[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You spend that much money so you don't have to actually know stuff. You can pay someone to deal with that for you. Except when it's not that simple, and you do need to know stuff.

But, Dennis, my sweet...she DIDN'T! She knowingly hired an illustrator that hadn't ever made a book before. I mean....

An old friend wrote a series of posts elsewhere on job hunting. She's an older woman who has been in finance for many years, and writing about financial topics. After a dozen years at her last employer, she ran afoul of a new HR Director who didn't like her and pushed her out. (I believe the HR Director is no longer there because she rubbed too many folks the wrong way, but that doesn't help my friend.)

She's been on the job market for a while, but didn't expect the process to take as long as it has, and was blogging about her job hunting experiences and dealing with recruiters. She decided the blog posts would be a decent eBook for others in the market (and raise her profile in the market and make potential employers more aware of her.)

She knows nothing about eBooks, so a friend who does helped her put the collection into a Kindle volume available through Amazon. That's all well and good, but the whole world doesn't use Kindles or Kindle apps, and doesn't get content from Amazon, so while Amazon is certainly where you start, it should be the only thing you do.

(sigh). I feel ya. EVERY time I quote someone new, I have to go through the whole song and dance that we're giving them the ePUB files for a very good reason, not merely to line our pockets. They all think that a quote w/o an ePUB will be 50% of the price, which of course, it's not.

I tried to explain that there was more than one eBook format, and she needed to cover other bases. My one paragraph explanation was completely non-technical, but the response was that that level of detail would have scared her off from trying in the first place. Detail? If I wanted to go into detail, she would still be reading next week...

Yup. I get this all the time.

My concern is that I think she's defined herself as someone incapable of grasping tech. The woman has a PhD from Harvard and is comfortable with explaining abstruse financial topics, so it's not a question of intelligence. But I've seen this before. If you define yourself as being incapable of doing something, you won't be able to do it, and closer off a range of opportunities. Somewhere she internalized that someone like her wasn't supposed to understand tech, so she can't. That sort of thing dismays me.

(She just landed a new position in finance that will be a challenge, because she'll be customer facing and trying to sell services. I think she can, but she's never done that before, so it will be a learning experience. Crossing appendages...)
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Dennis

Ye olden self-fulfilling prophecy. "I can't understand tech" becomes, "I really don't understand tech."

I get a ton of clients--by design and definition--that are admittedly "not techie." But I also get a bunch that seem bizarrely proud of it. Some will tell me, "well, I'm OLD, so I don't understand this newfangled yadda," and are a bit taken aback when I tell them that pretty much everyone here is over 60. Then they don't know what to say as their excuse. (One client at least had a sense of humor about it--"oh, no!," he exclaimed when I said that to him, "Hoisted upon my own bulls*t!")

I had a client--you can't make this sh*t up--to whom I sent one of our ClickByClick Guides, which means, I walk them through something, screenshot-by-screenshot, as it says, "click by click," right? This was a "how to upload to the KDP Guide," and the first screenshot was a picture of the KDP Login page.

This client kept clicking the screenshot. In the PDF. (She didn't know what a "PDF" was, either. I should have known, when she said that, to run for the hills.) When I explained to her that it's a screenshot, she said "what's a screenshot?" I literally was not able to help her, because her lack of knowledge was so profound it was like expecting Helen Keller to read skywriting. Thank GOD she had a son that was in his 50's, that at least could muddle through the guide.

How do people survive, in this day and age, without at least a modicum of understanding of how computers work????

Hitch