Assorted Notes

MONDAY, 21 JANUARY 2013

Yesterday morning my Smashwords account indicated that I had sold two copies of A shorter version of a longer book (which I had just made available a few hours previously) overnight. By last night, though, the sales appeared to have been the result of a “fraudulent payment method”. What does this mean? A criminal tried to purchase an obscure collection of essays with a stolen credit card? It’s either an interesting comment on my description of the book, or it says something about the criminal.

I did make use of the opportunity to remind myself of a few things:

1. Some people who are going to buy your book are not going to like what they read, and they will attempt to recover their money from the place where they had bought it.

2. Some buyers of your book will not like what you wrote or how you wrote it, or they will be alarmed to see what your opinions are on certain matters, and immediately seek an outlet for their revulsion, which they usually find by leaving mean but what they regard as honest comments on a public forum so that other potential buyers can see what they think of your book (or how little they think of it).

3. Some people will buy your book thinking it would be amusing, then after reading a few pages realise it is indeed not amusing at all – or not enough for their taste or expectation – and then be upset that they have wasted their money.

There, a few thoughts for those who might be considering making a living with words, or any other method of conveying thoughts or opinions to the population outside his or her comfort zone. It is probably the price one has to be prepared to pay if you are not satisfied with merely capturing your thoughts or opinions, but if you actually go so far as to make available what you have written for other people to purchase and read.

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SATURDAY, 5 JANUARY 2013

I usually stand in the front row of the choir when a lament is being sung about how time flies. One year … five years … a decade! Twenty years … As you’re standing there in shock, wondering what you have done and what you still wanted to do, you see the images of ten and twenty years ago in your mind’s eye – clear as crystal, as if it was yesterday.

It is therefore sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the actual numbers:

5 years: almost 2,000 days and nights

10 years: more than 3,500 days and nights

20 years: more than 7,000 days and nights; more than 7,000 times you ate breakfast, more than 7,000 dinners; more than 20,000 trips to the loo; if you worked full-time for a 20-year period, that means perhaps as much as 5,000 days … more than 5,000 times stuck in traffic (maybe twice as much) … thousands of times you talked to people you really wanted to avoid … maybe more than a thousand barbeques in the backyard … maybe as many as 10,000 programs watched on TV, or even more.

Time doesn’t really fly.

In fact, if you look at it closely, over five or ten or twenty years, you have thousands of opportunities to do good, to fix what is wrong or what you have done wrong, and to produce something or to help create something that will eventually have value to other people.

Every day you get a chance to enjoy a little something of life, and every day you get a chance to mean something to someone else – someone who may remember you long after you have enjoyed the last of more than 25,000 breakfasts.

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TUESDAY, 25 DECEMBER 2012

Christmas Day is a bit like life.

If a whole table full of food is prepared on the 25th day of the twelfth month of the year, a special tree is dragged into the living room and festooned with lights and small disco balls and dolls and stars, toys are bought and wrapped in colourful paper for the children, a few songs are sung, and all gathered together eat themselves into a new weight division, and laugh and joke around and chat, then it’s “Christmas”.

If you don’t do these things, it’s only the 25th day of what is coincidentally the twelfth month of the year.

So it is with life.

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THURSDAY, 15 NOVEMBER 2012

Because I try my best to avoid failure and disappointment, I wonder long and hard whether a particular way to make money is a good fit for me. I want to be sure before I spend time, and money, on a project.

A few comments:

1. There is no guarantee that you will make money with anything – even if other people earn their bread and butter with it, year in and year out.

2. There is a parallel to identity: who I am versus who I want to be. Decide whether you want to make money with something, whether it is something that suits your lifestyle, whether it is something with which you can identify, and whether it’s something that will be sustainable for at least the next ten years. If you decide it is indeed something with which you can and want to make money, then do what you need to do and learn what you need to learn to turn possibility into reality. Commit yourself to becoming successful with this activity.

What more do I want? Confirmation in a pile of tea leaves? Should someone throw a handful of animal bones to confirm something is right for me?

Decide something is right for you, and then make it right for you.

WEDNESDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2012

(I have most probably already noted this idea.)

My efforts to make money since 2006 have to a large extent been a search for identity – in a new “environment”.

For years I reckoned how you make money is not who you are; it is just what you do to meet your own needs, and perhaps the needs of a family. You are therefore not a lawyer – it’s just what you do for money.

Projects I have undertaken with the sole purpose of making a profit include affiliate marketing, sports betting, short report writing, and the selling of websites and domain names. I was perfectly competent and intelligent enough to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to eventually make money with these activities, and in some cases I was somewhat successful.

However, none of the ways in which I made money, or could have made money in theory in most cases, was something I wanted to see as part of my identity. What I learned was that if you do not see a certain way you can make money as part of your identity, it is not a complete mystery why you’re not a raging success.

MONDAY, 17 DECEMBER 2012

To think of myself as a “publisher” is to a large extent a missing piece of the puzzle.

Since the early nineties, I’ve been holding on to the image of the “writer” – independent; elevated above the ordinary; on his own. The specific vision was of myself in an old stone fort, somewhere in a mountainous wilderness, or perhaps on the plains, at least a few days from the nearest civilisation.

That this romantic figure needs money – or worse, that he needs to make money – has always been a huge stumbling block.

This is why the idea of the publisher is so powerful. The publisher’s business, to some extent more than the writer’s, is books. Whereas the writer puts ideas and opinions and stories in words, the publisher focuses on publishing. The publisher is the one who places the writer’s creative work in the hands of the reader.

The writer is in the wilderness – or on the plains. He writes, and does not allow himself to be distracted by such common everyday concerns as money.

The publisher is in the city. He does the marketing. He advertises. He produces books in different formats. He talks business.

The publisher is the one who makes money. He is the one who makes sure the writer survives.

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