Our big night out is our annual splurge. My son marks off the days.  Our weekend hours of playing catch, me hitting him grounders and pitching him batting practice revolve around the state of Derek Jeter’s batting average or whether or not C.C. Sabathia might pitch the night we’re scheduled for the Bronx.

This year, I promised to teach him how to keep score.

We’re going to track every pitch and mark the game just like the official scorekeepers do.  He’s learned that a sharply hit grounder to shortstop with a man on first is probably going to end up on paper as a 6-4-3 double play, that a player who looks at a third strike gets the ignominy of a backwards “K,” and the fun of knowing he’ll be able to conjure the game in his mind just by looking at a piece of paper.

I tell him about when I was a kid and of how I got to the ballpark three hours before the first pitch so that I could watch my hero, Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente, take batting practice and basket catch deep fly balls in Right Field. I tell him how Clemente was able to effortlessly catch a ball on the warning track, turn and throw a frozen rope all the way, chest high, to home plate. How Clemente was an even greater man than player.

How he shamed a huge chunk of racism out of a big city just by being who he was. When sportscasters nicknamed him “Bobby” to make his name easier to remember for white fans, he refused to answer their questions. His name was Roberto. He was a man, not a boy. How he chartered a plane, loaded it with relief supplies for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua and gave his life trying to help complete strangers.

He asks if we can go see batting practice too.  I say sure and then find out that the stadium opens two hours before game times, not three like in my day. As the Yankees take batting practice first, there is no way we’ll be able to see A-Rod or Mark Teixeira work out their kinks, but we’ll be able to see the Tampa Bay Rays hit.

Better than nothing, but I can see the disappointment in my guy’s eyes. He perks up again, though, when I tell him that CC is pitching against Tampa Bay’s ace David Price.

The day arrives and I pick up my son from school at 4 o’clock.  We head down the street and split a pizza before getting the subway.  I’ve paid a King’s ransom for the tickets and I’m as excited as he is.  We’ll be about twenty rows back from the first base dugout and will have a perfect wide angle of the entire field.  The subway ride seems to take forever, but we make it out and onto the Yankee grounds at 5:05, exactly two hours before the first pitch.

I’ve got my messenger bag packed with sweaters for both of us, my wallet, keys…all that kind of stuff.  You’re not allowed to bring your own food and water into the stadium, unless it is wrapped in the manner prescribed at the official Yankee website, and I didn’t have the time to sort through all of that. I guess the team isn’t really making any money on the high priced tickets, so they have to move a lot of popcorn and stuff to make up for it. Plus the new Yankee Stadium cost over one and a half billion dollars to build, even though the team was given innumerable tax breaks etc. from the city and state of New York to help with the cost. George Steinbrenner had threatened to take the team to New Jersey if the Yankees were not incentivized to stay in the Bronx. They were.

The first experience we have at the ballpark is the “pat down” and search of my bag. I’ll never get used to the indignities of our brave new “homeland security” world, but I grimace through it and chalk it up to the cost of living in a free country.

Now we give our tickets to the ticket taker. Except he doesn’t take them.  He tells me to hold the bar code under a computer and wait for the beep.  My son’s ticket beeps, but he doesn’t understand the protocol and walks past the “turnstile.”  The ticket taker yells for him to come back and asks him if he’s had his “Wheaties” that morning.  My son is confused and a little bit scared as he has no idea what this man is asking him.  He doesn’t eat cereal.

I explain to my son that he needs to push the handle of the turnstile down and walk through that way.  He does so. I do the same thing and we’re inside the “Great Hall.”  It’s some kind of cheap plastic cup promotion night that Premio Foods—makers of the official Yankee sausage—is sponsoring for the first 25,000 fans.

A large woman jams the cup in my son’s face and he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do.

“It’s a free cup! Take it!”

I tell the lady, “Thank you, but we’d rather not have it.” She gives me a dirty look.

Now I begin to register the aural assault.  Innumerable speakers blaring inane advertising and “special Yankee experience” opportunities as 30 db serve as the white noise behind the live hawkers selling hats, bobble heads, Carvel Ice cream in plastic Yankee helmets, and reminders that entry into the Mohegan Sun Sports Bar located above Monument Park in Center Field and the Yankee Audi Club in Left Field are only open to season ticket licensees. I can’t help but regret that I’m not a season ticket licensee.

I finally locate the small podium dedicated to the sale of game day programs.  They are $10.00 and all of the articles have been written and printed months before so that they can use the same program for every home game.  Two thirds of the magazine is advertising but it does have the scorecard inside. They even give me a little pencil.

We make it deeper into the stadium.  The next thing we see, before even making out the field, is the massive 100 foot by 60 foot television screen in center field. More marketing and commercials about how to “experience” Yankee stadium, locations of the best spots for buying memorabilia, how to apply for Yankee credit cards, with “live” correspondents inside the stadium giving remote reports about how fans are loving their food or “experience” and asking them how many games they come to each year.

I try and ignore it, but my little guy can barely walk.  He’s so overwhelmed with stimulation that he can’t help keeping his eyes glued to that TV.  It’s hard for me not to stare at it too.  And I’m getting these strange urges to buy buy buy.  Like I’m a nasty, cheap miser. If I don’t buy something material, my kid will never remember the “experience.”  I resist.

We make it to our seats.  It’s still a good hour and a half away from the opening pitch.  We sit down. While the seats have a great view, they also have two speakers from a higher balcony deck pointed directly at the back of our skulls. It’s difficult to talk over the sales pitches. We’re watching Tampa Bay’s assistant coaches hitting fungo ground balls to the infielders, fly balls to the outfielders, etc.

Everything I promised my son is actually happening on the field and these pros are as remarkable doing what they do as I’ve told him.

“See how he attacks the ground ball, gloves it, sets himself, and then throws? How his front foot points directly at first base after his follow through?”

But former Yankee David Wells is on the TV talking about something else entirely (Yankee Fantasy camp for the Ladies) and my son can’t peel his eyes away from the screen.

Now our waiter comes up to us and blocks our view of the field. He introduces himself and pitches all of the remarkable food and drink we can buy from him.  I buy popcorn, a bottle of water and a beer just to get him to go away.  He can’t betray his disappointment with my lame order.

Right before the popcorn comes, a nicely dressed young man comes walking down our aisle.  He holds his hand out toward me and out of common courtesy, I stupidly shake it.

“Hi, I’m Nick Matthews from the Yankees. How are you enjoying the game?”

“Great, just trying to have a nice night out with my son.”

“Ah yes, I remember how my dad used to take me to games….Can I ask you a question?”

I don’t answer him.  Pretend I didn’t hear.  It’s not out of the question considering the speaker volume.

“How many games do you go to each year?” he asks.

“Just the one,” I say.

He’s perplexed. “Can I ask you why just one?”

“It’s extremely expensive” I say.

He looks shocked. “Hmm.” Then he holds out a card and asks me to fill it out.  He obviously is trolling the crowd to get marketing information. The card is asking a load of personal information, email address, date of birth, how many kids I have, how much money I make, who my favorite Yankee is…

I decline to fill out the card and thankfully he vanishes.  Now our waiter is back to see if we’re enjoying our popcorn.

After he leaves, a photographer comes up and takes our picture without asking.  He hands me a card. It’s pitching me to “Get your keepsake photo Today!” at a kiosk at the New Era Team Store, but to allow 30 minutes for processing.

This goes on and on the entire evening.

We persevere though and dutifully follow every pitch and mark up our scorecard with aplomb. When we have to go to the bathroom, I come back and the guy behind us gives me the full scope of what I missed.

“Ball, ball, strike, strike…F8”

When Curtis Granderson hits a home run, we cheer wildly. He catches the last out of the game in deep center field too. Jeter doesn’t get one hit, but he doesn’t dog it running out his ground balls either.  CC goes 8 innings and gets the win.

On the subway home, my son sits with the scorecard, thinking back on every pitch, hit, stolen base, error, fly out and strike out of the evening.

It occurs to me that keeping detailed score is what writers and artists do.

They take in the stories around them and dutifully burn the memories into a scorecard of sorts in their minds. They disregard the BS and experience what is real, even in the most artificial circumstances.  They record the fact that most human players contend with failure after failure (the essence of baseball and of a rich and full life) and still commit to keep putting everything they have into each action.

Like life, some guys cheat in baseball and get away with it. But my gut is that most of them don’t.

They laugh off the hype machinery that forces them to “Welcome you to Yankee Stadium” ad nauseum on the big screen as the cost of playing. And as the service they provide to justify their massive paychecks. They aren’t really being paid to play.  They’d still be humping it in the minor leagues, living off of per diem money, if they didn’t have the stuff for the Bigs.

They’re being paid to entice people to buy their official Major League Jersey, their autographed baseball, all the while buying mementoes of all of the other wonders of the 27 Time World Series Champs.

I feel better about the night, and tell myself to let all of the nonsense go. The core appeal of the game is still there and there are admirable guys still playing it.

The next day, my son has little league.  I pick him up and we walk to his field in Central Park.  He tells me about how he let all of his friends know about the game last night and that they sat spellbound as he was able to do a running play by play.

The game starts and my little guy comes up to hit. My phone rings. I mute it and watch my son take his swings.

When the half of that inning ends, I check my phone and listen to the message.

“Hi Shawn, it’s Nick Matthews from the New York Yankees…”

One day at school, a frienemy teased her about having had a play date with another girl in their class. My daughter had not been included. Nah…Nah…Nah Nah Nah.

I discovered this while helping her put on her tights. It was the day she’d planned her revenge.

I’m pleased that my children were born in an age of abundance. I grew up in the era of scarcity.  In my day, there were only so many jobs at the steel mill, there were only so many football scholarships available…there were only a few opportunities to “make it.”

If someone won, someone else lost. The sum of the positive and the negative equaled zero. That made a lot of sense back then when our worlds were provincial and closed.

But this competition for scarce resources (jobs, education, status) created a “give as good as you get” culture. If another person was kind and generous to you, you owed them something in return. If they attacked, you hit back with equal ferocity. Accepting a kindness as a gift or turning the other cheek upset the social balance.

“Can you believe Bridget never sent me a Thank You card after I watched her kids all afternoon?”

“Everyone loses a fight sometimes, son, but you can’t let another boy intimidate you. Get back in there and get your licks in.”

This was a world that ran on fear, mistrust, and isolation. To open oneself up in search of an authentic connection with another human being—and all the joy and sorrow that entails—was lunacy. The naïve who showed any vulnerability quickly learned about the necessity of building walls around themselves. How to be one way with one person and another way with the next… Insert your own remembrances of fat jokes, fat lips, and fat chances here… We’ve all got ‘em.

But seeing the world today through the lens of scarcity is a mistake.  We no longer live in tiny little kindergarten communities where everyone knows our name and knows where we rank on the big scoreboard of life.  In fact, some of us don’t even speak to our next door neighbors.  We’re too busy keeping track of our hundreds of Facebook friends who live thousands of miles away. We live in a global village today, with abundant opportunities to authentically connect with likeminded people.

In the world of scarcity, our actions were for the most part, automatic. My father did it that way, as his father did before him, who am I to do something differently?

But in an abundant world, that old model is ridiculous. The old way is not just becoming more and more ineffectual (see American Icon by Bryce Hoffman ); clinging to it distracts us from our real work.

The big scarcity scoreboard just doesn’t make sense anymore.  There are just too many people who believe too many different things and care about too many other things to tally. Who is the best microbiologist today? Who is the best book publisher? Who is the best CEO?

There isn’t any one answer because it depends on who or what group you ask. . . . And each day more and more little groups are formed online joining the conversation. They have different skin colors, different religions, and different places of birth, but they value the same passions.

It makes perfect sense that the digital disintegration of the scoreboard causes a lot of anxiety.

How do you rank yourself in a world where the pseudonymous “Tyler Durden” at www.ZeroHedge.com is as respected and as vilified as the head of JP Morgan Chase?

You can’t.

Those still trying to find their place on the scoreboard end up on Reality TV, or on the Forbes 400 or are gaming The New York Times bestseller list. To what end? To what purpose do these hierarchies serve us?

The pursuit of titles (Shift Foreman or Head of the Homeowners Association) used to keep us all on an even keel—in control. The payoff for keeping in line was security. I put in my 25 years, and then I get my pension. That was the mantra of men in my youth. It was life led like the lead character in Jackson Browne’s classic song The Pretender.

We can no longer rely on the pre-programmed “take care of number one” scarcity decision-making strategies of our fathers. In his terrific new book How Will You Measure Your Life? Clayton Christensen writes about the failures of “marginal thinking.” Is it so shocking that a monomaniacal pursuit of a life at the top, even just wanting to make it to the middle, is the source of so much sadness and alienation in the world?

So if a global abundant village means that we can’t live in the winners and losers world of our past, how do we navigate this new paradigm?

The first thing we need to do is remember that every action we take is a choice. Just like in the old scarcity model, each choice in an abundant universe has a positive and a negative option. But the similarity ends there. The positive option in the scarcity model just moves us one step closer to our goal of being the employee of the month or head coach.  The negative simply sets us back a step from that goal.  That’s it. There’s no higher purpose in the scarcity model other than to attain a material objective—your name on a plaque, or a David Mamet-ian second place set of steak knives (check out Glengarry Glen Ross).

Ever watch an interview with a Super Bowl winning player? Words like “it’s unbelievable” inevitably come out of their mouths. It’s not that they can’t believe how wonderful and fulfilling their victory is, it’s how empty they feel after attaining it. They come to understand that old Peggy Lee refrain “Is that all there is?”

But in the abundant model, the positive option is the one that expresses our authentic selves . . . the action that we know is “the right thing to do.” Not the one that will get us up the ladder. In fact, the negative option in the abundant model is continuing to blindly behave as if resources are scarce. “If I fudge this one little piece of data, it will move me ahead of the PhD pack and I will get closer to my ‘dream’ of being the youngest Nobel Prize winner in history!” And then what?

Yes, we can cynically manipulate the abundant digital landscape for our own “gain,” be it for money, power, fame, or whatever makes us feel like a big shot.  We can create fake email addresses and bogus news stories and take advantage of the insatiable 24/7 news cycle all in pursuit of page views that we can parlay into higher advertising rates.

[I just read a bound galley of a jaw-dropping book about this phenomenon called, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, by Ryan Holiday…someone I met through Steve’s website.]

We can trick people we don’t really know into debasing themselves for our entertainment and profit. We can start up companies with complex exit strategies for the sole purpose of being bought out by Google.

But these kinds of choices serve the negative old ‘dog eat dog’ scarcity model. We know this because we feel like Hell after we’ve dumped our toxic psychic sludge into the world just for some extra digits in our bank account. No matter how much we “win” when we behave abiding the zero sum mentality, it’s never enough. Ask Charlie Sheen.

How many impossibly rich people and celebrities do you think are content…sure that their contributions to the world are the best expressions of themselves? Are they living the dream or are they trapped in a nightmare?

“Most people in showbiz are either bitter that they aren’t huge stars or unhappy that they are. From the Starbucks barista to Oscar winners, almost everyone thinks that they’re getting a raw deal. Here’s my advice to them and to all of you: Quit.”

—Bobcat Goldthwait )

The alternative to holding on to the old “I’m Number 1!” world is to consciously think about every action you choose. Is this action a positive expression of who I am or is it a negative one? Do I want to send positive mojo into the world or negative?

Taking the positive route is hard. There is no “atta boy!” slap on the back. There is no limousine or Gulfstream Jet waiting for you at the end of the day. The food is lousy and the portions are small. There is only the opportunity to do the work you were put on earth to do. Seize that opportunity. Thousands of years of civilization had to happen before it could emerge. It’s here.

Find the labor that will give your life meaning.  You may never have a million dollar beach house, but you won’t have a hard time looking in a mirror and you’ll certainly sleep better. And who knows that beach house may be in the offing too. Just don’t work for the beach house.  Work to contribute that thing you were put on this earth to leave behind.

Yes, the digital world of abundance, scale, and infinity can create a 100 Billion dollar IPO. Whoo Hoo! But what is more remarkable is that it can also provide for people who want to explore an idiosyncratic territory without slavishly climbing a hierarchy.  They can share their work and build digital communities of compadres who appreciate their True Gen…with no advertising revenue streams, no twenty five page “privacy policies,” and no Bullshit.

Authenticity and hard work are valued in this abundant world in a way we are only beginning to understand. There will always be disingenuous hustlers and scammers and cynics to prey on us, but what is amazing is that the abundant digital world gives us the chance to shame them into becoming their better selves. Not by literally “shaming” them with scarlet letters, but by just not playing that game anymore. The more who don’t, the better the world will be.

There is no reason why the positives can’t outnumber the negatives.

All of this scarcity and abundance soup I’ve spilled above is just the result of listening to a hurt little girl and wanting to teach her how to metabolize her pain.

To see the world as a child does is a gift.

She told me that she couldn’t wait to get to school and stick it to that friend of hers who made her feel bad about not being invited on the play date. She had a play date herself that day and her nasty friend wasn’t included in this one. She was going to give it to her as good as she got.

Children are our best and worst selves.  You’ll find no better representation of joy and unrestrained fury than watching a child play whiffle ball on a warm summer evening or putting on a puppet show on a rainy afternoon. A child has both light and dark impulses and indulges them in equal measure. They aren’t yet wired to make rational choices.

They do eventually learn to choose. And the way they learn is by watching us. Not listening to us. Watching what we do…day by day, year by year until their brains process the information. Mom always holds the door for old people…that’s what I should do too.

I explained to my daughter that I thought it would be better for her not to taunt her friend about the play date. Don’t add more hurt to the world to get even. She listened and really seemed to get it.

That night I came home from work and asked her what she had decided to do.

“I told her about my play date and made her feel bad,” she said.

I gave her a hug and remembered a passage that still sticks with me from my days living in scarcity, sitting alone in the back of a Sunday school classroom over forty years ago…

Paul the apostle’s first epistle to the Corinthians…

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Experience is a factor.

At baseball games, my four-year-old sings “Take me out to the ball game . . . buy me some peanuts and Apple Jacks . . . ” She’s had the cereal more often than the snack, so her understanding of the lyrics is infused with personal experience.

What to do?

Misunderstandings are impossible to avoid. When sharing Steve’s work, we’ve tried to remain clear and straightforward. We know readers bring their own experiences to everything they read/do—and we know we can’t control that piece.

Trying too hard is a factor.

Last summer, a college student came to my door to sell me on the services of the company for which she worked. She told me all about what the other companies in my area didn’t do. Something about her being nice and stumbling over her message, trying to keep things straight, and me remembering when I was in that position years ago, kept me from shutting the door. I stuck around until Silence visited. I asked her a little about what she was doing that day, going door to door and then thanked her and turned down the company.

What to do?

What the college student didn’t know was that I had been unhappy with my current company and was looking for a new one. Her personality had won me over. Had she spent less time talking about why all the other companies were bad, and more time stating what was right about her company, I would have jumped ship. She was trying too hard, and it back-fired. As Steve would say, she wasn’t “sitting chilly.”

I can’t tell you how many phone calls Steve, Shawn, Jeff, and I have had about how we share with others. At some point, we’ve all been that young college student. And while our hearts go out to her, we don’t want to be her again. We want to share what makes the most sense, in the way that we’d want to receive it ourselves.

Audio interference is a factor.

This week I decided to ditch my fax machine and separate phone line and save some money by using an online fax service for those rare instances when a fax is the only way to get things done.

I called a few companies. The one with the best pricing and program had a problem with audio interference. As I spoke with the salesman, I heard Impatience and Condescension answer my questions. Online, the company came through loud and clear. Via one of its reps, it was garbled, corrupted. I tuned out.

What to do?

Steve can’t do all of the sharing. It eats into the time he needs to write his books. Shawn, Jeff and I work with Steve to share his work. Do I feel like I’ve always gotten it right? No.

Every now and then Petty and Anger stop by for a visit. They like to debate Sanity and Calm. I hate to admit that there’s a battle, but one happens from time to time—usually when Nasty visits the comments section. And sometimes, I’m just tired. It’s easier to be short—which just brings on the audio interference. In the end, tuning into the “Do Right” frequency allows for the greatest, most-well-received broadcast.

***

There are other factors, but the three above are the ones that seem to pop up the most often.

In the end, we’re trying to remain clear and straight-forward, sit chilly, and do right.

How Mulally got Ford out of its tailspin reminded me of pages 147 through 159 in The War of Art. In just these twelve pages, Steve Pressfield puts his finger on exactly how our world view directs our actions.

Mulally’s turnaround of Ford is a brilliant case study to support Pressfield’s ideas. He switched Ford’s orientation from hierarchy to territory. The book reveals:

We no longer live in isolated analog hierarchies.

Ford can’t rely on consistent F-150 sales just because it has enough market share, solid distribution, some economies of scale, and capacity. Rather they needed to strip down the bureaucratic hierarchies and all work toward a common goal…producing the right number of cars to meet demand with impeccable quality. No one buys a Ford just because it’s a Ford anymore.

Our world is just too connected to rely on BS.

Too many other car options…too easy to find influential tribal voices that debunk cynical marketing. Too many people online writing their truth…“don’t believe the hype, the Honda Ridgeline kicks the F-150’s butt.” (Just FYI, I don’t know anything about trucks, so please don’t take the above statement seriously. Find someone who does know trucks to give you the real scoop.)

We live in a global digital territory now.

The pursuit of “We’re Number One!” by concentrating on beating your competition is now absurd. Especially when your competition is as screwed up as you are. Create something great within your chosen territory that people don’t even know they want. Like a Ford Flex or a Pebble watch. Or a book about gardening in raised beds. Make it better. Then do it again.

Analog hierarchies use the pursuit of the fruits of labor—money, status, Big Kahuna-ship—to “incentivize” individuals. Do this and we’ll pay you more and get you into the Country Club… Daniel Pink writes a lot about this and he’s found that it is not the best way to motivate a human being.

What digital territories demand is much more difficult. They demand honesty, integrity, and connecting with other people to explore common interests. The fruits of our labor in a territory aren’t about being named one of People magazine’s 100 most beautiful people. The reward is simply to continue doing your work. If your work is professional and meaningful, there’s a tribe of like-minded people on the planet who will find and support you. If it isn’t, work on something else.

Alan Mulally’s big triumph was not making billions of dollars for Ford.  It was getting the people who spend eight hours a day at Ford to love their work.

So what does this have to do with Book Publishing?

These two books, American Icon and The War of Art, got me to think about where the book business stands today and where it’ll be tomorrow. Don’t cringe.  It’s good news. Very good news.

For fun, I made a couple of visuals to explain.

The first I’m calling “The Analog Hierarchy Ladder.”

This is the old Big Six scarcity model . . . writers getting picked by established experts who in turn present readers with officially sanctioned publications. The message is that these books are the “true gen.” The rest are vanity.

The second I’m calling “The Digital Territory Wheel.”

With the dawn of the Internet, the ladder began to lose its rigidity. And today, simply by connecting its bottom to its top, it has morphed into a wheel. The writer and the reader can now talk to each other without permission from the other four traditional players. Revolutionary.

Big traditional publishing will continue.  In order to remain profitable, though it will have to change in much the same way that Ford had to change. But we all crave third party validation. Being published by Knopf or Little Brown or St. Martin’s Press means that your work is professional and valid.

If you are offered a contract by one of the Bigs, it’s an honor. Pat yourself on the back and then start your next book. Plus, these big companies can finance projects that are extremely daunting.  They will remain the Medicis for great artists like Robert Caro and Steven Pressfield (whose next project requires a dizzying amount of work and expense). We need them to get those blockbuster works funded.

The new Territorial publishing will thrive. Brave professional souls willing to forgo the advance check and spec it, now have the ability to build their own long tail businesses. I think that these “little engines that can” will not only increase the number of book readers and writers, but will be the industry leaders that truly globalize book publishing.

The wheel is turning and it ain’t gonna stop.

Where was book publishing going? How could he stay in the ring? How was I going to help him?

For quite a while, Steve Pressfield and I have been kicking around ideas for future Black Irish Books. We want to come up with projects that would be embraced by an audience wide enough to financially support writers we admire. The byproduct of that goal will keep the BIB bank balance in the black too. The way we’ve structured the company is that we won’t make any money if our writers don’t. In fact if a big enough audience doesn’t come to the party, we’ll be out all of the capital we invested to produce the project from idea to finished book. We’re willing to take that risk. We’re betting on ourselves.

We’re not picking books from submissions, so please don’t send us your Uncle Ralph’s unpublished fantasy series. Tell Uncle Ralph to get it out there himself.

Rather we’re thinking up the books we want to read and the ones we think you guys will want to read. Then we’ll look for Pros we think would enjoy working with us. If the alchemy works, a cool book will result and we’ll all put a few shekels in the bank. If it doesn’t at least we’ll learn something.

In caveman-speak the proposition is pretty simple: We like this kind book. You great writer. We help you write book so we can share with friends. Friends buy book and fund next project. That kind of thing.

I have a mongo pet project/s that I’ve been trying to put together for three years…it requires a writer with mucho cojones to pull it off.  Sort of someone like Steve back when he was living in a van down by the river—a man or woman who is a Pro with like 7,000 hours knocked off their 10,000 hour craft polish. I think I could help him/her slice that last 3,000 down into a fraction, but he/she will have to put their ego in check to get the time warp. A lot harder to do than you might think.

I wear a lot of hats—agent, editor, writer and publisher—and I’ve learned a few things over my twenty years in the business. I want to pass those lessons on. That’s why I’m here.

I thought this client would get what Steve and I are trying to do. He’s a very successful journalist—Columbia School of Journalism Masters after Sarah Lawrence B.A. and every byline scalp a MJ would want hanging from his belt.  He just delivered his first book to a very big deal publishing house. It’s the house that everyone wants on the spine on his/her book. Lots of validation to be published there.

I sold that book for him when I was at the Endeavor Agency (now William Morris Endeavor). Despite his owning the story lock, stock and barrel, the book put him on his ass a number of times.  It took three times as long to wrap his arms around it. And he wasn’t given a King’s ransom of an advance to write it either. In the end he had to cut 48,000 words of hard work to get it where it needed to be.

He told me that he’d made peace with it, no matter the response from his Big Six editor. He was emailing him the manuscript after our meeting.

Why did I think this guy would “get” my pitch?

1. He didn’t quit on his book. Even when he probably should have. For the pragmatist, quitting and returning the advance would have been the right financial decision.  He could have maintained his ego as a full time breadwinning journalist and write the blowup off as a lesson learned.

But this guy is an artist, not a pragmatist. He made the hard choice. Because he needed to stay focused on the story in his book, he didn’t take any high paying freelance job offers that came his way. Doing that journalism would distract him. Instead, he moonlighted doing odd jobs to bring in the necessary cash to keep his family in Cheerios. He laughed off the struggle, too. Didn’t bitch about it.

1. Cutting your work is excruciating and 48,000 words is the equivalent of half a book. He did it because the story required him to do it. Every single one of those dead words hurt him, but precious sentences that don’t serve a story need to go. So they went.
2. He’s not afraid of his big bad editor sitting in a wood paneled office. What the editor thinks of his final work is not something he can control. It has nothing to do with his true triumph—beating Resistance.
3. He set up a morning coffee meeting with me for the very day he would turn in his book. He chose to start something new just as he completed his last project. No celebratory drinks date with his cronies. No hiding in a hole waiting for judgment from on high. He has more work to do. He wants to get to it.
4. This guy is a Pro.

I pitched him three intricately entwined projects. To do one…requires that he do them all. And they would all be on spec. There is no way that any of the Big Six would get near the ambitious nature of this endeavor. It’s daunting.

The difference is that I’ll work with him from the very start. On spec too. I’ll chip in my intellectual capital along with him.

Believe it or not, this is a major innovation. An editor helping a writer before the writer has written one word is crazy. But I’ve done it before…quietly…and it’s a blast. I confess. I love this work. And now the publishing world has opened a portal for me to do it more and more. I explain this to him, but I don’t really have to.  He knows how hard it was to do his first book with zero help along the way. A Pro offering help to another Pro? Don’t think twice…take it.

Innovation requires a lot of spec work and often the goals you set at the outset fail, but the residual lessons you learn while putting in the effort are priceless. He’ll have someone in his foxhole this time. And I’ll give him the benefit of everything I know.

I could tell by the excitement in his eyes that he was “in” after five minutes. In eighteen months (at the very least) we’ll see if my pet project was everything I thought it would be… The beautiful part is that whatever happens, it won’t be mine anymore.  It will be ours.

***
April 20, 2011, The Domino Project released Steve’s book Do the Work and we were gearing up for the releases of The Warrior Ethos and The Profession.

I look at April 20 this year, like my friend looking at the moon, hundreds of miles away. Trees and clouds change up her view. Hindsight changes up mine.

I woke up April 20, 2011, thinking I was a pro.

I went to bed April 20, 2011, knowing that I was an amateur.

***

End of day, April 20, 2011, news about the deaths of photojournalists Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington started breaking.

By that evening, I made the connection between Chris and a high school friend.

Brothers.

***
I grew up in an Army family and for as long as I can remember, have known others visited by Death. Family. Friends.

April 20, 2011, was the first time Death stopped me in my tracks.

***

Steve talks about doing what you love—that thing you would do if you were the only one on the planet.

Last year I admitted that I wasn’t doing it.

And almost every day since, I’ve thought about Chris, doing what he loved.

And I’ve asked, “Why him?”

I’ve known veterans and their families who have experienced the same loss, but Chris’ stayed with me in a different way.

***

In an interview Steve did almost two years ago with Sunni Brown he quoted Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk:

“I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, but she’s been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.”

I know that train. It visits me when I’m reading Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner. Their voices call out to the ones circling about, and chase them into my head. And if I’m lucky, I capture them in the margins of what I’m reading, grabbing that pen, writing as fast as I can because I know they’ll be gone by the time I hit my computer.

Until April 20th, I wasn’t racing as hard. Those voices ride the express train and I’d set myself up as a local station, not even on its route.

***
I know a few things about Chris.

I know his brother was the subject of his experiments, that he asked him to run, to jump, so that he could practice capturing motion, and that his photographs wallpapered the room they shared through high school.

I know “he found his life’s calling once he had his first camera.” “I got a cheap point and shoot camera and was taking pictures and showed him,” said long-time friend and journalist Greg Campbell. “And then he went out and bought the same camera. He was 16 and he came barging in when I was a busboy at the Lobster House. He burned through that camera and bought a Yashika from a pawn shop. He had found his life’s calling once he had his first camera. He’d have it 24/7.”

I know he figured out how to be where he needed to go. “The first story we worked on, for his college newspaper, was Bill Clinton’s inauguration,” said Greg. “We didn’t have press credentials. We talked our way into the inaugural balls and got super close pics of Bill and Hillary. My aunt had an apartment at the Watergate and he broke into my dead uncle’s closet, and was wearing dusty clothes and had this drive —this grab-life-by-the-shoulders approach.”

I know he cut his teeth in Kosovo and, from Greg, I know that when some were pulling back from the dangerous work “Chris took the opposite approach and was in every war and natural disaster in the last 10 years.”

I know that he had fire. It was translated into his work.

***

There’s a quote from GEN George C. Patton that I keep going back to:

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died.
Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

I wish Chris was still here. I wish this for his family and for his friends, and for all those yet-to-be-taken images, still riding that express train.

He lived out loud.

April 20, 2012, I am thankful for this connection I’ve felt to him. I never met him, but when I think about wanting to quit, thinking about him reminds me to be a pro. To feed my passion. To do what I love. To translate fire into my work.

***
The Chris Hondros Fund was set up after Chris’ death, “supporting and advancing the work of photojournalists and raising understanding of the issues facing those reporting from conflict zones.” Please visit the fund’s site to learn more about Chris and to view some of his work.

He had the courage to pre-emptively send an email (read it here) to hundreds of industry insiders this past Wednesday. In that email, Sargent did something that gives me great hope about the future of publishing.

He used the word “I.”

Macmillan CEO John Sargent

“I am Macmillan’s CEO and I made the decision to move Macmillan to the agency model. After days of thought and worry, I made the decision on January 22nd, 2010 a little after 4:00 AM, on an exercise bike in my basement. It remains the loneliest decision I have ever made, and I see no reason to go back on it now.”

We live in an era when the big publishers choose to refer to themselves with the sterile and unspecific “we.” We regret to inform you… After careful consideration, we came to the conclusion… That kind of thing.

But book publishing has been the bastion of a High School-esque collective of dysfunctional, often weird—but always passionate—book nerds from time immemorial. They work crazy hours for something other than overtime or stock options. Some have accidentally made a very good living, but no one enters traditional book publishing to get rich.

At their core, publishing people care about words. They live to facilitate the magical communion between writers and readers. Is there anything nobler?

But over the years, corporate overseers have reengineered publishing’s idiosyncratic DNA. Books are now acquired by committees. There are a lot of meetings. Like a crazy number of meetings. And finding books that every department can get behind are the order of the day. There is now a very long process to get a book from acquisition through publication. It’s a gauntlet that only a master of business administration could love—form filings lead to PowerPoint presentations which lead to catalogs and sales calls with more PowerPoint…

Publishing has been a business-to-business concern for decades now. But passion is rarely found in a purchase order.

Rest assured, book nerds are still in-house. They just get shot down trying to acquire the odd books that the category buyers at the retail chains “wouldn’t get.” So those strange book phenomena like the Fifty Shade of Grey trilogy are only published by the Bigs after they’ve emerged from the primordial self-publishing soup.

Like other corporations, big publishing today announces its decisions in well-vetted press releases written by anonymous publicity department professionals. Rather than any one person willing to be the face of a company and saying something meaningful, we get headlines like this: Hachette Admits No Liability, and Asks Government to Ensure “We don’t return to the days of monopoly”; Harper “Made A Business Decision.” Without a human to come out from behind the curtain, it’s hard to click through that kind of link. That’s probably why they make statements anonymously. Less clicking, less caring. But when no living person comments, we forget that there are real live people who work at those companies. Remind us and we will care.

In the context of this murk, Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s decision to put himself forward is all the more heartening. We’ve all been on that bike in the basement sweating out a tough decision at least one time in our lives—if we’re really in the heat of our work we’ve been there multiple times. We have to choose whether to do what everyone else is doing, or to fight for what we think is right.

John Sargent chose to fight in 2010. Not only that, he put the decision squarely on his own shoulders. He publicly battled Amazon in a throw down public confrontation. And his insistence on the agency model not only helped Macmillan, it brought considerable financial stability to the supply side of the business—publishers. It seemingly made the old school model viable again. And the book business went back to normal. He’s choosing to fight now too.

But the Justice Department thinks that this stability came at the expense of the demand side of the business—book buyers. This is the crux of the contretemps.

Are you still awake? Is it hard to really care about the fall of the agency model? It is for me and I love this kind of stuff.

I don’t know John Sargent well. We’ve met a handful of times close to a decade ago when my small publishing company, Rugged Land Books, was distributed by the Macmillan sales force. This was back in 2002 when he was new to the job. I was at sales conference and I expected to be ushered into a corner of a ballroom and introduced to the new CEO. He’d be in a suit holding court, nodding a lot…looking implacable.

Instead Sargent could have been the sales rep from (ironically) the Pacific Northwest. He was wearing khakis and a flannel shirt and we bumped into each other in the salad bar line. I didn’t know he was the CEO until he went on stage to give the company’s state of the union address.

I got the feeling that he purposefully didn’t wear the CEO costume because he didn’t think the company was all about him. He was there to do his best for Macmillan’s books just as everyone else was. So the fact that he has put himself forward in the way that he has now speaks to his commitment to his tribe. After all, character is revealed by action. While others hid behind “we,” Sargent went with “I.”

Today, John Sargent believes that nothing less than the entire book publishing business is at risk of being overrun by a sinister force. He’s not alone. With the agency model gone, the thinking is that Amazon will go back to slashing eBook prices and the now inevitable race to the eBook price bottom will resume. With its deep pockets and rapidly expanding global distribution, Amazon will slowly lure the big bestselling writers from the big publishing companies over to its side.

Revenue at the big houses will continue to fall—only now exponentially—forcing the Big Six to downsize and/or merge. If someone doesn’t do something, Amazon will become a book publishing monopoly and once it does, intellectual content and discourse will be dominated by a single uber-company. Not good.

John Sargent has the guts to do something about this doomsday scenario. It means that much to him. He will stand up for, and with his colleagues, prove that the agency model was not the result of collusion. In fact, it was the best practice to ensure competition.

Book publishing needs an army of men and women like John Sargent—passionate about what they believe and willing to withstand the slings and arrows of powers much greater than they are. His is a very compelling story. Much better than “Harper Made a Business Decision.”

The only problem is that John Sargent chose the wrong fight. He’s on the eastern front when he should be shoring up the western.

He’s going to defend his company against the oxymoronic Justice Department? To what end? An apology? Less onerous terms for Macmillan’s ultimate settlement?

I love impossible odds. I started an independent publishing company in 2001. But geez, even a black Irishman like me can see the endgame here.

The fact is that the agency model is dead. And the reality is that it was only a stop gap anyway.

I think John Sargent should swallow his anger and good old-fashioned American stubbornness about this footnote in publishing history and redirect his passion. He and his fellow publishers—separately of course—should focus their energies and resources on innovation. Not strategies to manipulate “terms of sale,” but real innovation.

Let’s face it; the future of book publishing is B2C—business directly to the consumer. If you can talk to the consumer and the consumer trusts you, you’ll survive. If you rely on other people to talk to customers for you, you’re in deep trouble.

So make publishing personal again.

Come up with business models that allow the strange creatures within your citadels that dedicate their lives to books shine. You know who they are—editors, artists, sales people, publicists, marketers. Introduce these people to readers. Let them be weird. Let the conversations begin…and make sure to have your own store. Sell direct.

Rather than “stopping Amazon!” from taking over book publishing, I think John Sargent and all of the incredible people who work at Macmillan should focus on “out Amazoning, Amazon.”

Last week I caught the tail-end of the CNBC show “Best Buy: The Big Box Strikes Back.”

According to the show, Best Buy “closed its nine American style stores in 2011.” In China, Best Buy had become the Brick portion of the “Brick and Click” method of buying. Consumers went into the stores to see the product, to research it, but then they “go back home to buy the product online or they go next store to the local competition because it was a lot cheaper.”

In 2006, Best Buy bought a “controlling stake in Five Star,” which used to be run by the government. According to the show, Five Star makes money leasing out space in the store to manufacturers . . .who pay rent to Five Star and provide their own sales force, reducing overhead. Five Star receives a cut of every sale. On a really good day, a single Five Star could bring in $2 million.”

One reason the Five Star version works better than the American version? It is better tailored to its customer.

Last Year’s Model

In February, Shawn Coyne wrote the post “Last Year’s Model.”  Within it, he mentioned a conversation he had with a friend about ten years ago, when the friend was consulting the head of “one of the big six publishing companies.”

Shawn says to his friend:

“Where does it say that a publisher can’t be a retailer?”

His friend:

“Okay, so you’re saying that the big six publishers should all kick in like 20 million dollars each and start up their own chain of bookstores? Dude, that’s nuts. Do you have any idea the amount of work that would take? And how many small independent bookstores would freak out about that? Not only would that be lawsuit city from the ABA, it would piss off B&N such that they’d slash orders to the bone. I see balance sheets drowning in rivers of red for at least five years.”

Now back to Shawn:

What if the big six came together and “saved” Borders? They don’t ‘take over’ Borders, they “bail it out” with a major capital investment that gives them preferred voting shares and allows them to bring in their own management? That’s a good story, right…”how the big publishers joined forced, saved jobs and kept books vital!”? And they could brand the stores with sections devoted to each of their offerings…can’t you hear your wife saying to you… I’m going over to the Simon and Schuster boutique, meet me at the Macmillan store after you’re done at Penguin.”

The Hallmark Lady at Wal-Mart

A week before Shawn wrote his “Last Year’s Model” post, I was standing in the seasonal Valentine’s Day aisle in Wal-Mart, looking for cellophane bags like the ones I bought the year before, clear with red hearts – perfect to insert Valentine’s Day gifts for my kids’ teachers.

I inspected every inch of the Valentine’s Day aisle. Not there.

Headed to the greeting card/wrapping paper aisle. Not there.

Went back to the Valentine’s Day aisle and asked the woman stocking one of the shelves about the bags.

“Do you know where the cellophane goodie bags are for Valentine’s Day?”

“I only do the Hallmark section.”

“Are you restocking any in the Hallmark section?”

“No.”

Frustration pulled at the corners of my mouth and pushed my shoulders down into a slump. I didn’t have time to run to another store to find the  bags.

And then one last line from the Hallmark lady:

“You know, sometimes I buy the clear ones over near the arts section. Just get yourself a red Sharpie and your kids can draw their own hearts on them – and you can use the extras for other holidays.”

I smiled and thanked her, and was on my way.

What’s My Point?

Five Star, Shawn’s post and my visit with the Wal-Mart Hallmark lady have specialized experience and specialized space in common.

Specialized Space

Right now, publishers have a space in the stores, similar to Hallmark in Wal-Mart and electronic brands at Five Star. In book stores, the presence comes via co-op dollars. Those books on the tables at the front of the store? Bought space. The books facing out on the shelves? Bought space. The books behind the registers and on the end of the aisles? Bought space.

But, unlike Five Star, the space isn’t branded. There isn’t one corner or table rented, with obvious branding, for one publisher. And, the publisher isn’t responsible for the sales staff.  The bookstores are responsible for selling the books, and for the staff it takes to stock and sell them.

This handing over, of using a bookstores space – whether around the corner or online – is the second step in the risk aversion Steve spoke about in “Betting on Yourself, Part II.” Authors write the books and then pass them to publishers. Publishers publish the books and then pass them to bookstores. Each step relies on the others doing its/his/her/their jobs. By the time the book hits the shelf, it is like one of 300 students in a college symposium, each student hoping he or she will stand out to the teacher. But by that point, the teacher – or in the stores’ cases, the bookstore associate – has too many other students and doesn’t have time to get to know each one. Once on the shelves or in the online stores’ warehouses, the books are on their own. They’ve got to go whole hog to grab attention, to let readers know they are there.

Specialized Experience

I don’t know the deal at Wal-Mart, but I know the Hallmark lady made me like Hallmark and Wal-Mart a little more. Once she stepped back, she recognized what was in front of her, and tailored her response accordingly. And I imagine that tailoring is what attracted Best Buy to Five Star. The Five Star model was better suited for China, and I wonder if it wouldn’t be better in the United States, too.

I rarely head into a bookstore these days, so how would the specialized experience work online? It would work in the form of publishers being more creative with how they are selling. Brick and mortar stores are one way, but not the only way. Ultimately, the publishers know their books more than the stores – outside the authors, the publishers know the books more than anyone else. So why aren’t they doing more to specialize the buying experience for readers? This goes beyond venues and more to the how, and not where, of selling. How can they make themselves the place readers want to go for books?

And, why aren’t authors doing this themselves, too?

It is easier to have someone else handle it.

And easier isn’t always better.

More to come…

Maybe video? Or video series? But, not book.

My early definition of books:

My childhood favorites—Tikki Tikki Tembo and Blueberries for Sal—are heavy on images. The images faded in grade school, forcing an egg-headed edition of Ramona Quimby, and Meg, Charles Wallace, and a tesseract, to appear in my head. The more I read, the more I ran into other book formats—hardcover, paperback, mass market, special edition . . . And, in the case of The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, an obsessive interest in Michelangelo and “Winged Victory” was ignited, sending me off into encyclopedia reading, altering my understanding of books to include reference materials, and other non-story pages, sandwiched between covers.

With the intro of e-books, the sandwiched-between-covers bit of my book definition was edited out. The pages and words remained, read on a screen instead.

Audio Books forced a different understanding.

Some sidetracking on audio books here:

I was on the local from Washington, D.C., to New York City, stopping at what felt like every town along the way. The row in front of me featured a mother and pre-teenish son, with the mother’s friend across the aisle. The son sat quiet, headphones in his ears, Discman on his lap. The quiet was broken when he asked for a new book. His mother handed him an audio book. As he slipped the earphones back on his head and inserted the disc, his mother leaned over to her friend and said, “We love reading audio books.”

My inner snob shook her head at the mother. Such silliness. That’s not reading. That’s listening. And . . . I looked down on them, thinking about all they were missing out on because they weren’t reading.

This is where my early definition starts unraveling and my inner snob has the tables turned on her.

I grandfathered audio books into my definition because they are based on words-on-pages-to-be-read books. Listening provided the same experiences I had as a child, except with a stranger instead of my mother reading the books.

But what if a story exists on audio, but there isn’t a version to read? Does that mean it isn’t a book?

Should an audio book, without a traditional book pairing, be allowed to live under the title book?

Which brings us to video. Steve’s video book isn’t a direct reading of a traditional book. It features the listening experience of audio books, with a visual element, too.

Is it a book?

Back to my childhood understanding: Books ignite my imagination. They cause me to rethink what I know, to explore.

Are there other things that spark the same? Yes. Walking old battlefields, listening to veterans’ share their stories, spins my imagination off into other eras, encouraging me to dig for more.

And that gets me thinking pre-book, when stories and lessons were shared via oral histories, passed down through the generations.

Gutenberg’s press was a step toward mass sharing, toward other formats. But the core—the  main focus—has remained on stories and lessons.

So if Steve is sharing stories and lessons—and if a book is about preserving and sharing—then yes, video and book should be paired.

Today, there’s a great focus on reading books. However, books weren’t created to encourage reading. They were created to preserve the oral histories and to share.

Back to Steve’s video book. Am I comfortable with the term now? Yes.

Ultimately, it is the preserving and the sharing that does the greatest good. Reading is important, but we aren’t all readers. It isn’t the end-all-be-all, best-way-to-learn for everyone.

But the preserving and sharing? Yes. That’s the best way.

Don’t get stuck on titles for formats.

Get the lessons out there. Share the stories.

(Callie’s note: I jumped the gun on this post. I wrote it after reading Steve’s post slated for this Wednesday, and forgot about the timeline until I went to post it. . . Please read Steve’s April 4 Writing Wednesday column for more . . .)

Thank God there is a beautiful ocean outside to cool me off.

I’m on vacation and a couple of things popped upped for Black Irish Books. They aren’t the end of the world.  Steve found a typo on one page of his next book.  We both agree that it is crucial that we fix it.

No problem.  I’m the liaison with the printer so it falls in my lap to have it corrected. I’ve been in charge of about a million copies of printed books in my life, so I’m not sweating it.

I’m thinking twenty minutes, four emails, and it’s done. I love what I do so the excuse to slip away from the beach is a welcome one. Perfect mix of Home Life and Work Life. The sand castles will hold up while I’m away.

We are in the “approval of final files” stage with the printer…the last chance you have to fix anything before you pull the “print” trigger. Then you pay for your books no matter what.  We’re printing 20,000 copies and we ain’t skimping on materials. The bill is not cheap. We want it to look great and indistinguishable from a BIG SIX book.  Better in fact.

Steve and I have gone through the book about six times each to make sure it was “perfect.” The book is about being a pro, so we don’t want any amateur mistakes in there.

But alas, one letter was switched on one word in one of the twelve proof reviews and it’s a very important word.  Like head-exploding, apologizing-for-the-rest-of-your-life important.

I email the printer’s production manager. She informs me that it will cost us a couple hundred bucks to fix this one letter.  Or I can send it back to my designer, have him fix it, then have him strip out the one page that had to be fixed, and send it back to her and it will only cost Steve and I…$19.00.

Steve and I are operating on a shoestring.  On Purpose.

A couple hundred bucks is a couple hundred bucks that we could use for something else.  And our designer is a mensch who will do it as a favor for nothing, because he knows we could ask him to do a lot more work in the future.

I’m on vacation so I don’t indulge my Black Irish temper.  If I did I would have thought to myself…

Geez is a couple hundred bucks that important to a printer who could end up being our go-to company for the rest of Black Irish Books’ printings in the future? Don’t they know Steve has sold millions of books and that I have twenty years experience in publishing with scores of bestsellers under my belt? Aren’t our chances of being a long-term client better than the norm?

I mean if I were the head of that printing company, I would give my production managers’ the leeway to say.

“Don’t sweat it! We’ll take care of that one letter fix. NO CHARGE.”

Instead, the head of the printing company insists that clients be charged for their mistakes no matter how small.  I mean they are running a business and every second counts.  It’s no small thing to open up a PDF document and go to page 12, scroll ten sentences down and change the letter “e” to “h.”

In fact after careful calculations, the head of the company figured out that it costs the company a couple hundred bucks to do that. And they are giving us the option of just doing it ourselves and only charge $19.00 to substitute an entire page instead of just one letter. That’s fair.

It is fair, but it’s short sighted.

I swallow my “don’t they understand that Steve’s last book, which we just ordered a 20,000 copy print run from them, has sold a steady 30,000 copies a years for the least ten years?  Don’t they think that his next book could do the same, which would guarantee them work for at least 60,000 copies a year from Black Irish for the next ten years?  600,000 copies…maybe more?”

Let it go Shawn! It’s no big deal!  You’ll get it fixed. Chill. You’re on vacation!

While I’m doing the third email explaining what I need my designer to do in order to get the right document back to the printer as soon as possible so I don’t lose my “off the press” date, I get another email.

This email is from the printer too.  But it’s not from the production department.  It’s from the Binding department. The two departments obviously don’t communicate.

“We are behind in our bindery department and are not going to meet the completion date for this week…I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

The 20,000 copy order that Steve and I put in for the brand spanking new Black Irish Books first edition of The War of Art on February 20^th, 2012 would not be ready on the day the printer “estimated.” The 20,000 copies were supposed to be ready on March 23, 2012. Now they “estimated” that only half would be done by March 30^th, with the second half ready by April 6^th.  We’ve obviously been bumped off the bindery in favor of a bigger client.

Steve, Callie, Jeff and I have been working for close to half a year on a schedule built on the delivery dates that our printer gave us. Now that schedule is obliterated. And I’m told about it a day before the books are supposed to be in our warehouse.

But at least a person I’ve never met, let alone heard of before apologized for “any inconvenience this may cause.”

Why is it that when you order something from a manufacturer, you only receive an “estimate” of when it will be delivered, but if you gave them an “estimate” of when you might be able to pay them, the company would laugh in your face.

I understand that there are some cheaters in the world who make things miserable for the rest of us. Cheaters who order something on credit, get delivery, and then never pay. So I’m cool that I have to pay for the books up front, every last penny, before we receive them.  Steve and I don’t have a long history of payment with the printer, so that is par for the course when you establish a relationship with a vendor.

But here’s what the printer has done in about two hours:

1)   Nickel and dimed a client for a one letter typo correction for a new print job.

2)   Missed their delivery date of the client’s other print job after having a very long window to get it done (the loose interior pages of THE WAR OF ART were ready to bind on March 6^th, by the way).

3)   Infuriated the Black Irishman responsible for production.

What I need to take away from this experience has nothing to do with the printer or if we miss a ship date. Or typos, or how the world is out to get me.

What I need to do is work as hard as I can to make sure that anyone who has an experience with Black Irish Books does not get their blood boiled in the way mine is now.

Thank God there is a beautiful ocean outside to cool me off.