Two books rescued :-)Plus a small JPFO-related rant

Both RebelFire: Out of the Gray Zone and How to Kill the Job Culture Before it Kills You are now back in my possession and my ownership.

Whoohoo!

Question is: what to do with them?

—–

With both books, all rights have been reverted to me.

With RebelFire I have about 200 physical books plus my original .doc files, which I’ve always kept.

With Job Culture I have few, if any, physical copies but do have the original .docs (kindly returned to me by Paladin last week; I thought they were lost in the mists of time).

I’m thinking about selling some of the RebelFire copies, autographed, on eBay or direct from the blog.

Job Culture I need to revise before I do anything.

I see Kindle editions and print-on-demand editions of both in the future, but this I know nothing about. Hope the learning curve isn’t too steep.

Any other thoughts? Preferably easy ones?

—–

Paladin was a dream to deal with. The rights reversion took some time and anxiety because although they were getting my emails, I wasn’t getting their replies. (Been having weird email troubles recently.) But once we made contact, via a snailed copy of the emails they’d been trying to send me, everything was settled without a hiccup. Salutes to Peder, Donna, and Shelia of Paladin for making it so simple!

JPFO was a little more “interesting.” I negotiated the rights reversion in poor Doug Schuett’s last hectic week in the office, days before JPFO was formally handed over to its destroyers. The negotiation went okay, but not without hair-raising moments.

No matter what, though, I was not about to let traitors have my book!

And fortunately, it is my book. Nobody realized it after Aaron’s death, but RebelFire never belonged to JPFO. The rights belonged, personally, to Aaron and me. JPFO only had the contracted authority to print and distribute it.

And since nobody had sent me any royalty statements since LaVonne Schuett died early in 2013, I had a good argument that they’d lost that authority by taking it out of print. (I never worried about the statements because I always thought the book was a loser; far as I knew it never sold enough to earn back my initial advance.)

Since the book was a dud, I doubted anybody would care. But Doug balked.

At first I think he didn’t know what to do. The question seemed to be whether he was more afraid of me or of Bob Meier, the JPFO board member who initiated and drove the sellout to SAF. (Unfortunately, Doug always deferred to Bob, even when Doug’s own instincts were 1,000 times better than Bob’s.)

But then Doug told me how many books were still in inventory — just that couple hundred — and I realized that not only had I not been getting statements, I hadn’t been getting royalties.

JPFO owed me some unknown sum of money and many, many months worth of bookkeeping and Doug, do you really want me raising that issue when you’re killing yourself just to close out the office?

I guess suddenly I became more scary than Bob Meier. 🙂 Doug not only quickly reverted all rights, but arranged to send me all remaining copies of the book for the cost of media mailing.

—–

[rant]

Well, not quite all remaining copies. Bob asked for four copies of RebelFire, claiming that he had helped research the book.

I had to laugh. A bitter laugh, but still … laugh. Bob had nothing, nada, zip to do with RebelFire. He did not perform a single second’s worth of work on it.

Years before RebelFire, when I was starting The State vs the People, Bob sent me a couple of boxes of paper news clippings; Aaron gave me permission to ignore both the useless, cumbersome, aging paper and Bob’s persistent attempts to tell me how I “must” write SvP. That was my last contact with Bob until the recent fiasco. RebelFire? Never, no way, nohow.

Of course I let Bob have his four copies; what do I care about a handful of books? But that’s just typical of the way the man operates. He’s not merely forgetful. He’s Bob the Indispensable.

After the sellout was done, I got some emails, as I mentioned, from a JPFO, now SAF, hanger-on, urging me to collaborate with SAF. This person had spent quite a while talking with Bob. And the story the two of them were promulgating was that “Bob was JPFO.” Yes, in exactly those words. “Bob was JPFO.” For all the years since Aaron died, Bob was JPFO’s sole financial support and most important asset! So of course he had a right to sell it to SAF. Why, JPFO would have dried up and blown away without Bob!

Now, I’m not in a position to say whether Bob ever put money into JPFO. Maybe he did — or maybe not. But I know for sure that he was not supporting JPFO in its last 10 months. Bob’s own financial life was reportedly in ruins (a JPFO board insider told me that Bob managed to lose his family farm and bankrupt his own business this year) while JPFO was pulling ahead. Precariously ahead. But this year the organization had a number of profitable months, thanks to the renewed connection with members and corporate supporters. Summer slowed way down, unfortunately. But even at the very, very last, I heard that JPFO’s shortfall was less than $1,000.

If anyone supported JPFO in its last year — other than the donors, sponsors, and members — it was Doug. Doug was hired in 2013 to bring JPFO back after several years of catastrophically neglectful management (compounded by several more deaths after Aaron’s). He was doing that. And Doug personally guaranteed a company credit card, at great cost to his nerves. Long before the sellout, Doug told me he paid off that card — from new JPFO memberships, sponsorships, and sales — and cut it up.

“Bob was JPFO”? Horsefeathers. Bob cost JPFO money and time. He led JPFO into failed projects (like a ghastly direct-mail letter he wrote that was sent to highly targeted recipients and got exactly two — count ’em, 2 — responses). He micromanaged while missing the big picture. Although nobody could really have filled Aaron’s shoes, Bob wasn’t even worthy to have tried.

Now much shameless whitewashing and rewriting of history is going on. Bob’s little claim to have helped write RebelFire is one minor pimple in a very big rash.

The fantasy that “Bob was JPFO,” and that JPFO couldn’t ever make it on its own, has been promoted around the gunblogosphere by those who uncritically support the sellout or have something personally to gain.

Bob also appears (I don’t know for sure) to have been the source of other ridiculous disinformation (e.g. that a very successful spring 2014 fundraiser, which raised thousands, brought in less than $150).

Part of me feels sorry for a sad, possibly confused, possibly broke, old man who’s probably had a crappy couple of years. But sympathy ends when that man engineers the betrayal of Aaron Zelman’s legacy just because he’s too weary or weak to care any more. And especially when he stubbornly engineers that horrific sellout even when presented with an alternative created by long-time JPFO loyalists, life members, and corporate sponsors.

(Oh yes, and that’s another rumor going around. There never was any such alternative; it was just one malcontent blogger — guess who? — creating an illusion! No alternative to the SAF takeover was ever presented to the JPFO board! There was no alternative funding, no organization, no ideas! It was just that one noisy, lying blogger! Maybe her and a handful of unfunded amateurs who had no idea what they were doing. Heck, the SAF deal was such a natural nobody even quit JPFO in protest! Long live the New! Improved! Compromising JPFO! Long live the great, heroic Bob Meier for saving JPFO from certain doom!)

Ahem.

Anyhow, all I’m saying here is Bob, you’re welcome to your lousy four copies of RebelFire and to whatever attempts you and your hangers-on can make to inflate or polish up your deeds. You’re welcome to rewrite the truth in any way you and your allies prefer to see it. But you’re getting no fake credit from me for work you didn’t do on a book you never touched.

[/rant]