Page 28 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • December 5, 2012 At any given moment, there are several million books in print. The author can figure out roughly where he or she stands by looking up sales on the Internet for that particular day or part of a day. If sales are consistently in the 100,000 range or lower -- low numbers are good here because you are computing against the two-million-plus baseline -- you can expect some kind of a royalty check every six months. Someone I know once edited a book for a number of high school kids who contributed pieces so they could say they had been published. The guy who claimed to be the publisher put them up to it at $500 a pop. The sales stalled in the two million range once the high school kids’ parents stopped buying copies for relatives. Conversely, I once worked at the same newspaper as at least one author whose books float in the hundreds for several weeks and then lapse into the lower thousands for several months. He gets some nice paychecks, but this author has been writing for 40 years and worked for two national news magazines and a couple of daily newspapers, so we are not talking about an amateur. Another guy I worked with wrote a couple of best-sellers about baseball. He still gets electronic hate mail from sports fans who want to write. No matter what characters you extol or assassinate, or what depravities you claim to have perpetrated, you will probably not get rich as a writer. If the depravities were serious enough, you may not even make bail money. The riparian Amazon is replete with serpents. One bite can turn you into piranha fodder. The electronic Amazon is replete with other types of reptiles: the insidious one-star reviewers who actually buy a book that is the price of admission. These folks file a one-star review and convince other people not to buy. The motivation is sometimes is simple as envy. The first review that crops up online for “Custer Survivor” is a one-star review. The reviewer had previously written a self-published book and an e-mail site “proving” there were no Custer survivors. Any ego involved here? Confronted with an assault from truth -- complete with forensics -- some people argue and other people scream. But they all seem to love those one-star reviews. The book averaged out to about 3.5 as friends of both parties chimed in. This was not an evaluation; it was more like an election. I think I won, but I am not sure. When the documentary “Custer’s Last Man” hit The History Channel, the reviewers verged into hysteria. The Webmaster had to take one guy off the case after repeated warnings. Most of the one-star guys self-publish if they publish at all, but the televised documentary, with some very plausible acting and location shots, was way out of their league. This provoked a feeding frenzy, especially when the final signature that showed up on screen was evaluated as NOT being the signature of the Custer survivor. The analyst on the documentary was correct. That particular signature was written by a clerk, as was the 19th century rural custom in land transactions, though not in military enlistments, marriage licenses, or wills. I explained that in the book. (Have you ever tried to explain a fine distinction to someone who is emotionally committed to denial, and who is playing to an audience who agrees with that commitment?) My new book, “Operation Snow,” attracted a couple of one-star reviewer types in what looks like the Soviet tradition of “disinformation.” This means that when an irksome fact crops up, someone attempts to frame the author as a McCarthyite or argue that the paranoids of the FBI had no right to call somebody a traitor because, 20 years later, J. Edgar Hoover made some dubious calls during the civil rights movement. As it happens, the villain of “Operation Snow” got nabbed two years before anybody heard of Senator Joe McCarthy, and J. Edgar Hoover never pushed the case because he was leery of offending Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even though Hoover passed along some information that could have warned the White House about Pearl Harbor if the people there had not been asleep at the switch -- or pretending to be asleep at the switch. The Pearl Harbor instigator took the drop from a couple of Soviet defectors and from his own monumental arrogance. In a turbulent way, the online system is somewhat democratic and perhaps more egalitarian that the old system, where a handful of book reviews in New York or Washington newspapers could make or break a book. Nowadays, the author who can get published can ride the rocky waves of a constituency of those who ordered the book online. If they liked the book, the author is a star of many stars. If they hated the book, or the author, a lot of one-star reviews follow. But the reviewers had to buy something to write that review. Some authors swim to safety, or even to temporary fame, and some drown, but in the end, the Amazon seems to win. Once upon a time, authors self-published almost routinely. They dropped off a manuscript and a check or a sack of coins and, lo and behold, a book emerged at the other end of the tunnel. The reading public determined whether the book was a hit or a miss. Most books published before the mid-19th century came out that way. The process changed when a huge percentage of the public in America and Western Europe became literate and Victorian family life superseded the sort of society in which a man sired an heir and then spent the rest of his life drinking himself into a stupor with his buddies and the barmaid. Readable books with characters that inspired good character, some of them 800-page tomes about dramatic versions of the people next door in threatening situations, became popular. Some of these are still read in schools today. (Pity those poor kids!) But there was good money in these books and good times around the piano near the fireplace. Modern publishing was born, and now the writers were expected to produce books that would sell to the same audience, often by telling the same story over and over. That was before the days of the Amazon. The Amazon River has claimed a number of victims. Theodore Roosevelt tried to recapture his lost youth, and possibly the lost White House, by an exploration voyage to map the “River of Doubt,” a tributary of the Amazon, in 1913. Roosevelt permanently damaged his once-robust health, but he might have been a presidential nominee in 1920 had he not died from what may have been complications of various injuries and tropical diseases. In 1925, Percy Fawcett, a British officer and experienced explorer who found a lost city in Sri Lanka, set out on a far more speculative trip for “the lost city of Z” -- he pronounced it “zed.” He was never seen again, although his compass and signet ring turned up in a Brazilian pawnshop. Clark Gable in “Too Hot to Handle” and Harrison Ford in the first Indiana Jones movie also had Amazon adventures, though these were purely cinematic and less than lethal even on film. (Ford starts off where Gable left off -- trying to take off in a float plane while the locals shoot poisoned arrows at him.) Various other films, including one with Errol Flynn, used the rain forest we need to save as a metaphor for a menacing leafy cavern haunted by invisible villains. That brings us to the modern Amazon, a way of getting books to the general public. This Amazon has had a serious impact on brick-and-mortar bookstores, the people who work there, and the authors who want to get their books to the public. People who dream of writing a book dream of getting rich. Dream on. Once in a great while, a new writer produces a book that sells into the hundreds of thousands of copies, gets translated into a couple of foreign languages, and facilitates early retirement, mountain homes, and yachts. More typically, good writers probably break even if you average the hours spent writing the book against what they would have made doing newspaper work or magazine articles, legal research, adjunct professorial work, or tutoring. I would not say the casino is rigged -- the majority of publishers are honest men and women -- but the odds are stacked. Who can best the Amazon? Letters to the Editor Urges residents to vote ‘no’ on referendum I urge all Midland Park residents to take the time to vote “no” on Tuesday, Dec. 11 and to defeat this expensive and ill-conceived proposal. The polls will be open from 2 to 9 p.m. James J. DeLuca Midland Park Dear Editor: In the midst of these difficult economic times, the Midland Park Board of Education is proposing a $15.3 million bond issue which, if approved, would raise the taxes on the average Midland Park house by more than $400 a year for the next 20 years. This proposed tax increase is in addition to the current school taxes paid by the residents of Midland Park which already make up more than 65 percent of each homeowner’s current total tax bill. In reviewing the proposed expenditures, it appears that many of the proposed maintenance items should have been budgeted and paid for as part of routine maintenance and repairs. Why didn’t this occur? Other proposed expenditures are ill advised and not essential to our children’s education. Rather, these items appear aimed at satisfying special interest groups or keeping up with neighboring towns. This is particularly true with respect to the proposed renovations to the high school auditorium, the proposed installation of artificial turf, a new track, scoreboard, stadium lighting, and new bleachers at the high school, all of which will cost more than $3 million. The board of education and our highly paid school administrators should instead focus on a more productive endeavor, namely forging a send/receive agreement for our high school with a neighboring district at a favorable per-student cost. Under this arrangement, our high school students would benefit from a broader, more challenging academic program and our student-athletes would participate in more competitive sports teams. Students in lower grades could then use the current high school facility, and perhaps the students housed in the Godwin School and Highland School buildings could occupy a single facility, eliminating significant expenditures currently proposed. These are hard choices, but the members of the board of education and school administrators owe it to the residents of Midland Park to look at all alternatives and not simply spend taxpayers’ money. Dear Editor: On Tuesday, Dec. 11, voters in Midland Park will be asked to cast their ballots in a special bond referendum that would authorize the district to fund needed renovations to our schools’ facilities and infrastructure. These renovations include boilers, roofs, windows, plumbing, electrical, lighting, fire alarm systems, flooring, and bathrooms. The list of aged and neglected infrastructure projects was based on a district-wide facilities audit. The board of education has determined that these projects are all vital items that need to be upgraded, repaired, or replaced. The school district facilities have suffered due to fact that the board of education has always put academics first. In addition, the board has to deal with a mandatory two percent cap imposed by the state, and is prohibited by law to build a capital improvement fund over a multi-year period. The board of education has put together an outstanding school administration, resulting in excellent faculty, staff, and curriculum. Now is the time to match the excellent academic component of our school district with upgraded facilities. Let’s give our children the opportunity to be educated in a safe, clean, and comfortable environment. Please do not look at this referendum as a burden on the taxpayer, but as an investment in our community. Excellent school systems equate to higher property values, as well as a pride in the community. Do not be content with rundown school facilities. Let’s make this one of the best school districts in the state. Let’s take advantage of our small school population and provide a more private-like education to our children. (continued on next page) Referendum is investment in community