words / myth / ampers & virgule

Comcast

2012-02-13T16:35:00.000-05:00

What part of “customer service” do they not understand? Enough said.

Good Goods at Yale Rep is the real goods

2012-02-06T23:18:00.000-05:00

Yale Rep is a little like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. “You never know what you’re gonna get.” Well, that’s not entirely true. It is a repertory company, after all, and you can pretty much assume that when they do Shakespeare or Molière, you’re in for a good night of theater.

But when they do a world première from a young playwright who recently graduated from Yale School of Drama—well, let’s just say the results can be uneven. We’ve seen our share of unmemorable first plays from playwrights who haven’t lived enough to know anything about life. Oh, you can expect a great set and brilliant staging, and a cast that gives it their all. But sometimes, frankly, there’s not a lot to work with.

Tonight was not that night. Tonight was the other kind—the serendipitous discovery of a brilliant young playwright, who took a throwaway class exercise and fleshed it out into a wonderful entertainment. The playwright, mature beyond her years, is Christina Anderson, and attention must be paid.

Good Goods is an actor’s play, with juicy roles all around, the kind of characters that are caricatures of themselves and really can’t be overacted. Everyone in the cast had fun (one more than the others, but I won’t spoil the surprise for you). And so did the audience.

The set and the staging were up to the Rep’s high standards.

Go. You’ll enjoy.

And keep an eye on Ms. Anderson.

Yes, dammit, there is such a thing as a dumb question

2012-01-12T07:38:00.000-05:00

I understand the rationale behind saying to an inquisitive child, “There is no such thing as a dumb question.” We want to encourage children to explore the world and ask questions about it, not shame them into passive silence. Fine. I’ll cooperate and never tell a child the question is a dumb one, even if it really is.

I have no such compunction with adults, however. I calls ’em as I sees ’em, and if someone asks a dumb question, I’m liable to say so. I am a curmudgeon. Love me, love my dog. That’s all I’m saying.

Presses, printers, and publishers

2012-01-09T12:43:00.000-05:00

I have encountered a lot of confusion of late, particularly in some discussions on LinkedIn, among people who have gotten their books “accepted” by a “publisher” as well as among people who had their books printed by a “press.” Let me try to untangle this mess a little bit.

When the word press is used in the context of producing books, it can mean a machine on which books are printed; it can mean the printing company that owns the machine; it can mean the company that publishes the book; or it can mean the newspaper and magazine industry taken as a whole. This can lead to some confusion.

Historically, many publishers owned their own printing and binding facilities. Another way to look at this is that many printers published books. Before 1500, it was pretty much a given that the printer who printed a book also published it.

Today, many publishers use the word press in their names. Think of all the university presses, for example. But virtually none of these publishers would consider owning a printing plant (I’ll posit that there are exceptions, even if I can’t think of any offhand). Instead, they pay book manufacturers to produce the books for them.

A number of book manufacturers, as well as other kinds of printers, have the word press in their business names, with no intention of deceiving anyone into thinking they are publishers.

Other companies, called subsidy publishers or vanity presses, also use the word press in their names. They are not publishers or printers; they’re companies that enrich themselves on the ignorance of authors, trying to give the impression that they both print and publish.

But what about the referent of this popular metonym? What’s the synecdoche about? When books were generally printed from raised metal types, those types were literally pressed into the paper. When offset photolithography became economically feasible, it was natural to call the machines that laid ink on paper offset presses, even though the image sat on the surface of the paper rather than being pressed in. And today, with the “photo” part replaced by direct-to-plate electronic imaging, the printing is still done on offset presses, where the paper does get squeezed pretty tight (pressed, as in pressing a sheet with an iron), so the word makes some sense if only as a metaphor. Digital printing, which is just a more sophisticated implementation of the basic technology your desktop laser printer uses, is even further afield from the letterpress of yore, but we still sometimes call the machines that do the printing presses.

Where am I going with this? Well, I’m asking you to be clear in your mind that printing is not the same as publishing, that the “press” that published your book is a publisher, the “press” that printed your book is a printer, and that a vanity press is neither. If I’ve helped you understand the difference, then I count this as a good day.

"Market yourself"

2012-01-05T11:33:00.002-05:00

For those of us who have freed ourselves from wage slavery (whether by choice or by layoff) and have chosen to go into business for ourselves (whether by choice or because the man must be paid), one of the hard questions is how to go about promoting one’s business and attracting paying customers.

For people of the editorial persuasion, this is a real challenge. For one thing, many editors are naturally introverts. Editing is a good fit for introverts for a number of reasons. The admonition to “market yourself” may come naturally to extraverts, but it’s often hard for introverts to take on board. Combine that with the fact that, for the most part, people associate editing with bad memories of high school English papers coming back with red marks all over them, and you can see the problem.

Today on the copyediting-l mailing list, a colleague posted her plaint that she has never figured out this marketing stuff. I posted a reply, and another colleage, Katharine O’Moore-Klopf asked me to post my little essay here, so she could link to it from the Business Tools section of her Copyeditors’ Knowledge Base. So, for what it’s worth…

Different people figure out how to market themselves at different points in their lives (some when they’re still children, some of us not until we’re laid off in our forties or later). But eventually, someone will provide the right prompt, and the idea will suddenly click for you. The penny will drop, as the saying goes.

Let me try this angle: Forget the phrase “market yourself.” It’s meaningless. Instead, focus on solving problems for people (which is what you do all day). The question a prospective client has is not “Who is Jane Smith and how talented and experienced is she?” The question is “What’s in it for me?” In other words, “What can you do for me?”

This is the reason so many marketing materials (in all fields) begin with a question or series of questions: “Feet hurt?” “Bills piling up?” “Need a vacation?”

For the most part, people do not wake up in the morning thinking, Gee, I need to find an editor. So you have to find the pain point that makes them realize they need an editor. Once someone recognizes a problem, you can pitch a solution and position yourself as that helpful person who can provide it.

I’m getting some long-postponed projects done in our house. I don’t care how much one contractor desperately needs the work versus another contractor. I don’t care whose kids are in college. I don’t care whose truck broke down or who’s in the hospital. I don’t care who has an engineering degree and is doing carpentry to make ends meet versus who dropped out of high school and learned the trade as an apprentice. I care who’s going to show up on time and do the work I need done. People who retain editors are just the same. They don’t care about a list of qualifications, education, and awards. They want to see what you can do and that you can do it on time and for the agreed price. So if you can communicate that—keeping your focus on the customer’s needs rather than your qualifications—perhaps this whole marketing thing will begin to work better for you.

с Новым годом

2011-12-31T15:57:00.000-05:00

On copyediting-l (mailing list for copyeditors) a little while ago, a member inquired about an arcane typesetting matter: what is the convention for representing the Russian soft sign in transliterated Russian text?

Now this is not a question that comes up in material for a general audience (such as newspaper readers); the presence or absence of soft signs and hard signs is ignored. But in scholarly work, there is a convention that, depending on the particular style guide in use, the soft sign (ь) is represented by a prime or an apostrophe and the hard sign (ъ) is represented by a double prime or a double quotation mark. I know you don’t care, but stay with me a second (or should that be stay with me a ″?)

It seems to me that this whole system of transliteration is an artifact of the machine age. Before the introduction of linecasting machines (Merganthaler Linotype, Harris Intertype), scholarly works typically included foreign words in their original alphabets, be they Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or whatever else was under discussion. This was a particularly cumbersome thing to do with a linecasting machine (and not all that much fun with a Monotype machine).

Fast forward 100 years (the Linotype was actually manufactured for just shy of a century, giving way to filmsetters and then to electronic typesetting machines). Then add another few decades, and here we are in the world of Unicode and OpenType.

It’s fine for non-scholarly work to use transliteration, because we can’t assume that the general reader of a novel will necessarily know that с Новым годом means Happy New Year! But if we’re talking about an audience that already knows what a soft sign and a hard sign are and knows the convention of representing them with primes and double primes, then wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to skip the transliteration altogether and just use the Cyrillic?

It is a rhetorical question in the case the list member asked about, because the author already made that decision. Perhaps next year, in ירושלים.

Funnel follies

2011-12-05T08:16:00.001-05:00

Dear United Airlines:Your funnel is fermischt. The first decision your site visitor has to make is whether to book a flight using cash or miles. Well, if my wife and I want to travel on the same flights, with one paying cash and the other paying with miles, we have to make two separate reservations, hoping the same flights are available for the second ticket and hoping you get it that we want to travel together on an eight-hour flight, not at opposite ends of the plane when you decide to upgrade one of us but not the other. Don’t you think it would make sense to let us reserve two tickets together and THEN tell you we’re paying for one with miles? Show the price for every itinerary in both dollars and miles, and put the payment choice, for each ticket separately, at the end of the sales funnel, not at the beginning, please.Thank you,Frustrated Mileage Plus member

A Doctor in Spite of Himself at Yale Rep

2011-11-28T22:02:00.000-05:00

Worried about global climate change? Depressed about the stock market? Angry about political corruption. Heartsick about hatred and violence?

Well, pack up your troubles, c’mon get happy, and head to Yale Rep. There’s nothing like good slapstick to put you in a good mood for the holidays. The current production of Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself is fabulous. The audience was dancing in the aisles even before the curtain, but the show was a laugh a minute. The cast was as brilliant as the writing and direction.

Supposedly it’s harder to do comedy well than to do drama well. But it hardly looked like anyone was working tonight (although I’m sure they were), because they just looked like they were having a grand old time.

Keeping books on the books you don't keep (and the ones you do keep)

2011-11-17T22:15:00.000-05:00

You’re a publisher, right? Sure, you’re a self-publisher, and you only have one title under your imprint. Nonetheless, you’re a publisher. And you’re trying to sell books at a profit.

But you’re also an author, right? And as an author, you want to be paid for your effort.

This is a hard concept for some people—many people—to wrap their heads around.

Wholesale or retail?
In a previous life, my first wife and I exhibited and sold our wares at large arts and crafts fairs, mostly in upstate New York. Because the region is somewhat isolated, many of the same exhibitors did all the shows we did; so I got to know quite a few of them. Quite a few of them, consummate craftspeople though they were, did not quite get that they were in business. Some were happy to collect enough from their sales to pay for their materials (never mind the booth fee, the transportation, or their time). It was just a hobby, after all. Others decided what their time was worth and then proceeded to sell at the same price to everyone, retail or wholesale. They could not understand how that might hurt them financially. Others applied a formula to calculate their wholesale and retail prices but never looked at whether they were actually making money as retailers.

I looked at the situation differently. I figured that for every piece of every product we made, I had the opportunity to sell it wholesale to a shop at a price determined by what the competitive traffic would bear, and I had the opportunity to sell that same item retail if I took it to a craft show. So my wholesale left hand told my retail right hand what the wholesale value of the item was. And my retail right hand had to make enough of a margin to pay for the booth, pay for the truck rental, pay my helper’s wage for the day, pay for meals and occasionally lodging, and cover the opportunity cost of my being there. Otherwise, I was losing money by going to the show. After a couple of years of testing all the craft shows in the region on this basis, we winnowed our schedule to fewer than a dozen weekends a year while other people kept beating themselves up week after week after week and never knowing whether they made money or lost money.

Self-publishing works much the same way.
As the author, you want the publisher to pay you royalties. As the publisher, you want to show a profit after paying those royalties. And you don’t want to count the same money twice, only to find out when it’s time to pay your bills that you have half what you thought you had.

Marion Gropen consults with publishers of all sizes on accounting and finance matters. The other day on a mailing list for mostly small publishers and self-publishers, she had this to say in response to a question from a new publisher:

Publishers have a few unusual issues. First, we are not ever allowed to include the fixed costs of producing an edition (such as editorial, cover design, etc.) in the inventory value. They are, of course, part of your cost of goods sold (COGS), but they are not part of the unit cost of your books. Instead, you are required, for tax purposes and by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for publishing, to put them in an asset account when you incur them, and then to amortize them over the expected lifetime of the book. This is generally a trivially easy task, and you can certainly do it in any basic accounting software, but you do have to know that you’re going to do it when you set them up.

Second, even if we’re self-publishing, it’s wise to pay ourselves a royalty, and treat our publishing operation and our authoring operation as separate functions, and entities.

When I asked Marion to elaborate a bit on that last point (does she really mean that the one-title self-publisher should formally pay royalties in that way?), her was her answer:

The typical one-book self-publisher may need to be dragged into recognizing that they are running a business, and this will help in that effort.

But the best reason, from my perspective, to do this is that it makes crystal clear how much of your income is coming from which part of your operation. If you pay yourself as an author, and also as a publisher, you will often see that you’re doing much better from the author side of the table. If you also don’t enjoy the publishing work, then it becomes clear that you need to sell the rights to a traditional publisher.

Words to the wise (quoted with Marion’s permission,of course).

Makeover time!

2011-11-12T10:00:00.001-05:00

I took Jane Mackay’s advice in updating my website (see her comment on previous post). I integrated some other people’s thoughts, too. Better, I think. We’ll see what Google thinks.

Interesting post on the history of business cards

2011-10-28T07:57:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Will Sherwood on LinkedIn for this link.

Makeover time?

2011-10-25T13:06:00.000-04:00

I need your help.
Saturday, at the Self-Publishing Book Expo, I unveiled new graphics. My thinking was that my old graphics, representing classic, elegant typography, were not going to go over big in New York. I wanted something splashier.

The old look
My website (go ahead, click the link) matches my old business card:

The new look
Here are the graphics I had at the show in New York (and my new business card, front and back, matches the two striped posters):

Which do you like better?
Should I redesign my website in the newer style or leave well enough alone? Drop me a note or comment below. Tell me where you are geographically and what your relationship is to book publishing, so I know whether the new graphics have any appeal outside New York.

Thanks for your time!

You missed a good event

2011-10-23T11:35:00.000-04:00

The Self-Publishing Book Expo, October 22 in NYC, was well attended. Sessions were excellent, I’m told. But the crowd in the exhibit hall kept me pinned to my table all day, so I can’t offer any direct reports. I do know that the list of speakers included some of the major lights of independent publishing, and people came away with a lot more knowledge than they arrived with. The exhibitors included a number of companies that provide important services to self-publishing authors, and I had productive conversations with both attendees and other exhibitors.

This is a fast-evolving business, and attending conferences is an important way to stay up to date.

Sorry you couldn’t make it. Maybe I’ll see you there next year.

Self-Publishing Book Expo, October 22, NYC

2011-10-16T09:53:00.000-04:00

I’ll have an exhibit table at the Self-Publishing Book Expo this coming Saturday. Stop by to say hello.

Location:

The Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers
811 7th Avenue (between 52nd & 53rd)
New York NY 10019
Main number for hotel: 212-581-1000

The exhibit hall will be the New York Ballroom West, on the third floor.

Hours: 9 am to 5 pm

Are you a soon-to-be-famous novelist?

2011-10-13T05:27:00.000-04:00

Read this interview. Thanks to Jane Friedman for the tip on Google+.

Making Mini-Mes

2011-10-02T16:54:00.001-04:00

I was in Baltimore Friday and Saturday, at this year’s Communication Central conference, organized every year by the freelance publishing world’s very own hostess with the mostest, Ruth “I can write about anything!”™ Thaler-Carter.

I spoke yesterday afternoon to a roomful of editors on how to attract self-publishing authors and how best to help them. The audience was receptive, and I hope some of the people there will take up the challenge.

The more the merrier, I say. Independent publishing is growing at a tremendous rate, far outpacing traditional publishing. In 2010, 2.8 million titles were released in the United States. If independent self-publishing is going to gain traction and credibility—as well it should—in the publishing world, producing quality books is going to be a key, whether they’re printed books or e-books. And that invariably means that most self-publishing authors are going to need at least some input from professional editors and designers. There should be plenty of work to keep us all busy.

There were several excellent presentations at the conference, running in two tracks. I picked up some valuable ideas, and I know others did too.

Suggestion box

2011-09-23T10:53:00.002-04:00

Your credit card statement comes. There’s a charge ascribed to some company with an obscure name you don’t immediately recognize, but there’s an 800 number associated with it. So you call the number, speak with someone who eventually answers, and find out that, indeed, this was a purchase you made and agreed to pay for. You hang up.

What has this cost the company (which is obviously set up for just this transaction and probably goes through the process many times an hour)? The call cost something. The representative’s time cost something. Let’s call it $5 (wild guess), which is a cost they then have to build into their prices, probably lowering total units sold.

But there’s a solution. I just received the following email:

Dear Dick Margulis,

This notification is just a friendly reminder (not a bill or a second charge) that on Sep 9, 2011, you placed an order from [obscure company]. The charge will appear on your bill as “[even more obscure rubric]”. This is just a reminder to help you recognize the charge. You will not be charged again.

Bingo! One email, sent by automated script two weeks after the purchase, alerting me to what I’ll see on the bill. Total cost: less than a penny.

Some employee of the company suggested that strategy and hopefully got a reward or a promotion for doing so.

I don’t know if you’re old enough to recall when every box of Kodak film came with a folded sheet of instructions printed on lightweight paper. You may not even be old enough to remember film, but just go with me on this. Kodak had an employee suggestion program. Any employee could write up a suggestion, and if the suggestion was implemented, the employee would get a hefty reward. The number that sticks in my mind is ten thousand dollars, which was nothing to sneeze at fifty years ago.

Well, one inspired employee came up with the idea of printing the instructions on the white inside surface of the yellow box itself, rather than on a separate piece of paper. The cost of the reward was recouped within weeks of making the change, perhaps within days.

A decade or so before that, another Kodak employee noticed that the Brownie camera kits sold as Open Me First Christmas presents were being returned in large numbers because of dead batteries. The batteries were dead because they were inserted into the cameras when the packages were put together, in July, so they could be shipped to stores in time for Christmas sales. The employee suggested packing the batteries in a separate slot in the box, rather than in the camera. Problem solved. Returns cut to a negligible level. Millions of dollars saved.

When was the last time, in this age of MBA-led corporations with their attitude that all innovation comes from the top, that you saw an employee suggestion box?

Just asking.

What color should I paint the hall?

2011-09-22T08:34:00.003-04:00

Caller: Is this the architect to whom I am speaking?

Architect: Yes. How may I help you?

Caller: Well, I’m thinking about building a house. I don’t have a piece of property yet, and I don’t know how big the lot will be or whether it will be in town or in the country or near the ocean or near the mountains or what direction it will face or whether it will be in a neighborhood where it’s safe to have picture windows or what style I want the house to be, but there’s a paint sale on at Sears, and I want to know what color I should paint the hall.

The other day in a LinkedIn group called Creative Designers and Writers, someone began a discussion thread under the heading “How do you choose the best font?” [If you can access the group link and then find the discussion, go ahead and do so. I think access is restricted group members, though, so you may not be able to until you are accepted into the group.]

The question, though, is like asking what color to paint the hall. It’s approximately the last question to ask when designing a block of text for a book or a website or anything else. This is old ground for me, but it’s worth repeating. A few of us old type hands tried to put the question in context. Alas, others kept extolling their favorite typefaces (and continuing the confusion about the difference between a font and a typeface, which are not the same). As I said in my comment, “Context. Context. Context. What’s the medium? Who’s the audience? What is the content about? Does the type have to be read, or is it just there to make a statement or draw the eye? If it is to be read, what are the page dimensions, margins, line length, character count, leading, …?”

Details matter.

Two cultures

2011-09-02T07:09:00.002-04:00

A visitor last Sunday by the name of Irene blew a tree onto a neighbor’s house. Onto two neighbors’ houses, actually. It was a mature white oak that yielded two good-size saw logs.

The complicating factor, aside from the precariousness of the tree’s crown over the second house (its lower trunk having already crushed the front porch of the first house) was that the neighbor lives on a state road. So the state owned the tree, but the tree fell on private property. Well, rules are rules. It was the homeowner’s responsibility to get the tree taken off the houses. The homeowner, after due consultation with an insurance adjuster, called in a tree service who had worked on the property before.

It was quite a show.
Wednesday, three people showed up in two vehicles. One was a large stake-body truck that would be used to haul away branches and brush. The other was a log truck, the kind with a large hydraulic boom and claw mounted on the back.

One man did all of the technical work. He did both the chainsaw work and the claw work, making a complicated, difficult, dangerous job look like child’s play. It’s a joy to watch someone with that level of skill ply his trade.

His two helpers flagged traffic while he went about his business. Now I don’t know how traffic is flagged on construction sites in your state, but the standard practice around here is that the contractor gets a permit for doing pretty much any work on or near a road, then pays for a police officer to come park a cruiser with flashing lights and stand around in a Day-Glo vest chatting with the workers and occasionally glancing at traffic. In this situation, though, perhaps because of the extraordinary nature of the storm, that requirement seems to have been waived. There was no police officer anywhere to be seen. And despite the two large trucks jutting into the road, there were no traffic cones and no vests of any kind. Just two guys, one before and one after the worksite, in nondescript clothing, with nothing but hand signals, stopping traffic when it had to be stopped and letting it pass when it was safe to do so.

Some people took umbrage at being told to stop by a person not wearing a uniform and decided to thread their way through at inopportune times, but there were only a few near misses and no actual collisions.

Total of three people. At the end of the day, a full truckload of branches and brush headed out and the log truck stayed parked.

Thursday morning, the crew returned, this time with a fifteen-yard Dumpster instead of the large stake-body, and finished the cleanup, then left. No muss. No fuss. Just working guys doing their job as efficiently as possible.

All that was left was the upturned stump, where the tree had tipped out of the soggy ground. State tree. State right-of-way. The state’s job to remove the last piece. This is not a dangerous situation anymore, as the stump is nowhere near power lines or structures of any kind.

This morning, seven state vehicles arrived.
Supervisor’s pickup, large front-end loader. Backhoe. Cherry picker. Three dump trucks.

That was an hour ago. They’re still here. The road, during commute time, is blocked at both ends, forcing traffic to detour. At some point I’m sure they’ll get done with what they’re doing, but what they’re doing consists principally in picking up one large, heavy object and placing it in a truck for removal.

Just working guys doing their job, in full compliance with all state work rules.

To all those who complain about regulations hampering private business,
I offer this counterexample.

How a Book is Made: AD 400 vs. 1947 vs. 1961 vs. 2011

2011-08-27T18:41:00.000-04:00

Here is a great link from Joanna Penn. Enjoy.

Teach them to write an English sentence

2011-08-22T08:58:00.002-04:00

At a recent industry conference (I’m intentionally obfuscating the location and the industry, but my source is reliable), a speaker, the head of the mechanical engineering department at a large university, invited the audience to tell him what specific coursework would make graduates with master’s degrees more attractive as new hires.

The first person to rise to the challenge indicated that his company was less interested in hiring people with master’s degrees than in hiring people with bachelor’s degrees in engineering; but, that said, there were two basic skills he found lacking, not just in graduates of the speaker’s program but in graduates of all three of the local engineering schools.

First, he said, they all know about CAD and 3D modeling software, but none of them know basic drafting. So they design products that can’t actually be manufactured. Make them take a basic drafting course, so they can make a sketch.

Second, he said, teach them to write an English sentence. I want engineers who know enough about technical writing to produce a report that I can understand when I read it. You’re not doing that.

The audience approved. The professor responded pusillanimously, saying those courses had to be removed from the curriculum to make way for more engineering courses. The questioner was not impressed.

Amen.

A crowdsourcing tale

2011-08-06T07:31:00.002-04:00

Everyone should read this blog post on crowdsourcing. It speaks volumes and is applicable in many fields—mine and maybe yours, too. Thanks to Carolyn Haley for the link.

Fix the USPS

2011-08-04T11:34:00.004-04:00

If you’re even tangentially involved in publishing, a functioning USPS is important to you. If you live in the United States, you know the postal service is in trouble (and not for the first time). If you’re older than twelve, you’ve probably gotten crosswise with the USPS more than once in your life. I know I’ve lodged my share of complaints over the years, and I’ve watched the service deteriorate, improve, and deteriorate again. It’s time to fix what’s wrong.

In the short term…
Mail volume is down in all categories. A lot of mail has gone online. A lot of the reduction is a symptom of a weak economy. Volume is not going to recover. As a result, the USPS is losing money hand over fist and they’re looking for ways to save money. They always trot out their old standby—eliminating Saturday deliveries—because they know that will be rejected and they’ll get a rate hike instead.

Well here’s an idea: For business deliveries, go ahead and drop Saturday. It’s okay. Really. For residential deliveries, keep Saturday and drop Tuesday. People who work regular Monday-to-Friday jobs, what few of them remain, need to be able to get to a post office when it’s open, to pick up parcels that were not delivered, to mail bulky items, to purchase money orders, to apply for a passport. They need Saturday hours. Once mail that came in over the weekend is delivered on Monday, most people would probably accept skipping Tuesday. And for federal holidays that fall on Monday, the postal workers would get an extended break (something they rarely get now). That wouldn’t happen if the skipped day were Wednesday. Similar arguments can be made against Thursday and Friday, particularly as regards checks that come in that you want to deposit during the current week. But Tuesday? I can live without it. How about you.

Why does my letter carrier drive a truck?
In all the countries I’ve visited in the last several years, letter carries use pushcarts, bicycles, tricycles, or scooters. They do not drive a fleet of custom-made gasoline-powered trucks for a total distance of two miles a day each in order to move mail from a local branch post office to houses that are within easy walking distance.

My local post office is on the current closure list, and the neighborhood is up in arms. Why? Because the post office is within walking distance, and it would be a shame for seniors to have to get in a car to go to the next post office down the road (less than a mile away). Doesn’t that suggest that the letter carriers could manage without their own individual trucks? Do it the way every other civilized country does it. Save capital costs. Save energy costs.

Why is my post office lobby frigid in summer and broiling in winter?
Because it was built when James Farley was Postmaster General and postal workers were not entitled to a pleasant working environment. So the only heating and cooling equipment is in the lobby, and by cranking it to the max, enough makes it through the service windows to the back to make life bearable. In other words, the building is an energy hog. It should be retrofitted or closed. How many other post offices are of the same vintage and wasting huge amounts of expensive energy for equally ridiculous reasons?

In the long term…
All of the long-term dysfunctions of the USPS—and for all they do right, they are certainly a dysfunctional organization—can be traced to a single root cause: the USPS is the archetype of the Theory X organization. It’s time to figure out how to migrate to Theory Y, to empower employees to make decisions that solve problems instead of hobbling them with thousands of pages of regulations, procedures, and rules.

First, teach managers to manage, not the way they’re trained to manage now but in accordance with modern practices. Then empower them to do so.

An example. A couple of weeks ago, our mail deliveries suddenly became very irregular. We got little or no mail when it was eventually delivered, which was not every day and certainly not during daylight hours. When I inquired, the reason eventually given was that our route only takes three and a half hours to deliver and so does not justify a full-time carrier. Therefore we’ve been designated an auxiliary route (don’t ask). After a bit of conversation, I asked why the manager doesn’t just divvy up the routes differently so they are all roughly equal in length, rather than always having to designate an auxiliary route and leave customers angry and upset. No can do; laying out routes is not the manager’s responsibility. Well, why the hell isn’t it the manager’s responsibility?

Classic Theory X. The manager is powerless to manage, because all decisions and rules are imposed top-down from layers that are totally inaccessible from below.

Change it. Make every employee from the carrier to the CEO accountable for meeting performance goals and then empower every employee to make decisions to that end. If that means replacing trucks with bicycles to save enough money to keep the office open, then the carriers and manager should be empowered to make that choice.

This will take a long time. The USPS is composed of people selected for their ability to digest, abide by, and enforce rules—on each other and on us, the customers. It is not peopled with employees dedicated to serving customers or meeting performance goals creatively. If they change their hiring practices today, it will be thirty years before the workforce turns over. But they should start today anyway. And they should start intensively training the managers they have (who come from the same ranks of rule-bound employees) and favor the ones who understand how to adapt.

The USPS says it has a crisis. There’s no better time to act. Fix the system.

Typography books at ABE

2011-07-20T19:29:00.002-04:00

A nice collection of typography books. I own too few of these. But then I also own many not listed here. The subject is both broad and deep.

Moses behind a laptop

2011-07-14T09:07:00.002-04:00

I am sitting in the living room at a retreat center—one of those 1930s-era lefty summer camps for adults that fill their calendars with workshops and lectures and canoeing and hiking and bad vegetarian food. This is not my thing. “Fun group activities” is an oxymoron in my idiolect. I readily acknowledge being a curmudgeon. I am here only to humor my wife, who is here because of a particular workshop she wanted to attend.

Earlier this morning, another guest, a woman about my age with a German accent, came down the stairs, saw me sitting here, and asked if I would mind if she took my picture. “If that would amuse you, feel free,” I said, and kept reading my email.

She took her picture and then volunteered that she is accustomed to seeing young people tapping away at their laptops but that she was startled to see me. She said, “You have a patriarchal beard.” I replied that the last time I shaved I was a young man and my beard was not patriarchal. “You look like Moses behind a laptop,” she said.

Maybe I’ll go on that hike this afternoon, after all. It’s up a mountain.