the army depended on whether or not your parent’s farm had a single leased donkey (oil pump) on it.
