[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

MWAHAHAHAHA. Suffice to say, after 30 years of dealing with other development and construction professionals, lo, buddy, this came as one HELL of a surprise to me. Honestly...in hindsight, I'm boggled at the idea that I was ever this naive. If you'd asked anyone I knew, prior to this, if I were a naive person, they'd laugh in your face. Now...I wonder.

Naivety is situational, and stems from lack of knowledge. We are all naive about something. Your experience comes as no surprise to me because I've been watching the process for some time. I expect the folks at the vanity presses back in the print only days could tell similar stories about clueless clients.

Ah, an adrenalin junkie. Never met a crises s/he couldn't love or fabricate. No crisis too big or small! (I know the type well. Had a boss that I mostly adored, was this way for literally DECADES. If things were going along too smoothly, well, bygod, he'd find a disaster to scream at us about.)

I did manage to not say "Larry, take two Xanax and call me in the morning." He was a gay man with a deep love of theater, in $DAYJOB because he couldn't make a living in theater. (I saw him in a local production where he did a fine job in the role. I always enjoy watching people do something they love.) But he brought his love of drama to his professional life, and I sometimes wondered if at some level he saw his co-workers as audience and he needed to perform in consequence.

OMG, you're as bad as I. I've chased folks out of the room with something similar. "If you stay in here, the computer will crash." On the other hand, though, I have a magic way of making scanners misbehave. Don't have any idea what it is. It's like inverse-pheromones or something. Ha!

I told Larry "You have a mysterious power to cloud machine's minds. They fail in your presence."

But the computer room at the shop had been built out before I came on board, as fast and cheap as possible. I had a patch panel things plugged into where connected things would drop out if you looked at it funny. When I finally got the budget to replace it, I really wanted to drop the old one out the window from the eleventh floor location, if I could arrange for those who specced and built out the room to be standing beneath when I did.

I hired a telecom/datacom contractor to give me a hand replacing it, and part of the fun was figuring out which cable coming into the computer room led to what gear. We got to the point of saying "Where does this lead?" "Dunno. Uplug it and see who yells." There were some incoming cables where we never did discover what they connected to.

Yes. THAT is the unblinking, unvarnished, and unpalatable truth. The part that they don't want to hear. And, crap, here's the dreadful part about it: we, at my company--we don't care. We're not inspecting their book for grammar, punctuation, or good/crappy story. We is just de book-builders, mon. I admit though, that wince-worthy covers and the like usually prompt me to say "hey, did you see that free cover-making tool over at....?" or the like. Obviously, the more they write and sell, the better it is for us, so, it's also true that we WANT them to be outrageously successful.

No, you don't care, nor should you. You aren't editors or publishers concerned with quality or material and whether the book has a prayer. You are paid to put whatever it is into a form suitable for electronic issue. With luck, you can mostly avoid even reading it.

(A late friend was a copy editor on the Penthouse Magazine "Letters" volumes. He commented that typesetters are trained to connect fingers to eyes, and don't normally actually read what they set. He could tell when a tale grabbed a typesetter and they actually read it because errors in the galleys would soar. I said that was a consequence of typing one handed. )

And that, push comes to shove, IS the business model of publishing. Nobody--not even the best editors at Random House--picks a winner each time. And if that were the model, all those much-beloved but low-selling novels of "literature" as opposed to genre would die a sad and quiet death, for no one would publish them.

Not just publishing. Film, music, and TV are similar.

An old friend was an editor at a trade house that was part of a media conglomerate. He recounted a visit from an executive on the media side who asked "Why did you publish those midlist titles? Why didn't you just publish best sellers?" The proper response would be "Why did you greenlight notable bombs X, Y, and Z? Why didn't you just produce the $100 million grossers?"

And I'm philosophical about the stuff I consider crap that becomes bestsellers, because the money those books make makes it possible for the publisher to issue the literary stuff I like to read.

Hmmmm. That's an idea, that is. I have the lists ready-to-go; I stopped handing them out when they unambiguously scared off the clientele. Hell, maybe I'll post them on the homepage of the website (which I just spent THOUSANDS <gasp> rebuilding, to be friendly, mind you).

I looked. Well done.

But it sounds like you are well enough established now that you might be able to afford to scare off some clientele. It's no longer a matter of "OMG! I need every client, now matter how much of a PITA they are, to keep my head above water."

Yeah, you are likely right. One clear symptom of the situation in which I find myself now is that I am less likely to tell a client to bugger off than I was in my prior life. I think that this is due to having employees that rely upon me to pay their bills; keep their homes, eat, etc. I used to be perfectly content to read a client the riot act; now I'm far more reticent to do so.

You certainly won't want to do it as often as you might wish to, but as mentioned, you have to draw a line somewhere.

Well, THAT I have absolutely developed radar for. It's what happens after they accept the quote that seems to be problematic. But even just chatting about this has given me some ideas, to try to head this off at the pass. I appreciate that you were here to bounce things off of. I genuinely do.

If all it does is make you feel better to have an understanding ear at the other end, it's worth doing. If it gives ideas for things you can try, even better. You're more than welcome.
______
Dennis