Here’s a little note on business. An independent filmmaker recently
communicated to me why he (or his small company) prefers to sell DVD’s of a new
film exclusively for about six months before putting the film on Amazon
(including Instant video rental) and Netflix.
He says that his personal earnings is triple the amount per DVD sold
that it could be with any Internet retail operation, or even conventional
studio distribution. This helps in
business relations with investors.
That means that his website has to take credit
cards, and meet certain standards for security in collecting personal
information, or at least financial credit card information. (Use https, for
openers.) The PCI Security Standards Council is explained here. Throw into that the ability to process Paypal (which I don't use right now), or even bitcoin. But using those payment systems still require some middleman payment (or, as novelist Thomas B. Costain called it, "The Moneyman").
I’ve never required (or even allowed) users to log
on to my own domain. (To comment on my
blogs, you log on to Google, and I let one of the world’s biggest Internet
companies deal with the security issues.)
For comments to my “doaskdotell” site (Aug. 22), I just let people send
me emails, and I post them. (A lot of
people really did this.) That could
change in the future, given the feedback I got from this filmmaker, since I
contemplate a similar project myself.
In the early days of my first book in 1997, people just
contacted me by email and sent checks (in a couple of cases, cash) The world wasn’t so automated then. I didn’t put the book on Amazon until January
1998 (right after coming home from the hospital from my convenience store
accident) when getting feedback from visitors (in rehab) that I should. I was naïve in those days.
There’s another little matter to mention today. That is how I handle “unsolicited calls”. On landlines (which I don’t publish) I get a
lot (left over from my mother) which Comcast Xfinity identifies and most of
them are robo calls. I don’t pick up. Registering with the FTC’s “do not call”
doesn’t do much. On the cell phone, the
volume is lower, but I don’t like to take the time to listen to cookie cutter
pitches. Ditto, I’m pretty good at recognizing
spam “as a human being” missed by email filters. The same for spam comments (which usually
get filtered out). In my circumstances,
I don’t have time for a lot of charity pitches – I know this sounds harsh – but
there are so many of them, and no one party is more “deserving” than any one
else until I say so! More about that
soon.
One Saturday afternoon in June, while I was at a
film festival, I got an unsolicited call about one of my books. If I understood properly, the message said a
major NYC publisher was interested in the 2002 book. The message was marked urgent. Now, I never “got around” to calling back,
because I didn’t believe it. It sounded “too
good to be true”. It sounded like it
could be a scam. Major companies don’t
make approaches like this on weekends, and they generally don’t want old
non-fiction books. The hysterical marking
of the message as “urgent” on a Saturday afternoon seemed rude and
inappropriate.
What could have been true, though, was that a
publisher could have wanted one of the specific essays in the book, like the
one on “Bill of Rights II” or one on “narcissism, affiliation and polarity”, or
even one on self-publishing. In fact,
one of the essays (from 2004) on my “doaskdotell.com” site was picked up by a
trade publisher for its “Opposing Viewpoints” series (Books blog, Sept. 19,
2006).
The moral of the story is this. If you call, make sure you are convincing. Be
specific as to what you have to offer.
Don’t make a cookie cutter approach that you make to many people. If you have a legitimate opportunity and make
it sound routine, then I will behave like anyone else flooded with input (“resume
fatigue) and forget it after the first five seconds. Everyone loses when an opportunity is lost
because of careless presentation: the employer, the teammates, the client, the
customer. Remember the lessons of “The
Apprentice”. As Donald Trump warns, if
you’re careless and inconsiderate, “You’re fired.”
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