Oaksys Tech Update

I’m fascinated to see the french court case between La Martiniere (a french publisher) and Google over the Google Book project. La Martiniere has won damages and Google have been ordered to stop digitising book from France. Strangely enough the french government have just announced approval of a 1 Billion euro project to digitise french books.

I wonder how the french publishers would react if Google remove all reference to the french books and their publishers from the french publishing industry? The publishers would sink into digital oblivion if Google decide to retaliate.

Guru

Oaksys Tech Ltd has been in operation for over 10 years and we place great emphasis on good customer relations. Going that  extra mile is important. Imagine our surprise when we discover the situation with a new supplier of printing services to ourselves. We ordered a batch of USB memory sticks to be printed for marketing purposes by this “new” company.

First they demand payment up front, because they have not dealt with us before. Understandable, but an irritant and a bit one sided.

Then they can’t handle the artwork which has been used by other printing companies, because they don’t handle pdf format files. We have to fork out an extra £25 for the file to be converted by them. They are starting to test our patience.

When we placed the order, we mentioned that there was no rush because we will not be using the product before 1st Oct 2009. We sent a cheque for the full amount 16 days ago. Since then radio-silence from the printer. Knowing that typically such a job takes about 4 weeks with previous printers we sent an email enquiring about their estimated delivery date.

You’ve guessed it already - they are planning to deliver on 1st of October 2009, some 10 weeks after the date of order. These people must either be extremely busy or have some weird scheduling process. I’ve checked with other printers and they have told me that once the artwork was available it would be only 30 minutes work maximum to print the USB memory sticks.

What really irks me is the lack of communication from this printing company. In these days of email it is inexcusable. It would have cost them nothing to send an email saying - “thanks for your order … this is when we intend to deliver …” How do they stay in business if they treat their new customers so poorly. I don’t think that they will see any repeat business from us.

Guru

My publisher wrote by email to the Local Authority of Southwark offering them a free copy of my new book for each of their libraries. That was over a week ago and there has been no response of any kind. My publisher phoned today to find the name of the person he should write to, given that the contact email address on their public website seemed to be unmonitored. After 35 minutes on the phone, they were finally able to find the name of the person who deals with such matters.

My publisher forwarded the original email to the newly discovered email address. Sure enough 5 minutes later an out of office response was received saying that the person addressed in the email was away for 20 days. I wonder what will happen when that person returns? There will be a massive outstanding email stack to be dealt with by the person.

I don’t think that my publisher will waste any more time on this local authority.

Alaric

Whilst I was writing the second book of the Adam Cranford series - “Company Mole” I needed to research how much space and weight £1 Million (Sterling) would take if someone had to move it by hand. After some internet research I couldn’t find the weight of a £20 note so I weighed £1000 using sensitive weighing scales.

It turns out that £1 Million in £20 notes would weigh around 53 Kgs and take a space of 0.7M x 0.5M x 0.3M depending on how tightly it was packed, age of notes, humidity etc.

So £1 Billion pounds would weigh about 53 tons. That is two large lorry loads full of cash.

If the UK Government has spent £50 rescuing the banks, that is 100 large truck loads of cash.

Alaric

Recently published Teen Valour

Here’s quite a useful analysis for authors wanting to use the internet for publicity. The danger of being too technical is that you get engrossed in the technology and forget the message of marketing.

Alaric

One of the issues raised in my book Teen Valour is the conflict faced by a teen boy when he is faced with the opportunity of making a lot of money. In the story the boy is given the opportunity of making a great deal of money for apparently little effort. It conflicts with the upbringing by his parents. They teach him that he will have to work hard and live carefully to accumulate any savings. Adam Cranford, the hero of the book, already has enough problems dealing with the fact that his family are relatively poor yet all of his friends at the new school are very wealthy.

He can see how having access to wealth has spoilt some of his friends, but when he is faced with the opportunity to make a lot of easy money how should he react himself? Will he take advantage of the situation and give into temptation. Adam is a deceptively simple character. It is not easy to predict how he will react.

Alaric

Sorting out the marketing for a new book seems to entail as much work as writing it in the first place. Teen Valour is about 170,000 words and took about 6 months to research and write. There seems to be an endless supply of publicists willing to take a fee and have no results firmly defined.  The current bid is about $4000 just to get talking to publishers, but no guarantees.

Alaric