One year ago today: June 14, 2020, see this jungle.
Five years ago today: June 14, 2016, a family of sparrows.
Nine years ago today: June 14, 2012, but over the horizon.
Random years ago today: June 14, 2017, Miami Bill of Rights.
Time is wasting, but new business undertakings never go smoothly. Today we talk mostly about publishing, as the sole remaining requisite is consensus from Tennessee. I’ve taken enough notes from the training sessions to know the other guys are winging it. Most of the training videos are unrehearsed and you spend a lot of time as they over-explain basics, then gloss over the parts you want. I gather the entire publishing process can be done on-line and remotely. If so, that ramps it up another notch to something we will almost certainly try. This is a significant departure from traditional publishing. Who remembers the writing club I attended until I got weary of the repetition? Well, somebody go warn them they are on completely the wrong path.
What’s gained most from these studies is that being an on-line copycat works. It’s not like before, where you copied just enough to gain resources to strike out on your own. Remember Ken, the guy who goes to the library or grocery store not to read or shop, but to stare at what other people are reading and buying? Should we call that the Sanchuk Syndrome? Anyway, that mental condition is pretty much sums up Amazon. However, that is where there is a great divide in motives. Once more, I say, today is mostly about this potential business.
Take for instance, the various options on the Amazon header. Most people never give them a peek, and if they do, it is to snoop. The advice I’m taking says goes further and uses these results to statistically explore what is selling. Channel your efforts accordingly. After a few days of practice at it, I see their meaning. What I did to accomplish this is go back over each video and create a flowchart of what they are saying. Darn rights they neglected this step. We’ve all seen this, people who have created a PowerPoint presentation that has no overall direction, just slide after slide until they get tired.
It does not take long to isolate a trend on Amazon. You can try it yourself. Go to Kindle and click on bestsellers. Pick a category, avoiding unduplicatable material like biographies, memoirs, and kid’s stories. Of what’s left, keep clicking sub categories until you get to the lowest level. What is selling? Suppose you found 60% of the books in a list were had a similar topic. There’s your opportunity. If you find twenty books selling well on the theme of wines, as I did, it’s easier than before to come up with something along the same lines.
Is this being a copycat? I’ve pondered their advice that at this point, the book with the best title and best cover design will be the winner. Glancing at the layout on how Kindle advertises, I’d say that’s probably the case. So it’s a good thing I have my own private world-class design bureau up on Tennessee. By now it’s becoming clear that in my lifetime, I have to give this a whril. How fast we move on this is dependent on the true cost of production, which nobody will tell, and the projected breakeven point which I guess is around 200 books. I estimate it to be around $800. That’s still a tenth of what the standard rates for self-publication by traditional means. The evident distinction is most people have $800.
Don’t borrow the money, and I’ll tell you why. Now that I’ve got you thinking logically about the money, look how long, on average it took the other books to sell 200 copies. None of the books I investigated was a runaway success. They all took their place amongst the others and plodded along for more than seven months to reach that plateau. Most beginners don’t have that kind of patience nor resources. I rejected many a business idea because of it, but this one has some desirable qualities, such as once the book is being sold, it requires no further effort from this end. And, in roughly 80% of the books I scrutinized, they were still selling at that rate years later.
Vegemite ingredients.
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The lessons say it the book production takes two weeks, so for beginner’s, I’d say one book per month. This is where you use your spreadsheet skills to program a chart of where you would be in one year, cranking out a book per month, selling 30 books per month or 1 book per day, as the figures begin to compound like interest. If your books sells for $19.99, consider half of that is your share but treat that as gross, not net. After expenses and taxes, take if from me, you will eventually see around $6 per edition. Of that half, or $3 will have to be plowed back to keep the business going—mark my words. And thinking you will sell a book a day is wishful thinking for most.
Nonetheless, that cascading effect of selling this way fits wonderfully with my conservative views on success. I’m always willing to invest on such chances. We’ve had one failure, which is more like I said pull the pin on Forex trading. That New Zealand pound drop seems to have wiped out an entire level of their pyramid scheme. I underline that it was not that that made up my mind, but the number of reports of people who said there were delays getting their money when they decided to pull out. The money was kept in a virtual bank in the Marshal Islands.
Now, if you do try to make a spreadsheet that maps out the income, you will run into a problem. Unless you know how to “drill-through”, this can’t be done on traditional 2-dimensional sheets. I don’t like drill-through, so I tend to create a series of sheets that carry forward results in a more visible path. In real time what happened is we set up a three hour zoom meeting to address around six problems that were creating roadblocks. In it’s rawest form, this was like a psychology session with two people from different planets—but the problems were corrected even if the ride wasn’t so smooth. You might like to know more about that.
The Reb has vastly more customer contact experience and is great at it, while I chose a career with no contact because I don’t like it. So it has been more than 40 years that I gave a hoot over a customer’s emotional needs. Business needs that he pays for, I’m on it, but his feelings aren’t my priority. And it has been 25 years since I felt any need to accommodate people, since I have had no incentive to change anything in all that time. I’ve played for enough rooms full of strangers to convince myself getting into audience mindsets isn’t worth it. Just do the most good for the largest number.
Ahem, this could be interpreted as me dwelling in the past. I do have the same attitude toward customers then as now, but I would not say that’s because I’m stuck there. Give me a reason to like people and I will. It is wrong to think that treating most people with indifference is not being nice. What part of indifference don’t they understand? Progress? I agree my last experience in dealing with people fundamentally different than myself ended 25 years ago, and so did my reason for doing so. I also don’t fly in airplanes anymore, that doesn’t mean I’ve not moved on. It should make good sense how in these circumstances, I would do business on-line because it minimizes dealing with customers.
So imagine one discussion we had around customer service. Both points of view are valid. She thinks my customer service skills are grounded back 25 years ago. I think the Internet has changed the model so much that most customer service is not even necessary, much less pursing that skill. The book topic in question was “Finding New Customers”. Which subtitle would you choose? “Ten Easy Steps” or “A Kinder Approach”. Your choice is also a good check on your character.
We left off where she thinks it is a difference that should be worked out, I left thinking I’m okay if I drink coffee and she drinks tea. I don’t see it as needing mending. Things change a lot like that and always will, so I say chalk it up to experience and we move on because there’s nobody else you can trust. Then, I cranked on the oven and made chocolate brownies. From a mix. To make brownies that look like the picture on the box, you need to use two packages.
ADDENDUM
Tomorrow is Jason Derek Brown Day, the guy who was convicted of being wanted for questioning. While this isn’t a new situation in America, being placed on the Most Wanted List for it definitely qualifies as “creative law enforcement”. No arrest, no charges, no trial, no conviction, but he is wanted. This is a curious circumstance in American law, which does not require anyone to speak to the police unless they want to. Thus, the police have become experts at making you want to, and it begins by throwing you in jail until you talk. I wonder, is that guy who won’t talk still being held. I’ve lost track of that guy.
Anyway, the cops can’t torture you directly, so they do it indirectly. Deprivation is a favorite. The trick is to get you to confess, thinking later you can retract it by stating you were under duress. Wrong, the jails are full of people who tried that. They forget the courts side with the cops. The rule has been for many decades, do not talk to the police under any circumstances and ask for a lawyer immediately, no matter how trivial the situation may seem to you.
In a related story, the police raided a safe deposit box business in Los Angeles, seizing nearly $90 million in value. The significance is, once again, that the box owners had never been accused of anything. In the US, you are supposed to have evidence before they seize property. Of course, the authorities say the box owners were involved in criminal activity, but they’ve already lost most credibility on that one. Some contents have been returned to box owners, no doubt after everything was carefully photographed and logged. (Some say the cops were just after the money.)
Here is a partial list of things you should NOT keep in a safe deposit box:
Passport – you can’t get it in an emergency.
Your Will – the bank loves to seal those boxes when you die.
Power of Attorney papers – dead people cannot confer POA.
Spare keys – can’t get them when you need them.
Anything illegal – safe deposit boxes are not safe.
Cash – it isn’t insured, loses value, and most banks forbid it.
So, we wonder what is going on with our favorite fugitive. No way the cops will let their despised Brown alone for a moment. He’s in Utah and they know his whereabouts, I say. But they don’t want another Waco on their report card, particularly not if it involves, as I suspect, Mormon kingpins. Keep an eye on how badly Biden botches the meetup with Putin. TMOR, the US does have a program that keeps people in jail without having been arrested or charged. It is called remand and is in complete disregard to the principle of presumed innocence and the police and media prefer the euphemism “held in custody”.
The exceptions are rare, since the US uses the bail system to discourage flight risk. So it is conspicuous that several hundred people that we know of are being detained without trial, a situation prohibited in the US by habeas corpus, the right to have the detention reviewed by a Judge. That so many people are held so long is a shameful revelation of how far radical liberalism has leached into our system. Putin knows all this.
