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There's a book I ran across, Fear and Loathing in Tech Support, that has lots of stories from Tech Support Hell. Funny, and well worth reading.

Never ran across that one, but I know what our policy was: "I'm sorry, that's a hardware issue. Not our responsibility. Get the crazy glue cleaned out if you can or a new port put in. Have a nice day!"

As long as people are allowed to call up in the middle of disasters & scream at you that the modem is slow (Manhattan customers on 9/11); help desk is going to be hell desk.

Funny you should mention that. One of the major DSL centers in Manhattan actually went down that afternoon. Totally unrelated. It took about a week to get everybody connected again, and that only by routing through someplace about a hundred miles away. Things took over a month to come back to normal. Again, however, it's not our problem because we were leasing our DSL from local telcos. If there's an outage like that, we report it and it's out of our hands. Oddly enough, almost all customers understand that we can't fix equipment we don't control and that the phone company's doing its best.

That's not to say that there aren't unreasonable, stupid callers out there. I ran across enough of them that I actually wrote a book about some of the funnier ones. Maybe the fact that I laughed about the weird callers instead of yelling at them is why I enjoyed my job.

Actually, most POD places do charge an upfront cost. Booksurge and Xlibris, for example, want $299.

I use lulu because they don't have an upfront cost. Then again, I don't expect to make money from this - it's a hobby with me.

I'd be a LOT more concerned if they were buying this:

http://www.amazon.com/StarBird-David-Greenley/dp/0738812439/ref=sr_1_22/002-3699275-9111221?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176468104&sr=8-22

(Here's a sample chapter, in case you enjoy pain: http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/book_excerpt.asp?bookid=553 )

Surely it doesn't take $120 to make Mitchell's Machine Learning--it's such a tiny book!

Especially now that Print On Demand technology enables the publisher to do single-copy hardback press runs, keep the retail price below fifty bucks and still make a profit. The tech publishers are just screwing you.

Your writing style leads me to believe that you wrote this book
http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp? bookid=10349

Am I correct?

I have a book published by "print on demand," because it's a book of tech support humor, and that's a small nitche market if ever I saw one. No mainstream publisher would be crazy enough to put it out, but I can make a small profit by print on demand. There's at least one such company specializing in putting old books back into print for the authors, and Piers Anthony has most of his old backlist books out that way at Xlibris just to get them back into print and help out the company because he believes in this type of thing.

I'm not sure what kind of technology they are using, but there is www.xlibris.com, which, after an initial setup fee, does one-offs as they are purchased. There is also www.mypublisher.com, which publishes onesie-twosie books for personal use (they are expensive, not much room for markup) and then CafePress has been printing books, although their formatting options are limited. Xlibris will allow you to do color on the regular pages.

Sometimes you have to do things like that because the caller wouldn't understand you if you tried to explain. Sometimes, it's not worth your while to try. If you really want to see what it's like "on the other side of the phone," check out this book of tech support horror stories. You'll have a little more sympathy for the techs once you've finished.

He's got a wonderful first novel starring, suprise, a patent attorney. It's a murder mystery!

M.I.T can be Murder

Check out my former employer (as a temp):

XLibris

1. Authors sign up
2. pay fee
3. books get formatted, listed on Amazon (and Books In Print)
4. folks order on Amazon (or their bookstore)
5. print on demand publisher creates the book
6. ships to store/customer
7. royalty goes to Author.

Authors get much higher royalties this way, but zero marketting, shelfspace, etc.

Also, with XLibris (unlike some competitors), Authors keep their copyright. They can unlist with XLibris at any time, and sell their book to someone else, whatever.

Now I dont claim to be an expert on publishing, but based on my own experience there looks like there's lots of different publishing companies around, ranging from short story magazines to full-fledged hardcover printers. Most publishers aren't as ridiculously greedy and arrogant as the RIAA and usually have more tolerable terms when it comes to copyrights. Frequently a type of right called 'first print' rights are requested, and maybe second-or-third edition rights also - but after the first few runs the rights ultimatly stay with the author. Because of the large number of competing publishers, a good author has plenty of choice where to take their works. As for a bad author? Well...we all have to start somewhere! 8)

I tried to get into the Xlibris site, but it's either slashdotted or unavailable where I am. However, the idea of a company that allows a person to publish their own works sounds like a very good idea. Especialyl for those of us yet to bite the bullet and start writing our first novel!

I'm hoping xlibris is as useful as this article hypes it up to be.....we'll know soon enough...

PS Its $3 cheaper on Xlibris, and they offer an eBook version which Amazon does not.

see here

Click on the actual link to "Reflecting Fires" at the bottom, and it takes you to http://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp? bookid=12036 aka where you can buy the book. Might not be very clear, but it is there.

Click on the actual link to "Reflecting Fires" at the bottom, and it takes you to http://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp? bookid=12036 aka where you can buy the book. Might not be very clear, but it is there.

First, their assertion that used books hurt the book industry and
authors is not correct. We've found that our used books business
does not take business away from the sale of new books. In fact,
the opposite has happened. Offering customers a lower-priced option
causes them to visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads
to higher sales of new books while encouraging customers to try
authors and genres they may not have otherwise tried. In addition,
when a customer sells used books, it gives them a budget to buy more
new books.

(Emphasis Mine)

Actually, it sounds like selling used books is good for Amazon.com, not the lit industry. Look, Amazon uses very predatory tactics to get their remainders, which they then sell as "used". These books never made their authors any money via royalties because they were sold as remainders and the publishers took a loss.

No one is arguing against anyone's right to sell used books. It's about treating your business partners nicely. If you're an author with a personal website, or a publisher, you'll want to link to an e-commerce site that will get someone to by your book new and make you a buck. That's only natural.

Actually, this is more of a pissing match between the publishing industry (corpulent, unimagninative and greedy) and amazon (just greedy). Who do you think funds the authors guild? Authors. Please... what authors do you know (megastars aside) who can support a "guild". The author's guild is funded by publishers.

In a perfect world, authors (and other content creators) wouldn't need greedy-stupid publishers and distributors to get their work out there. That's the promise of xlibris, but it's yet to really make an impact, mostly because the people who publish via xlibris couldn't get published anywhere else.

How I long for a day when artists and scientists don't need corporate patrons.

I second this idea, for what it's worth.

It would be interesting to see someone print a book including the DeCSS code, aside from any ramifications it might have for the case (although those would be a good side benefit). Isn't it an interesting enough topic in itself? Intellectual property rights, fair use, cryptography, open source--what more subject areas would you want?

This seems like something that would be perfect to put together through a book-on-demand publisher such as Xlibris. For the most basic level of service, they don't charge anything to print a book that can then be bought directly from them or ordered through any bookstore. Funnel the royalties to EFF or whoever and it could end up serving two purposes: (1) getting DeCSS into dead-tree format and (2) put some money in the coffers of a worthy cause.

I speak from experience when I say that it's not easy to step out of the standard publishing industry. It's also not easy to step into.

King can be successful with this method, but I don't think it's viable for your average author. I also don't think the SPP is viable.

But for most writers and readers, the biggest problem for non-standard publishing is the lack of an editor. Take Katz for example. Not to pick on him, but if anyone remembers his early articles, they were ripe with typos and inaccuracies. My novel is published at www.xlibris.com, and if you look through the excerpts from other writers, you'll notice the same trend. Writers are notoriously bad at editing their own work. Most wouldn't even know where to begin.

King can afford his own editor. Jim Munroe self-published his second novel. Check it out at www.nomediakings.com He is good enough to edit his own work, and the result is an excellent novel.

Most readers will be profoundly disappointed by the quality of a raw novel.