Goof-Off Central

I've done some writing about a certain Big Box Bookstore, and the big mistakes the company has made in the eleven years I've worked for them. And I can't say that this article is going to diverge that much from my previous themes. But there's something about working for a Big Box Bookstore that rarely gets mentioned in blogs about What Went Wrong. It's something that is still, mostly, the fault of the Big Box Company, since it's an HR issue – a matter of how you supervise personnel and divide labor. It is simply the fact that when I began working for this Big Box Bookstore eleven years ago, it was Goof-Off Central.

By the way, I signed an agreement promising not to talk about the company (by name) while I'm working for them. Technically, I'm probably pushing it by writing these blogs, but I'm not just kvetching. I'm trying to cast some light on how/why this particular sort of business tends to fail.

So – back to Goof-Off Central. I'm not exaggerating when calling them this. When I started working for the company, it was actually possible for an employee to spend an entire day pretending to work. Here are some examples.

I worked in the music department. When I started, this department had a full-time supervisor, an assistant supervisor, a lead clerk, and four full-time employees. (By the time I left, there was just me.) We had enough people to scan in, unpack, sort, keeper, and shelve all the product that came in (three shipments a week). We could easily have had perfectly alphabetized shelves, properly stocked displays, well-stocked listening stations, properly stickered product (sale stickers), etc. Instead, the section was utter chaos. Stock backed up for weeks, the sections were poorly organized and lacked any alphabetical order, CDs often had two different sale stickers on them, and many listening stations stood empty.

Why? Because employees spent their time goofing off. And management didn't seem to know how to motivate them. I could have played along with this attitude and goofed off too, I would never have been criticized. Not as long as I showed up for work every day.

Employees ignored ringing phones. They ignored back-up calls to the register. They avoided customers on the floor, when they could. They shelved books wherever they would fit, rather than where they really belonged. They spent hours in the back room sorting books into bins and gossiping with each other. Those books never made it to the floor, and eventually got returned.

I decided early on to take some initiative. It wasn't that I expected to be rewarded – I was simply bored. So I started at one end of the music section and alphabetized the whole thing. It took about a month. No one realized I was doing it until I was halfway through. Once I had it well organized, I could shelve quickly and accurately. I was given responsibility for merchandising after that; then for setting up monthly listening-station programs. My GM appreciated my work, and I got regular raises and high marks on year-end performance evaluations. They didn't ignore my good work. But most of the time, the supervisors seemed to be focused on other stuff. In fact, I always got the feeling that the day-to-day operations of the store were a huge bother to them, almost beside the point.

I remember one incident when my husband and I arrived for work to find one employee at the register. She had a long line and was desperately calling for back-up. We hurried to the office, assuming no one was available to help her, so we'd better clock in fast and get up to the register. We entered the office and found eight supervisors sitting at their desks, laughing and gossiping with each other – and ignoring the back-up calls. They felt it wasn't their job to do the actual sales-clerk work in the store.

Eight supervisors. I'm amazed when I think there were that many of them in the store at one time. On some days, they outnumbered the sales clerks. I hated their attitude concerning grunt work, but in retrospect I realize it was right in line with upper management. We had a big conference room in our store where regular company meetings were held, and I briefly interacted with several executives over the years. I say briefly interacted because these people barely seemed to realize I existed. Their sole job in the company seemed to be to have lunch and attend meetings. They spent their days generating catch-phrases and spouting business philosophy at each other.

How could they get away with it? Because – for many years this Big Box Bookstore could sell just about anything. People were eager to go there, drink coffee, meet people, buy books and CDs. This was 1999, 2000, the first half of 2001. Back in the 90s, during the heyday of this particular chain, the money flowed like the Mississippi. It didn't start to tank until the 9/11 tragedy.

But it wasn't just 9/11 that did them in. It was a long list of bad business decisions and technology shifts, many of which are being discussed in online articles at PW and various other websites. But what is never discussed is the idea that big companies are inherently wasteful. They seem to be havens for friends, family, and cronies – people who get their jobs partly because of nepotism and partly because of the mistaken belief that executives are necessary to run a company.

They're not necessary. They are an artifact of the upper class. Executive-level jobs are a way for them to draw huge salaries and exercise power. They don't do this maliciously; they really believe they know better and do better than line employees. They can come up with numbers to prove it. Those numbers seem valid until the whole mess comes crashing down.

I'm not suggesting that we adopt communist values and build guillotines to rid ourselves of executives. I'm suggesting that we begin to exercise some common sense and stop creating situations were executives (and other employees) can work at Goof-Off Central. There wasn't one employee at Big Box Bookstore above the GM level who was necessary to run that particular company. Everything those overpaid executives did could have been done at the store level (except for Accounting, which could have been contracted out).

Line employees could have been paid better, with more merit raises for people who actually worked harder. Stores could have established closer relationships with vendors AND customers, ordering things that their local clientele actually wanted. Signs could have been printed by local printers, GMs could have had regular conference calls with each other to share winning strategies.

Yes, we all would have worked harder. But maybe we would have realized early on that we needed to develop a good website. For years, we line employees who actually gave a damn tried to tell our company what we thought needed to be done, based on our day-to-day experiences with customers. They blew us off, because we were line employees. If we had any smarts, we'd be executives, right?

So maybe we line employees would have failed too. After all, Amazon came along, and e-readers, and a crappy economy. Music, movie, and book vendors never realized their prices were too high – they never took steps to cut their own unnecessary costs.

But at least we wouldn't have been Goof-Off Central. In my opinion, that would have been a worthy accomplishment.

The Publishing Singularity

Here's a link to Ernie's new blog posting about his experiences with the new, self-driven universe of publishing. This singularity is sucking people in from all over the globe (and beyond? ; ). Yesterday I was standing and talking with my mentor at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix (I'm in the docent program). She asked me what else I do besides school/day job/docenting), and I told her about my publishing history. When I mentioned online publishing with Smashwords, she said her husband wants to publish with them too, and that he had taken writer seminars with Mike Stackpole.

Small world! So here's what Ernie has to say about it . . .

Publishing Ebooks

For over a year I've been blogging about my intention to publish ebooks and record my own audio books. Now I've finally published a novel on Smashwords, and I thought I'd better write a bit about what I expected and what actually happened. Some things that I thought would be easy turned out to be fairly difficult, but some aspects of the process have surpassed my expectations.

First, let me make it clear that I do not expect to get rich by selling ebooks. I didn't get rich by selling hard copies through conventional publishers, either. Nothing squelches your high expectations like a royalty statement. But I had some new novels I wanted to publish, and this time around I wanted to be in charge. So I made some rational decisions.

First, I knew I needed a good editor, so I contacted Elinor Mavor, who edited AMAZING STORIES magazine for a few years back in the 80s. She went over my manuscripts with a fine-tooth comb and pointed out the problems. Using her feedback I rewrote, fine-tuned, tweaked, and read the manuscripts aloud until I felt confident that they were well-polished and up to professional standards.

Ellie is a wonderful artist and graphic designer too, so the second thing I did was contract with her to do my covers. Some writers might be really good at designing their own covers, but I'm not – though I recognize a good one when I see it. I love what Ellie came up with. Now I have attractive images connected with my new titles – I can splash them around the web and attract some attention.

I felt I was ready – I figured the next step was to log onto Smashwords and amazon and publish my first title, The Night Shifters. And that's when I ran into the wall. It was like that dream I had about Godzilla (ending with a resounding SPLAT). I found out that a manuscript formatted for printing does not work on an ebook reader. You end up with text in odd places, no indents, no centering, page numbers that no longer relate to reality, one-word pages, and all kinds of other baffling and ugly complications. And fixing it isn't just a matter of going in and dragging stuff back where it belongs. I thought I was going to have to learn HTML and become an expert on Word, just for starters. I could see weeks of hard work stretching ahead of me. I would have cried if my eyeballs hadn't already been so fried.

Then I noticed something in Mark Coker's How To Publish guide on Smashwords: he has a list of formatting professionals he'll email you if you'd rather not struggle with it yourself. He sent me his list, and I contracted with Elizabeth Beeton of B10 Mediaworx (who also writes as Moriah Jovan). She was affordable, and she did a marvelous job formatting the two files I sent her. She is now my go-to gal for all my formatting needs.

So I had all my ducks in a row. I published my first ebook, The Night Shifters, with Smashwords. Very soon I'll be publishing my second ebook with them too: Spirits Of Glory. They have an attractive site, and they have a feature called meatgrinder that renders an ebook into other formats for distribution on major sites like Kobo, Sony, Diesel, Barnes & Noble, and (coming soon!) amazon. This means a book published through Smashwords can be purchased and read in several different formats, on lots of different gizmos (like the Kindle, the Nook, and your iphone, ipad or itouch). One-stop shopping is one click away.

Now it's my job to market my books. I have offered coupons for free copies to my friends on facebook (begging for reviews in return), blogged about my new books, and looked for my name in google-search and contacted sites that mentioned me. I also bought an ad on facebook (and will be doing so again once my ebook makes it onto amazon). It will take time to build an online audience, but I'm nothing if not patient.

I mentioned audiobooks too. My first attempt at recording one on my Garage Band program was a success – except when I tried to turn it into an MP3 file. Then I found out my files were too big. So I get to do it over again in smaller chunks. But I'm not too upset about it – making my own production improved my self-confidence. I haven't learned enough about the process to offer advice about it yet, so I'll stick to what I DO know.

Hire a professional editor to go over your manuscript ($200 to $500, depending on the length of the book). Don't be afraid to contact artists and ask them how much they would charge to do a cover (price varies, but I paid around $500 – and please understand that you're not buying all the rights to that image, just the right to use it for that edition of your book). Once you've got a book and a cover you can be proud of, get it properly formatted ($40 to $75 if you don't have a lot of images, tables, graphs, etc. in the book – anything really complicated may be up to $200, and I have no idea what a graphic novel might be).

Once you've published, understand that there's a fine line between promotion and pestering. Think about the commercials on TV that you always want to mute or speed past. Don't be one of those commercials! Don't make your facebook friends wince every time they see your name in their email.

Even when all publishing was done the old, conventional way, the people who had successful writing careers were not always the people who were the most talented. They were the people who persisted. So in a nutshell: Learn your craft. Contract with Professionals.

Persist!

And While We're On The Subject

Here’s another awkward question people ask me: "Why did you change pen names so often?" And once again, I get a lot of blank stares when I give the honest answer: Because my publisher wanted me to. And not because they were trying to fool readers – at least, not at first.

The first time I changed my pen name, from Emily Devenport to Maggy Thomas, my publisher was trying to fool the book store chains. They had gotten into the habit of only ordering as many copies of a writer’s new title as they recently ordered of the last book. Think about this for a moment – we’re not talking about total sales for the last book. We’re talking about the order information for the last few months. So even if they sold 12 copies of your last title, if they only ordered 1 or 2 copies in the last few months before the new title was released, they would only order a couple of copies of the new one. Not only did that give you no opportunity to grow your audience, it actually caused your sales figures to shrink.

So it was time to become Maggy Thomas and write the book that readers liked the best, the one that got nominated for the Philip K. Dick award, Broken Time. Only my publisher didn’t do anything else to boost that book other than having me change my name. They didn’t make it a lead title or publish it in hardback, it was just another obscure mass-market paperback release for that year. So when it came time to sell the next proposal (for Belarus), my editor had to hustle to keep me on board with the company, and this time her reasoning was simple. She thought I could gain more readers if my name was "gender obscure," meaning that it could be a man’s name or a woman’s. That’s how I became Lee Hogan. So that time around, they were trying to fool the reader.

And that strategy worked fairly well. If the economy hadn’t started to slide the year Enemies was released, I might still be doing Lee Hogan titles. Instead, I and a bunch of other midlist writers got "remaindered" a few months after the 911 tragedy, which means the remaining stock for our titles was sold at a discount, reducing their value and screwing up our sales figures.

It’s not the saddest story out there – I actually managed to get 9 titles published and get my professional credentials, and I worked with great editors. I learned how to write novels, and no one committed suicide. But I have to say, having three pen names has been a pain in the neck. I made fans with all three names, and trying to direct them all to my new stuff could be a real challenge. Just trying to set up Facebook pages for each pen name makes my head spin – as of this writing, I’ve only done it for Emily Hogan and Emily Devenport, because I need a different e-mail for each pen name. I suspect the same is true for MySpace and LinkedIn, and I’m not sure it’s even necessary. I’m hoping I’ll only need two fiction websites, one for my adult fiction and one for my YA, because I’m pretty sure my head is going to explode if I have to remember even one more password.

I’d like to tell you I’d never get another pen name, but if I sell a book to a publisher and they want me to assume yet another pen name, I’ll do it. That’s the biz, folks. Sometimes you end up with Multiple Pen Name Disorder. God help me if I run out of e-mail accounts . . .