The Vent and Rant Thread

[4691mls]

Of course it would be ironic if these people were writing how-to manuals on some technical subject.

[BetterRed]

Into today's media saturated world people require information be presented as entertainment; and it's as true of baby-boomers as it is of gen zedders. I discovered this a couple of years ago when the project I was working on switched from text and video presentation to a gaming platform. Not so much for interactivity which was pretty minimal, but for the graphics and audio razzmatazz.

When I woke this morning I turned on NewsRadio to get the women's football scores, I had to listen to 3-4 minutes of bloviating waffle interspersed with shockingly awful commentary snippets before I they gave score - Australia 4 : Jamaica 1, and they failed mention the Brazil v Italy game! Ten years ago the same station would give the results of all sports at the beginning of the sports segment - and then do the bragging, summarising nonsense.

BR

[wodin]

How else do you expect them to hold an audience? Unlike printed broadsheets where they don't really care if you read the whole column as long as you pay for the paper.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

Post a second price for those who want YOU to do this part of the task, making it no longer SELF publishing. "HoldYourHand" publishing, maybe.

No, I know they won't acknowledge that they want that. But perhaps *having* a second price point listed, can then allow you to answer "If you want me to research all this for you, then you are asking for price point HIGHER rather than low-SelfPub price point".

You know, Badgood...you've given me an idea there. I mean, it's YOUR words and idea, but I shall avail myself of it. (wheels turning...). I suspect that I can sell that idea--base pricing, DIY; "HoldYourHand" tiered pricing, mo' money. Thanks.

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I'm curious - do you read the books? And if so, how many of your customers have written something pretty good vs how many have written utter dreck?

No. Not because they're all unreadable. It's simply volume. I quote over 100 books/month; we process about 100/month and I could never read them as well as actually run the biz. My bookmakers do tell me when they seen the good ones (and yes...I hear about the bad 'uns, too!)

Having said that, I have observed over the decade that the folks who come to us have, mostly, worked hard at it. We don't get the sort of horrid dreck that you see on Amazon, incomplete sentences, pages that look like grammar and punctuation are suggestions rather than rules and the like. People willing to spend money on producing their books--at our pricing--are working hard at it. They use critique groups, they pay for proofers or trade proofing, etc. They may NOT be masterpieces, by and large, but they're mostly competent in the overall book idea. Some need work on pacing; some on tightening suspense...sort of the work that you'd expect from a writer in their 3rd, 4th year of writing, rather than total newbies where you look and have to bite your tongue not to say "have you ever SEEN a book?"

Originally Posted by wodin

I'm guessing largely dreck.

Please see my paragraph above.

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

I'd bet the "half way decent" books have authors that read your instructions. The "utter dreck" books are the HoldMyHand people.

Oddly enough, not. Some of my absolutely worst writers are the best about downloading the guides, folllowing them slavishly, bless their hearts. I love those guys!

Originally Posted by 4691mls

I guess it's possible there could be really creative, artistic types who can come up with good fiction but aren't good with the technical side of things. But I would also bet on the dreck

OMG!!!! I wish I had a dollar for every dang time I've heard, "I'm a CREATIVE, I am not good with this 'stuff.'" (STUFF, apparently, being anything that they just don't want to do!).

One of my fave things is when someone calls me, and on the phone, they say something like "well, I'm OLD, so, y'know, they didn't have computers when I was in college/my prime/diapers/whatever," and they'll say something like, "I'm 60!," at which point I say, "oh, yeah, well, I'm older than that." (snicker...girl's gotta have SOME fun, dammit....)

.....more in my next multi-quote! You guys must have all just come home from work...

Hitch

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by Hitch

You know, Badgood...you've given me an idea there. I mean, it's YOUR words and idea, but I shall avail myself of it. (wheels turning...). I suspect that I can sell that idea--base pricing, DIY; "HoldYourHand" tiered pricing, mo' money. Thanks.

Hitch

I'm exceedingly pleased if you can use the idea. I *was* seriously trying to think of something helpful.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by 4691mls

Of course it would be ironic if these people were writing how-to manuals on some technical subject.

Lots of our books are DIY, self-help, etc., books. YES, you're right, that drives me absolutely b@tsh1t.

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Into today's media saturated world people require information be presented as entertainment; and it's as true of baby-boomers as it is of gen zedders. I discovered this a couple of years ago when the project I was working on switched from text and video presentation to a gaming platform. Not so much for interactivity which was pretty minimal, but for the graphics and audio razzmatazz.

What? A text/video presentation to a gaming platform? Can you elaborate? Because I spend my LIFE writing material, "do this, do that..." and then jazzing it up, just for that damned reason. I have a video about "do this" that's a Mission:Impossible send-up, complete with the ubiquitous 4-beat music intro....I have done COMIC books, comic character videos; humorous videos, NOT humorous videos ("dammit, listen to me for a change") and you-name-it. I'm simply curious about what you're saying.

When I woke this morning I turned on NewsRadio to get the women's football scores, I had to listen to 3-4 minutes of bloviating waffle interspersed with shockingly awful commentary snippets before I they gave score - Australia 4 : Jamaica 1, and they failed mention the Brazil v Italy game! Ten years ago the same station would give the results of all sports at the beginning of the sports segment - and then do the bragging, summarising nonsense.

BR

Yes, the twaddle and all that is annoying as crap. And at what point in our history did "reporters" start thinking that interviewing OTHER REPORTERS for their opinions was news????????

Originally Posted by wodin

How else do you expect them to hold an audience? Unlike printed broadsheets where they don't really care if you read the whole column as long as you pay for the paper.

Yeah--I guess that like governments, we get the news media, entertainment, etc., that we deserve. I mean....reality TV, anyone? We can all blame social this or that but the bottom line is, as boggling as it is, people MUST actually watch that drivel. Yes, it's uber-cheap to produce--there's always some attention-whore seeking to get their face on TV cheap--but still, if nobody watched it, we would have survived this phase with a minimum of damage. Instead, those cursed things are still on.


Hitch

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I really wish more people would stop glossing over the SELF in self-publishing. But, alas alack, that is a forelorn hope, methinks.

I fear it is. The dominant emotion in the self-publishing crowd seems to be utter wishful thinking. I recently encountered a book aimed at that audience titled "Everyone has a book inside them!" Well, so they might, but whether it's a good book is quite another matter, and whether anyone else might actually want to buy and read it is a question carefully not asked.

I had a go around on LinkedIn a while back with a chap up in arms about an AARP promotion. The AARP was looking for book ideas. The audience would be older retired folks, and what they were looking for was proposals for non-fiction autobiographical works by other older retired people detailing things they had done that were successful and fulfilling. The LinkedIn bozo was convinced the AARP would steal his idea, pay someone else to write it, and publish it. Attempts by me to explain what the AARP was attempting to do and that they were a reputable outfit got nowhere. I hadn't quite gotten to the point of saying "What ideas? What makes you think you have anything worth stealing?" (I'd seen no evidence he'd actually written and completed anything, let alone put it on the market or attempted to self publish.) But he decided I should be blocked as an enemy trying to sabotage his chances, and stopped talking to me. Of course, I was heartbroken...

There's an entire self-contained eco-system, with folks attempting to make money telling wannabe self-published types how to get rich and famous doing it, and lots of self-published types reminding me of the joke about the two Chinese trapped at the bottom of a well getting rich taking in each other's laundry. They are all busily pushing their works at each other, and are invisible to the wider audience.

The goal is to be able to announce "I'm a Writer!" with some hope of being taken seriously. So you get things like folks who are self-publishing but doing so under a DBA and claiming they are "Indie" published, because they think that carries more cachet and confers higher status than being self-published.

I'm at the point where I say "Writers write, finish what they write, and put it on the market and sell it to folks who want to read it. When you can point to things you have written and sold to an audience beyond friends and family, come back and make the claim of being a writer again. Until you can do that, don't make the claim to me. I'll just point and laugh."
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by badgoodDeb

I'm exceedingly pleased if you can use the idea. I *was* seriously trying to think of something helpful.

I shall. I've been making efforts toward a tiered pricing system, for layout, for the last...oh, forever, but I have real work in it now. Basically, it will be: "here are X layouts. Pick one and that's what you get in Tier one, no changes;" "Pick one and change ONE thing only, tier 2" and what we're doing NOW, "fully custom, tier 3" but with the concomitant pricing.

It simply seems that it would be simplicity itself to make each tier two levels, as well...DIY/Self-Publisher and HoldYourHand level. The former, you read our FREE stuff, you get the lower price. HYH, we read it to you, for another few hundred bucks.

At least what it would do is firmly (one prays) establish the idea that if you want questions answered, it's ducats, not freebs. I don't MIND answering questions; what I mind is when someone obviously hasn't even bothered, or worse, ignores what I've sent them and then asks me again. That just..."gets up me nose," as they say.

So, yes--I will use that, THANKS.

Hitch

[BetterRed]

Phone rings, he picks up the phone's handset, "Hello."
Deadly silence, he thinks: must be a robo-call.
Then, "Yada-yada-yada..." in an unfamiliar/unintelligible American accent.
He thinks: Eh, what's he saying—
Then, "If you are you a registered voter, press 1 if you're a Democrat, press 2 if your a Republican, or press 3 if—"
He hangs up the handset thinking: WTF

So, why are pollsters calling people who reside outside the US, who are not, and have never been a US citizen about their political allegiances? Not once, three times in the past several weeks.

The odd thing is that the calls were were made in my early evening, when its very early morning in mainland US - e.g. 02:00-04:00.

BR

[wodin]

What makes you think that they are calling from the mainland US?

[badgoodDeb]

Even if calling from Hawaii, you'd think they'd notice they were calling Australia!

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by wodin

What makes you think that they are calling from the mainland US?

What makes you think I thought they were.

Au contraire the fact that I received the calls around 18:00 Sydney time suggests to me they didn't originate in the US mainland or even Hawaii. Guam's a possibility, as is Vladivostok - they're both in same timezone as Sydney.

But my suspicion is Manila. Most of our boiler-room calls come from there, they speak with weird Yankee twang accents, and they're only two hours behind us.

BR

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

[INDENT]So, why are pollsters calling people who reside outside the US, who are not, and have never been a US citizen about their political allegiances? Not once, three times in the past several weeks.

Incompetence?

I used to work for a market research company that did telephone survey calls. I was the systems, network, and telecom admin at one of their call centers. (Thankfully, my shop didn't do political surveys. The stuff we did do provided quite enough aggravation for us.)

The calls are actually placed by predictive dialers, and the dialers were one of my responsibilities. The dialer is fed a list of numbers to dial that we called "sample". Quality of sample was an ongoing challenge. There are an assortment of companies that supply it, and folks who buy it specify things like the geographical areas they wish to call. The sample should include only numbers in that area, though cell phones have blurred those distinctions.) The dialer dials the number, and if a human being answers, the call is transferred to an agent who attempts to perform the survey. We had no idea who we were calling - only that the number dialed was supposedly in our target market.

An outfit doing a political survey aimed at US citizens should not have sample including numbers in places like Australia. Such calls are a pointless waste of everyone's time.

But given some industry stories I heard about outfits that did do political surveys, I don't suppose I'm surprised. That shop may have used "lowest price" as the selector when acquiring sample, and it it wasn't in the target market, didn't care. A machine would dial it, and an agent would only get involved if a human answered. (They would get more than enough hangups from people in the US. Some from outside the US wouldn't make a big difference.)

I'm just as happy I'm no longer in that business. I've reached the point where I mostly don't answer calls not from a known number, because of the increasing volume of robocall spams. (The current spate are from outfits claiming to be Windows technical support, warning me that a service I subscribed to was about to expire, and if I didn't speak to an agent to tell them to cancel the subscription the renewal would be automatically billed to me. Never subscribed in the first place, so...)

Back when I was answering calls in those days, the first thing I'd tell a survey caller was that I was in the market research business. That's usually a dis-qualifier, and I didn't want to waste an agent's time on a call that would simply TQ (Terminate Quota) on them. I knew what the folks in my shop placing those calls had to deal with, and didn't want to make it any harder for folks like that than I had to.
______
Dennis

[wodin]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

What makes you think I thought they were.

Au contraire the fact that I received the calls around 18:00 Sydney time suggests to me they didn't originate in the US mainland or even Hawaii. Guam's a possibility, as is Vladivostok - they're both in same timezone as Sydney.

But my suspicion is Manila. Most of our boiler-room calls come from there, they speak with weird Yankee twang accents, and they're only two hours behind us.

BR

Musta been a Kiwi.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

What makes you think I thought they were.

Au contraire the fact that I received the calls around 18:00 Sydney time suggests to me they didn't originate in the US mainland or even Hawaii. Guam's a possibility, as is Vladivostok - they're both in same timezone as Sydney.

But my suspicion is Manila. Most of our boiler-room calls come from there, they speak with weird Yankee twang accents, and they're only two hours behind us.

That would have been my guess. The MR outfit I worked for placed a lot of calls through a third-party call center in the Philippines when time zone differences were significant. The Field Director for the call center I worked in got sent there at one point to set things up to feed work to them. He described things like being asked whether he'd like to buy a girl (or boy) for some recreation while he was there. He wasn't interested in that, but
did wish he could join in a soccer game he saw going on in a field across from his hotel.
______
Dennis