Both RebelFire: Out of the Gray Zone<\/i> and How to Kill the Job Culture Before it Kills You<\/i> are now back in my possession and my ownership.<\/p>\n
Whoohoo!<\/p>\n
Question is: what to do with them?<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
With both books, all rights have been reverted to me.<\/p>\n
With RebelFire<\/i> I have about 200 physical books plus my original .doc files, which I’ve always kept. <\/p>\n
With Job Culture<\/i> 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).<\/p>\n
I’m thinking about selling some of the RebelFire<\/i> copies, autographed, on eBay or direct from the blog.<\/p>\n
Job Culture<\/i> I need to revise before I do anything.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Any other thoughts? Preferably easy<\/i> ones?<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
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<\/i> to send me, everything was settled without a hiccup. Salutes to Peder, Donna, and Shelia of Paladin for making it so simple!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
No matter what, though, I was not<\/i> about to let traitors have my book!<\/p>\n
And fortunately, it is my book. Nobody realized it after Aaron’s death, but RebelFire<\/i> never belonged to JPFO. The rights belonged, personally, to Aaron and me. JPFO only had the contracted authority to print and distribute it.<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
Since the book was a dud, I doubted anybody would care. But Doug balked.<\/p>\n
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.)<\/p>\n
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>, I hadn’t been getting royalties<\/i>.<\/p>\n
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><\/p>\n
I guess suddenly I became more scary than Bob Meier. \ud83d\ude42 Doug not only quickly reverted all rights, but arranged to send me all remaining copies of the book for the cost of media mailing.<\/p>\n
—–<\/p>\n
[rant]<\/p>\n
Well, not quite<\/i> all remaining copies. Bob asked for four copies of RebelFire<\/i>, claiming that he had helped research the book. <\/p>\n
I had to laugh. A bitter laugh, but still … laugh. Bob had nothing<\/i>, nada, zip to do with RebelFire<\/i>. He did not perform a single second’s worth of work on it. <\/p>\n
Years before RebelFire<\/i>, when I was starting The State vs the People<\/i>, 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?<\/i> Never, no way, nohow.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n