customer satisfaction

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Today's off-off topic note of interest.  Home Despot has LED bulbs on sale.  Phillips 60w replacement ( uses 8.5 watts ) soft white light.  A two pack for $5.  That's correct, a TWO pack.  Replace your crappy conventional incandescent with a bulb that doesn't burn out every year and which only uses 15% or so of the juice.  And avoid those retarded compact florescent bulbs that are chock full of mercury and never last as long as advertised ( LED's use about 75% of the energy of florescent bulbs- not as big of an energy savings, but still there ).  Now, I grant you, I'm not guaranteeing you that a $2.50 LED bulb will last as long as advertised on the box ( ten years at three hours a day ).  As with all things from China, you roll the dice.  Still, name brand, and a very cheap gamble.  Not on the isle with the other bulbs, the one facing the paint section.  Just around the corner from that on an end-cap.
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A bit off topic from the impending apocalypse, but it amuses me to cover it, so that is that, you shall like it, and in a moment I will prove why.  After the article “magazine explosion”, a comment was received to the effect that you should give the customer what they want ( I got the impression my new novel excerpt was being criticized, even though the article was about the failed advertising magazine ) in order to succeed in publishing.  I completely disagree.  Number one, customers don’t always know what they want and number two, customers want the impossible.  First point, modern publishing is a complete travesty of greedy pigs whoring themselves out to the lowest common denominator ( James Patterson being the most egregious example ).  The basic rule of thumb is that less than five percent of Americans read for pleasure, as a hobby.  And because the business model for traditional publishing is to lose money on most books, then make a killing on a few ( just as in Hollywood ), the book industry needs far more than that five percent to make money.  So, the books are dumbed down.  Someone who hates reading, the uninformed moron who thinks TV news is real, might-just might-buy a famous celeb tell all autobiography or a movie novelization or a scary/romantic suspense novel.  To participate in this market, to me personally, is embarrassing and a travesty for a real author. 

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Readers you are trying to reach, readers who love reading as a pursuit of knowledge ( and, yes, it is perfectly fine to be entertained at the same time ), don’t always know what they want to read next.  They are always surprised by a new fact they want to explore further, and to do that you must constantly push your comfort zone further out and explore.  Now, granted, this applies more to non-fiction than fiction, but even in novels constantly trying new authors exposes new styles you might appreciate for the new formerly unknown background information.  For instance, Tom Robbins and Robert Anton Wilson have given me a new insight into the sixties hippie era and in addition have bizarre writing styles I never would have explored by adhering to the top selling generic writers.  Not to mention, authors sticking to the perceived need of readers don’t write with their true voice but a contrived one.  As to the second point, readers wanting the impossible, filling the customers wishes is a losing proposition.  What they want ( cue in female singer, “what they really, REALLY want” ) is a free book, at great length, and more on the way monthly.  The Internet, may all the geek gods be praised for it, is super wonderful for the economics of publishing, but now it is almost impossible to make money as a writer.  Same as it ever was.  Just worse, since the traditional print publishers won’t talk to you until after all your free to nearly free e-books establish you as a market force.  Before, you wrote for free in hopes of publishing.  Now, you write for free to publish, then hope against hope you might make money ( I’m talking conventional author success, not my brand of it which is a small but constant monthly stipend by extremely loyal readers ).  Following a path to success by kissing readers asses only works for hacks.

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