Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • December 5, 2012 publishers are honest men and women -- but the odds are stacked. 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 onestar 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 Who can best the Amazon? Letters to the Editor Councilman-elect says thank you Dear Editor: Tuesday, Nov. 6 was an important day for our country, state, and township. With the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy still very fresh in our minds, Mahwah voters came out in numbers to choose the leadership they wanted in the coming years. I am both excited and humbled that these voters have elected me to a seat on our township council. The next few years will be a challenge for all of us as we work through the many issues affecting our town. I want to assure you that I will work very hard to represent you in the best possible way. Special thanks need to go out to my family and friends for their support and to my campaign manager, David May. I also want to congratulate incumbents H. Lisa DiGiulio and John Roth for being reelected to the council and Mayor Bill Laforet for his reelection victory. More importantly, I want to thank all of the voters of Mahwah who came out to vote during this election season. Steven Sbarra, Councilman-elect Mahwah Auction (continued from page 7) impervious coverage and housing development to a minimum, the township proposed creating only two nonconforming lots rather than three. Campion emphasized that the current value of the property lies in the two buildable lots into which the property has been subdivided. He added, however, that the buyers of the lots will have to apply to the planning board for site plan and soil moving approvals. The tank field on this site has a long history in the township, having been built sometime after 1912 when artesian wells were drilled in the area of Mahwah Road. The artesian wells and this reservoir and tank served the township for many years starting in the early 1900s, when the Cragmere Water Company was founded and the Cragmere section of the township was being developed, according to “From Pioneer Settlement to Suburb: A History of Mahwah New Jersey, 1700-1976.” The water company was sold to Albert Winter in 1925. He transferred the deed to the Mahwah Water Company in 1931, and the system was integrated into the township’s water system in 1950.