Call Me What You Want's List: History

There is a wonderful example of this in the story of the so-called Eastern Pearl Harbor, of the Second World War. During the first nine months of 1942, the United States Navy suffered a catastrophe. German U-boats, operating just off the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean, were sinking our merchant ships almost at will. U-boat captains marvelled at their good fortune. “Before this sea of light, against this footlight glare of a carefree new world were passing the silhouettes of ships recognizable in every detail and sharp as the outlines in a sales catalogue,” one U-boat commander wrote. “All we had to do was press the button.”

What made this such a puzzle is that, on the other side of the Atlantic, the British had much less trouble defending their ships against U-boat attacks. The British, furthermore, eagerly passed on to the Americans everything they knew about sonar and depth-charge throwers and the construction of destroyers. And still the Germans managed to paralyze America’s coastal zones.

The British excelled at the task because they had a centralized operational system. The controllers moved the British ships around the Atlantic like chess pieces, in order to outsmart U-boat “wolf packs.”

Lists, lists and some more lists

Running a single company is a challenge, running a group of companies might look like an unachievable challenge (remember: Richard likes it that way). To get through the day, you got to have a productivity system, right? As with most successful systems, Richard Branson’s system is simple. He takes notes in a standard notebook, and writes everything down. He states that he worked his way through a bookcase full of them. And there’s this quote in his book as well:

“I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of ideas, lists of companies to start, lists of people who can make things happen. Each day I work through these lists and it is that sequence of calls that propels me forward.”

Another Motorola departee told Gizmodo that the company group charged with consumer research has been marginalized by the engineers, who dismiss its concerns—and, to a large extent, its very existence—as inconsequential. "With the engineers," he said, "there's this attitude of, "I create—what do you do? You pick out colors?'"

The engineers could theoretically be kept in check by corporate managers, but few suits are bold enough to act. A Motorola insider noted that long-serving managers have "deity status" at the company—no matter how many of their products flop, they never suffer repercussions.

Keep in mind, too, that Motorola was the birthplace of Six Sigma, a methodology meant to eliminate product defects. But Six Sigma was created in 1986, well before the era of ubiquitous cellphones; its focus is engineering, not end-user experience. The methodology is therefore unequipped to address many of the shortcomings that have irked so many customers.

Take, for example, the navigation joystick on the ill-fated first-gen ROKR. It looked cool and worked as intended, but not without minor headaches: The joystick was a hair too sensitive, making it too easy to scroll past your music selection. Or take the Q—relatively powerful, but why in heaven's name didn't it auto-capitalize address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste? Sure these may strike you as minor details, but minor details make the difference in a competitive handset market. And Motorola's aging quality-control program wasn't designed to catch such annoying foibles.

Ex-employees are nearly unanimous in stating that bringing on Sanjay Jha as co-CEO (and designated handset-division savior) is a reasonable gamble. It's been clear for months now that CEO Greg Brown is in way over his head. "He has no idea how to run a consumer electronics business," grumbles one critic, adding that Brown's previous job was at an enterprise software company. While Jha is well regarded for his operational prowess and sheer intelligence, it's worth noting that he's fresh off a 14-year run at Qualcomm. Did chipmaking really prepare Jha to address the needs of Joe Sixpack consumers?

Our contacts contend that Jha's rescue plan needs to focus on two important areas—one technical, the other cultural. First, the company needs to streamline its wireless development, so that phone models are designed in conjunction with one another—thereby ending the lunacy of different generations featuring different (and inadequate) software. Second, there needs to be a reconciliation between the engineering heroes and the consumer research folks, who are currently out in the wilderness.

"Or take the Q-relatively powerful, but why in heaven's name didn't it auto-capitalize address book names, or allow for copy-and-paste"

Thats not Motorola's fault, the phone runs windows mobile so they can't really fix that, have you ever tried to get Microsoft to fix an issue like that, want to talk about the "I've been doing this for years" attitude, Microsoft is the worst.

"Motorola next turned to Linux, which has never lived up to expectations" Linux has far exceed anyones expecations. Its a free OS that people develop in their spare time as a hobby which rivals OS's that cost millions of $ and require thousands of developers from companies like Microsft and Apple.

It appears a certain columnist doesn't know the tect industry very well.

@enine: Umm. No offense but that doesn't fly. When you put stuff in your product, people attribute it to you. It is up to you to make sure your product works correctly and to your customer's expectations.

You're putting linux in your phone? You better make sure you make it work (It's open source for gods sake- modify it to do what you want it to do).

You're using WinMo? Bully Microsoft into making it do what you want it to, or take your business elsewhere.

In the end, it's your name on the product.

A leader cannot be an expert in everything ( design, development, production or marketing) but also cannot isolate himself from any of these.Organizations need leaders with vision, management skills, guts to stand against political pressure, smart enough to know what s/he doesn't know, confident enough to delegate.

Steve Jobs for example: He doesn't design, code or develop brand and marketing but he has certain skills in all of them. He is a strategic thinker, he has vision and achieves his vision with people.

@soulfinger: "Apple focuses on the design first. The user is first."

Close. Steve is first. If user tastes align with him, everything is swell.

Many of you forget that Motorola is NOT a consumer electronics company. That's just where they make their capital for other interests. They do so much other *cough* more important *cough* stuff out of the public eye, most people don't even know. The real issue is two-fold.

1) Motorola is a big company prone to the pains of being in a big company. They are bigger now than they were in the 80's, thus more bureaucratic problems. Deal with it.

2) The economy has changed. Back when they got popular, they had cutting edge stuff. They have not adjusted to the economic climate sticking to what they know, and have fallen behind the pack. Bad move by the big heads here, and if they were a smaller company, they would surely have gone belly-up by now. This is a common problem in post-bubble tech companies, just the good ones reacted when they knew they had to without much hesitation.

Is it too late? No, but that's only because their name is good enough to keep them afloat. They need to catch-up, diversify, or move out of the way.

@m4ximusprim3:

Sure Motorola could have picked a better os, but the same issue applies to the Palm 700w since it runs WinMo or the phones by samsung, etc so its not a fault of just Motorola phones.
You can't just bully MS into fixing issues or take your business elsewhere as long as corportate America uses Microsoft your stuck with it if you want to sell to that market.

I think this is more the case that the accountants took control... not the engineers. Ed Zander was focused solely on numbers and profits margins. This is the typical case for most publicly traded companies. It is a short-term solution (which is all he cared about).

Yes, I used to work for Motorola. I quit after the Galvin family lost control.

@Norcross:

I didn't say it didn't the wirter of the article did. my Winmo phone capitalizes as well. Since the writer said the motorola Q and not the Q9h/m/c its probably a bug/feature of winmo 5 which was on the original q.
Mine converts letters to numbers even, I can dial 1800byteme and it converts them for me.

"I create-what do you do? You pick out colors?"

this isn't just at moto. But the article is right - the attitude is one thing, but allowing the actions is another.

The IPhone has massive 3g problems. My girlfriend's iphone gets 49k/s in Manhattan. You still can't replace the battery without the jaws of life. The first phone they even soldered in the battery.

In my book, Motorola puts too much emphasis on engineering and Apple (much like microsoft) too much on the marketing.

Ironically, Motorola made the CPUs for Apple's PC's for years. Too bad Apple didn't partner up with Motorola on the Iphone.

I'm a happy HTC customer (Mogul on Sprint). Before that I was a Treo user (300/600/650). I'll probably get the Touch Pro on Sprint when it comes out.

@enine: "Linux has far exceed anyones expecations."

I don't think the article meant Linux in general, just Motorola's Linux Java platform, which has been a sinkhole of time and effort that will never recoup the costs put into it.

And yes, the general thrust of this story is absolutely correct. The company has kept itself mired in the engineering-only mindset, and has suffered for it. I work in the group that does UI and human factors for mobile devices, and believe me: there are a lot of smart and creative people here who *know* what consumers want and *want* to produce it, but the gap between low-level creative management and the upper echelons has just been much too large. I hope that spinning off Mobile Devices will help this. I hope the damage done and the loss of creative capital -- really, who *wants* to do user experience work for Motorola any more? -- isn't too great to recover from.

I suppose time will tell.

And yes, Libertyville sucks royally.

(Although it should be noted that a good chunk of the designers in my group work out of Chicago proper, not the L'ville campus.)

@soulfinger: Seriously? :)

Come on - Apple focuses on UI, but they certainly don't listen to their customers. They make products according to what Jobs thinks should be in them, and so far he's done a remarkable job, because he's an absolute visionary. But after he's gone...they'll be left with no direction, and terrible customer service.

I happen to think that the modern engineer should be able to design also.

I'm a software engineer, but I happen to think I have a pretty good design sense. There have been plenty of times where suggestions I have made in user interface design have made it into products. I'm always brought into design meetings and give my input in design and engineering matters.

The way I see it the modern engineer can be a designer with engineering being the tool of the trade. Think of it like a painter, they know all the technicals of color mixing, lighting, etc. yet they paint wonderful things. In my case engineering is my brush and paints.

Motorola was just full of old school engineers, engineers that became engineers because they had little or no creativity in them. I became an engineer because I wanted to design and create cool stuff and had many ideas I wanted to see come to life.

In phones, industrial design is critical. That's a discipline in itself. Software design is functional, user experience design is a combination of both.

To converge there needs to be one strong visionary leader like at Apple or so much market momentum (from the past) like at Nokia that you can try anything and see what sticks (n-gauge....).

What's tricky for Motorola is that they are in neither position to do this.

The new CEO comes from the semi-conductor industry. They need to complement with that visionary leadership. But where and how do you find it?

I love this kind of articles, that bring some in-depth insight into corporations who make the gadgets we love or hate.

Two good examples are the articles from Wired about making the iPhone, and BusinessWeek's "Building the perfect laptop" about the Lenovo X300.

Make more of those pls k thx bye.

In the early days of the web, I was always the guy responding to chain emails with links to Snopes or Urban Legends. And now, with this blog, I've been critical of "wisdom of crowds," of Google's strategy and stock price, the book "Good to Great," and lots of other things people on the web seem to love. Sometimes I turn out to be right, and intellectually it always feels good, but it's always a pretty lonely vindication. The next time I turn negative on something, no one says "better listen to Rob…"

You see, people really prefer positive people. People need hope, and that is why it sucks to poke holes in the stuff they believe. Our delusions are very dear to us. We want to believe that there is at least the small possibility that Bill Gates really will send us $1000 for every person we forward an email to, and we don't like it when someone tells us it isn't true.

Now that’s not to say that every idea is a good idea or that there is not a place for healthy skepticism. But it is to say that a skeptical mindset can really get in the way of accomplishing things.

As a final comment, my personal advice to everyone is to know your bent and then “go for the no.” That is, if you are naturally a “no” person, you should consciously spend time looking for the “yes” reasons. If you are naturally a “yes” person, spend time looking for the “no.”

As an educator I found this to be a really interesting article. I'm all for people using the internet to look up facts and question a lot of the rote memorisation that goes on in classrooms, but that doesn't mean that trainees won't need to pick up a vocabulary for the field of study they're engaged with, or an understanding of what things are possible in that field.

Both of these types of knowledge are essential for making good search strings in Google ^_^ and both require a fair amount of memorisation before the student can move from the 'I suck' stage to: 'I rock'. The less time they spend in 'i suck' the more likely they are to persevere and progress to the more interesting aspects of the subject at hand, and Piotr seems to have done some great work in this area.

I was wondering the same thing as marlborotestmonkey7 - this, to what end? Self realization and personal satisfaction? What's the point in becoming a "genius" if you only reach the goal just before you die? And what "few million" items do you choose to learn? Memorization is not the same as understanding or the ability to apply your knowledge.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very interested in the software and I may try it. Certainly this work seems very valuable. I wonder why he didn't collaborate on it? It would be nice just to be able to license his algorithms and plop a decent interface on top :)

"So you believe in trying things for yourself?" he asks.

"Yes."

This provides his opening. "In that case, let's go swimming."

At the edge of the sea, I become afraid. I'm a strong swimmer, but there's something about standing on the beach in the type of minuscule bathing suit you get at the gift shop of a discount resort in Eastern Europe, and watching people stride past in their down parkas, that smacks of danger.

"I'm already happy with anticipation," Wozniak says.

"Will I have a heart attack?"

"There is less risk than on your drive here," he answers.

I realize he must be correct. Poland has few freeways, and in the rural north, lines of cars jockey behind communist-era farm machinery until they defy the odds and try to pass. There are spectacular wrecks. Wozniak gives close attention to the qualitative estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement defined by death. So he guards his health. He rarely gets in a car. The Germans on the beach are staring at me. I dive in.

From the business side of SuperMemo, Wozniak's priorities can sometimes look selfish. Janusz Murakowski, one of Wozniak's friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak's focus on his own learning has stunted the development of his invention. "Piotr writes this software for himself," says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Delaware. "The interface is just impossible." This is perhaps a bit unfair. SuperMemo comes in eight flavors, some of which were coded by licensees: SuperMemo for Windows, for Palm devices, for several cell phones, even an Internet version. It's true that Wozniak is no Steve Jobs, and his software has none of the viral friendliness of a casual game like Brain Age for Nintendo DS. Still, it can hardly be described as the world's most difficult program. After all, photographers can learn to produce the most arcane effects in Photoshop. Why shouldn't more people be able to master SuperMemo?

"It was never a feel-good product," Murakowski says, and here he may be getting closer to the true conflict that lies at the heart of the struggle to optimize intelligence, a conflict that transcends design and touches on some curious facts about human nature. We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.

Many psychologists followed Neisser. But others stuck to their laboratory methods. The spacing effect was one of the proudest lab-derived discoveries, and it was interesting precisely because it was not obvious, even to professional teachers. The same year that Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landauer of Bell Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly 700 undergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be remembered. Their results were impressive: The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet — as Neisser might have predicted — that insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.

Obviously, computers were the answer, and the idea of using them was occasionally suggested, starting in the 1960s. But except for experimental software, nothing was built. The psychologists were interested mainly in theories and models. The teachers were interested in immediate signs of success. The students were cramming to pass their exams. The payoff for genuine progress was somehow too abstract, too delayed, to feed back into the system in a useful way. What was needed was not an academic psychologist but a tinkerer, somebody with a lot of time on his hands, a talent for mathematics, and a strangely literal temperament that made him think he should actually recall the things he learned.

The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long. According to Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible. The problem wasn't learning the material; it was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Using some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study, it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical.

Wozniak's discouraging numbers were roughly consistent with the results that Ebbinghaus had recorded in his own experiments and that have been confirmed by other psychologists in the decades since.

And I'll bet that for many of them a part of that fantasy is the making - a - living-as-a-freelancer -doing-something-interesting-rather- than-working-as-a- flunky-in-a-boring- job element. But how many people in the country actually manage to make a living writing books? A couple of hundred.

Millions would like to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it.

As a consequence of these sorts of realities, most serious-nonfiction writers either hold down fulltime day jobs (healthcare!) and do their writing during the evening and on weekends (whoops, there goes the private life!), or spend a lot of the time that they'd like to spend writing chasing down grants, fellowships, and stretches at writer's colonies instead. (This bunch is usually very worried about health care. See my posting on health care and the arts here.)

Not long ago, I ran into a woman acquaintance I hadn't seen in years, during which time she'd written a first-class biography of a famous man. We bumped into each other shortly after her book had been released, and I assumed she was basking in the good reviews, and exultant about the way her publisher was promoting the book. "This must give you a great feeling, as well as a great platform into your next book, no?" I said.

She rolled her eyes and told me emphatically that she was never going to write another book. "What I'm looking for now is a nice little not-too-demanding job with an office, regular hours, a health plan, and a regular paycheck," she said.

So why do people do write books? I come up with these possible explanations:

• Some hope to hit the jackpot despite the odds.
  
  
• Some have a dream about being an author, or taking part in "literature."
  
  
• Some are obsessed lunatics -- ie., they feel they just gotta.
  
  
• Some don't know better (these usually never write a second book).
  
  
• Some have other ambitions, and writing a book is a step along the way.
  
  
• A handful are determined to be trade-book authors as a career, and know what the game consists of, and have (or think they have) the tenacity, toughness, talent, luck and energy to succeed.

All of which leads me to a Blowhardish musing. It's such a pain to write books, it's such a bother to go through the publishing process -- what kind of person is willing to put him/herself through this? Answer: a very narrow demographic -- the obsessed and the ambitious. Exceptions allowed for (hi Hugo!), this would seem to mean that most of the books we've interacted with over the years have been written by people who are nuts. Let's grant that a few of these nutcases have talent and brains -- still: funny, no?

And this is a big part of why I generally celebrate digital media -- because the new tools give people from the non-nuts range of humanity a better chance to contribute and take part in the conversation that is "culture." How many such "normal" voices have really been heard in this conversation before? But these days, if you write and publish a blog, for example, the publishing part of blogging is trivial, at least once you've set the blog up (or in the especially inept case of the Blowhards, paid a good webteam to do the hard stuff). You can say what you have to say, press a button -- and what you have to say flies right out there and becomes part of the ongoing culture-thing. Never before in the history of blah blah blah. Very cool, in any case, and I'm going to follow how this affects the tone of the culture-conversation with interest. Blogs have already had quite an impact on journalism. What kind of impact will they have on the cultural world? (Huge, I hope.)

Over the years, a few people have asked me for advice about writing books -- fools! Still, I tell 'em what I really believe: Since you probably won't make money on your project anyway, why not do it in a way that minimizes your trouble and results in something that pleases you? How to do this? Publish your book yourself. (Self-publishing is a growing and happening thing.)

But why turn your urge to create into "writing a book" in the first place? You say you've got a story to tell? Well, why does it have to be a book? You'll burden your life with a tedious project for a couple of years, you'll probably overstretch your material, and then no one will read the results. Why not realize your project in a manageable and pleasureable way instead? Put in a month of writing, keep it to a compact length, and post it to the Web. (There really aren't many stories that need more than 50 pages.) It's certainly true that no one may pay attention to your work despite its being out there on the Web. But at least you'll have told your story, enjoyed the process, made your work available -- and you won't have ruined your life, or broken your heart.

No one listens to me, of course, and it's probably better that way. I confess that The Wife berates me (lovingly and charmingly, of course) when I go on like this. She says I'm being a killjoy. Lots of people dream of writing books. What a harmless dream -- why kill it? And she's certainly got a point. I, on the other hand, feel that my point isn't to crush anyone's dreams. Why not make this basic information available? But maybe The Wife is right. It's certainly true that, after 15 years of following the book publishing world, I do sometimes wish people would be a bit more realistic in their thinking and talking about books. But is that an awful wish? Where books and publishing are concerned, maybe it is, I don't really know for sure.

Best,

Michael

Hey Alexis, You' ve got good instincts, and The Wife would agree with you about the "relish" thing, although I remain convinced (deludedly, apparently) that I'm just performing a public service. But glad to see you doubting my motives ....

Anyway, the "couple of hundred" figure was given to me by the guy who runs one of the big authors' organizations, so the figure's trustworthy even if I'm not. I can't imagine anymore more quaified to make a decent guesstimate than he.

I said to the guy, How many people in this country make a living from writing books? He said, Do you want to include all kinds of books? I said, No, just bookstore-type books. No textbooks, and let's not include people who write computer-instruction books. And he said, Oh, in the low couple of hundreds.

So yeah, the figure would include sci-fi writers, mystery authors, self-help authors, literary people, etc. The authors of all the stuff at the local Barnes & Noble, minus the computer section.

As I say, one of the surprises of the field is how many even very big names can't and don't get by on what they make from their books.

Can anyone think of a similar industry -- where the people who produce the product don't generally make a living doing so? I can't, but maybe I'm overlooking something obvious...

Another industry: acting.

Only about 1 in 20 professional actors support themselves entirely by acting. This at first occasions rather sad but heartfelt discussions as people struggle to make sense of the idea that they are "really" actors even if they can't support themselves acting.

I wonder if Wallace Stevens worried that he wasn't "really" a poet since he made no money at it.

Are there other industries that have a ratio of paid creators to paid sellers comparable to book publishing? Yes, several that I have worked in:

Game design - Thousands of designers, perhaps as many as a few dozen who make a living (this neglects role-playing game designers, of which more later.) There are thousands of stores in the US alone that sell games, each of which has at least a few employees. There are more hundreds of people employed in printing, assembling, and distributing games. As for the designers, a distributor of my acquaintance used to tell prospective game designers: "Take $50,000 in cash and put it in a suitcase. Go to the middle of the highest bridge you can find and throw that suitcase as hard as you can. At the end of this process, you will not be worse off financially, you won't have a garage full of unsalable games, you won't have suffered the pains of trying to sell your game, and you'll be done years earlier."

Role-playing game design - Again, a few dozen people making a living, hundreds of others spending nights and weekends (or retirement funds) trying to make a living. Very similar to book publishing in the amount of hard work required, but there are many more self-published authors.

Hobby accessories - Whether model railroad scenery, after-market RC car pieces, or doll-house furniture, this is another garage industry (or set of industries).

The unifying theme seems to be that the people doing this are trying to find a way to have their fun and eat it too. 8-)

From an economic point of view, I'd guess that the combination of expected monetary reward (in the long term) plus the nonmonetary reward of working with your hobby (more illusory than real) result in people entering these industries with wildly inflated opinions of their own prospective success.

There is so much to read and to look at online, it's like being in a vast storehouse full of treasures - literally acres and acres full of gold, jewels, and valuable artifacts - and you can only take as much as you can carry in your hands. You don't know what to choose so you just keep looking, briefly examining and laying aside one piece of treasure and then the next and the next and the next. The Internet is like that for me. I find many sites where I want to spend more time reading but instead I just keep on surfing and finding other interesting sites. I always plan to come back to them... "later." ...

I might actually be reading more now; it's only the routine that has changed. Maybe the availability of so much reading matter makes it seem like I'm not reading as much as I should. It has never occurred to me that I should try to read every book and magazine in the public library, but for some reason with the world's biggest library right here in the corner of my dining room I feel guilty about passing over anything I'm the least bit interested in. I feel I have to read it all.

One alternative to job versus starvation may be to live somewhere off the beaten track that is very cheap. I have lived for 22 years in a small New Mexico village 75 miles by air from the nearest city, and in a determinedly un-chic part of the state.

I live in a 100 year old stone house with 4 main rooms ( a nice piece of "Alexandrian" vernacular architecture) that cost me less than a cheap new car does today. My newest car is 13. My wife currently works part- time in the local post office. At times she has worked full- time, and often had no job at all. Our main expenses are books and travel.

And travel itself can help pay the bills. We have in the last decade spent time in London, France, Zimbabwe, traveled twice to Mongolia, and are heading for Kazakhstan in the fall. All trips were at least work-related, and the last 3 paid for up front. What other life would give me freedom to do what I like and write about it? A job that paid for a month here and there would take all my time...expensive!

Isolation was more of a problem 20 years ago. Now, with blogs, e-mail, and internet it's not even a factor. I "talk" every week with people in England, New York, Latvia, Finland, Russian, Kazakhstan and more. There is more info a click away than you could have had in, say, Victorian London.

Unfortunately, there are vast numbers of individuals who believe that taxes and the huge government that results from it are good for us. How many authors would be able to suppport themselves if they didn't have to support millions of nonproductive government workers at the same time? How many government workers read? How many of them are so bored with their jobs at the IRS or the CIA that they're writing a novel in the hopes of escaping from their boredom? How many of the government thrillers are competing with other "art" to be published? Think of all the tax accountants and attorneys who make their living by pushing tax-related papers, who never produce any books, cars, houses or products that add any enjoyment to life?

The huge cut that the government sucks out of the markeplace at every level, the author's advance, the agent's salary, the bookstore's income, is money that creative people can no longer use to support creativity. It's time they don't have to write and it's money that they no longer have to buy the books that add value and enjoyment to their lives.

Yes, the money ends up in the hands of others and they will spend it. But what will the recipients of those tax dollars spend it on? Baseball? A wide-screen TV for watching football games? Will they spend it on great stories about the nature of existence and survival when their own survival is guaranteed by the money they can take at the point of a gun from those who produce and sell art?

Nobel Prize-winning ecomonist Milton Friedman noted in FREE TO CHOOSE that taxes distort markets. Once taxed, it is impossible to determine what real value is anymore because the price of something (the price paid to an author for his work or a bookstore for a book) is no longer an accurate measure of its real value to individual consumers. Markets become glutted with useless trash and real value falls by the wayside. Sounds like the book market that you described!

Responding to the point way above about childcare:

When I lived in San Francisco, it seemed as if every waiter and half the carpenters were 'really' artists of some kind - painters, actors, writers - or on a spiritual quest of some sort.

I was a carpenter/writer, and when our son was born we found a pregnant artist who wanted to run a small daycare to pay her way. Not being the kind to do things by halves, Sterret Smith had got a degree in child-something-or-other, and instead of actually living off her daycare income, it seemed as if she plowed it all back into toys and improvements (I built her a child-sized play loft, thus circulating our dollars nicely). I loved her paintings but was much more impressed by her childcare. She was truly a master in the art of starting children off in their lives. These kids had their imaginations stimulated every day, and learned how to resolve disputes without an adult's intervention (or with a minimal one) to a degree that still shows in my son's mid-teen years.

I began to wonder why there were so many young people waitressing or hammering so they could occasionally act or write, but few if any doing the same so they could be daycare providers. The latter seemed much more worth doing, or at least as worth doing, but we had all somehow absorbed the notion that it is an unromantic boring slog. For me, it probably would be, just as for some writing is pain and agony (whereas I have had months of ecstasy at the best points in novel writing) but for Sterrett it wasn't. Of course, she had endless dirty diapers, and the money wasn't good, and she depended to some extent I suppose on her husband, except that he was a freelance writer himself...

I wish childcare could be seen as more of an exciting area to work, money or not. Maybe there could be some way of starting an upward creativity spiral inb the field... Or maybe Sterrett should write a book about it... and suffer further penury.

You said "Hey, my English profs didn't tell me about this!". Right on! There is a lot more they didn't tell you..

LIKE -- universities are totally geared and set-up to make money and are businesses,not benevolent institutions designed to see you succeed.

LIKE -- when you decide to become a writer (or English student)make sure you do not ignore the fact there is competition in every field and though it seems unfair, others will succeed,

and no matter how much you love it,

you can fail consistently.

LIKE -- those who do succeed were destined to succeed through

their "success gene", that little sting of DNA that makes them blind to failure and are driven to success like a moth to a campsite lantern, even if they

studied plumbing they would end up owning a string of shops.

LIKE -- higher education is a brainwashing and re-programming process designed to produce worker-bees on various levels, it is NOT a process designed to make you rich or successful, the sooner you realize this, the more successful you become, they are there to sell seats.

LIKE -- people don't buy creative writing to entertain someone else's ego, they buy creative writing to be entertained.

The list goes on what universities don't tell their students. What they DO is sell dreams and a "product" which is a program designed to align your thinking with an agenda. What YOU have to do is figure out what that agenda is. Once you have done that you will have as much money as you can possibly stand.

Popular Rock and Pop bands don't make millions and zillions of dollars producing beautiful tracks of symphonic

masterpieces, they were intelligent business people who sell well produced songs about the money making themes like SEX, DRUGS, MURDER, WAR all of which the Beatles were a prime example of in the new commercialization of popular culture.

Most of outrageously successful and popular rapper groups have management who know it is not a matter of selling a new rhythm thousands of times for a large price, it is a matter of selling

an old rhythm millions and millions of times for a small price.

The frustration that you are feeling, the melancholy emotions, come with the sad realization people don't want to pay you for what is GOOD and what YOU want to believe in. But they will pay you for what they have been programmed to believe in.

A few tricks are writing new twists and imaginative new versions on; the masses are entertained by raunchy murder themes, they are entertained by raunchy horror themes, they are entertained by raunchy sex scenes, they are entertained by raunchy drug themes, they are entertained by raunchy sad sad scenes.

I can understand your frustration with writing for a planet of people who are

destined for failure by their core obsession with other peoples misfortunes

and their lust for sex, drugs and violence. But that is all that entertains them now that the "shock value" bar has been raised so high.

I will say that I detest the traditional publishers. They lie. They cheat. They never tell you how many books are out there, not to say, it's some big KGB secret re: how many really sold. They do deals with other big pubs, and get behind mediocre books due to big names, or friendships. All the chains get paid to show certain books up front in the stores. It's all a big money raquet, in which we lowly writers rarely get to partake. So, question:

Is there something in between traditional publishing and blogging/ self-publishing. ONe hopes yes. This one doesn't have a clue. Best, Louise

I think a thread that ties the books, movies, TV, and music industries together (and these are the most frequently cited ones in our postings above). They're all big money entertainment industries, geared toward creating bland, middle-of-the-road stuff that everyone will buy. It's largely because of the consolidation of media ownership, and the high stakes of the industries, that this is happening. If it wasn't the case that a huge proportion of books were sold in chain stores, which do big-money deals with the publishers, for example, there'd be a greater variety of books.

As Michael said, it's the proliferation of middlemen (agent, publisher, layout/designer, editor, bookstore owner) all of whom DO make a living that sucks up the money.

Another thing that has cracked me up about practically all the books I've worked on is the way the actual writing is viewed as a small detail by the middlemen. I'm in music journalism, and often write entries in music guides. many of them are good books and pay decently, but their approach has always amused me. They have a concept, it's sold, it's put into production, it's designed in many cases, and then they call me (along with twenty other writers) and say "we need 20,000 words in three weeks." If they don't get it in three weeks, the production schedule is thrown off! Im currently writing an encyclopedia, and it's the same thing; the publisher, a well-respected textbook press, had the whole thing put into production before word one was written. Now I have to compromise quality to get it done on time!

And a quick note of appreciation to those who say, Yeah, but writing books isn't the only way to get by from writing: Well, of course you're right, and many thanks for reminding us, and for giving examples of such. I will point out, though, that this posting wasn't intended as a comprehensive survey of how people get by from writing.

It wasn't intended as a pro-books-writing or anti-books-writing piece of cheerleading either. People can and will write books no matter what my opinion is, which is as it should be. Instead, I simply wanted to confront people's fantasies about writing books for a living with a few of the actual facts of the field. People who fantasize about writing books for a living aren't daydreaming about scraping by on reprint rights, stays at writers colonies, writing freelance travel articles, chasing down fellowships and teaching gigs, and pulling together encyclopedia entries on ridiculous schedules, which is what the professional book-writer's life often consists of. They're daydreaming instead about getting paid a decent living for writing the books they'd love to write. And the general books press isn't letting them know what the field really consists of. Hence this blog posting.

It took me 8 years to write my first novel, (a piece of crap), 3 years for my second (moderately awful, on the same level as Clancy and his ilk - you know, cardboard characters and boring plot), and two years for my third (which, read the reviews, really is damn fine).

And when I got the third one published, I discovered that if you're not published by one of the 'BIG 6' publishers, *nobody will review your novel*!

It's as if there's some kind of conspiracy going on. And if nobody reviews it, no bookstores will stock it. And it certainly won't appear in any chains, like hotels, airports and so on, because ALL those outlets buy only pulp paperbacks from the New York Times (yech) 'best seller' list - and all those are chosen arbitrarily from the BIG 6 publishers.