Decisions, decisions, decisions

People who know me pretty well will gladly tell you I don't make some decisions easily or quickly.

Ask me where I want to go to eat? You should ask me about 24 hours beforehand. That way, I can literally sleep on the idea and spend my waking time thinking about it.

Does it literally take me that long to decide where to eat? Well, I can decide immediately if I have to. I just don't.

When it comes to a lot of small decisions, I waffle more than the South's most popular all-night diner. It is not that I have a problem making decisions. Like you, I make decisions constantly throughout the day.

Unlike you, I make decisions on a regular basis that can affect a person's life for the rest of their life. I am not a judge (except for food contests) and I do not want to be. Yet I wield a lot of power and, as Stan Lee wrote, "with great power comes great responsibility."

It does keep me up at night.

MEET VAL

You do not know Valerie, this one at least. She and I worked together for a while at a newspaper. She wrote a story and the main source in that story committed suicide shortly after the story came out. Was Val's story the main reason, the proverbial straw on the camel's back or it had no effect at all?

The only person who knows exited this life intentionally.

Val was torn up. 

While the details are obscured by decades, what happened sticks with me. 

Every day I make decisions on what to write, how to to write it and so forth. Frequently, I am conscious of what Val went through. I do not want that to happen to me.

So yeah, it keeps me up at night.

MAKING A DECISION

Over the past couple of weeks, I made a decision. It was finalized around 7:30 a.m. Sept. 16, 2024, when I typed the last period into The Wiregrass' editorial for the week. That editorial was not a matter I took lightly.

In fact, the whole matter started in Jun 2023. I sued the local City Council and won. Going to court kept me up at night; some of the Council are people I truly call my friend. I appreciate the Council and the hard decisions they have to make. But dammitall, right is right. Gotta stand for something or fall for anything.

As of the last period on the editorial, some individuals on the Council did not do some of what the Judge ordered and the whole Council did not do at least one thing the Judge ordered.

In the editorial I gave the Council until Noon Friday to comply. Then, I'd file papers to go back to court. I called out by name the 2 Council members who defied the Judge's orders. Gonna hear about that one.

That part I can handle. Bring it on. I'm justified and have the Judge's order to prove it.

Still, it was not fun. Fortunately, it was not a decision that required instant action. I sat back and waited for a while. I even wrote a news story the week before saying 2 Council members, unnamed at that time, refused to comply.

INSTANT DECISIONS

I am not one who is paralyzed by the need to decide instantly. I can. If lives, damage, pain and so forth are on the line, I am moving.

I can make decisions when they have to be done.

IMMA PASS

But I keep going back to the decisions I make as a reporter, editor and newspaper publisher. I make calls that can change lives. So, when it comes to the little things, Imma pass.

The pen is mightier than the sword; it is an old axiom that still holds true.

The late Sheriff Lamar Whiddon told many people, don't worry about the ones that attack you physically. You can get over that. Worry about the ones who come after you with barrels of ink. 

I buy ink by the barrel.

So grant this cynical old reporter some relief. If I want to pass on making a decision, please let me. I have enough weight on these pain-wracked worn-out shoulders and even a straw is more weight I'd prefer to avoid.

Ignoring the reality of book publishing

TLDR - Money matters.

Lost the thread on FB but invested too much time in this to just toss it. It is about the world of traditional book publishing. If you are thinking about writing a book, here ya go.

This is gonna make some people mad. As I frequently say, if the truth hurts, yer living wrong.

Lemme speak to this as a publisher, a person who buys words other people write. I am also a 30+ year veteran judge of the Benjamin Franklin Book Awards. And yes, I also write books. I also own a bookstore, am the editor for an international magazine and co-own 3 other businesses.

What I see in a lot of these comments is a missing element. Traditional book publishers exist for one reason - to make money. They have a proven formula to do this. They know what sells. They know what will not sell.

Do they make mistakes? Sure. They sometimes publish a bomb. They sometimes reject an author who then goes elsewhere and becomes a best seller. These rare exceptions, call them aberrations, happen in every business everywhere. You can easily find a list of the rejected works that turned into monumental hits.

Betcha can't find a similar list of books the traditional publishers tried and lost big money on. Lemme give you a hand with one example - Billie Eilish by Billie Eilish. Crash and burn! Samuel Clemens was a stunning author. As a businessman, he was a stunning author. He lost a fortune in the publishing company he created. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736554

Lowering standards, easier access, getting an agent etc etc etc to open the doors to more authors are all grand ideas. Somebody has to pay for it. Who? People who buy books. Publishers, editors, agents, press men, etc etc etc got bills, yo. The ROI is simply not there.

So about those Ben Franklin Awards (self published or independent publisher). Each year, I get between 10 and 50 books to judge. I can generally count on 1 or 2 of those books being good enough for a traditional publisher. Depending on the category, it could be none. I can definitely count on about 25% of the entries being so bad it makes me want to go down to my farm and set fire to the timber so the trees cannot be harvested to make paper that could be used to print more of those books.

The rest? Eh.Don't quit your day job. Good idea, mediocre execution. I simply don't see enough in the author's work to believe the writer could turn the book into a money maker.

If you are still with me, I have talked people OUT of self publishing too. 98% of self pub books do not make enough money to recover the author's cost of producing the book. Me bud Ang is one of these people. She wanted to do a cookbook (and Ang can COOK!) What she did not want to do is market her book.

Self publishing requires the author to market, market, market. If you cannot invest significant time in trying to sell your book, it won't sell. Another bud Susan self pubbed and had monumental success. The work she had to put into it gave her a nervous breakdown and landed her in a mental ward for a while. She talked about that in a later book.