Information Age?

I thought this was supposed to be the Information Age.

Last week, I was given what should have been a relatively simple task: find the names of the managers of about forty stores in the county so that we could send a letter about changes in the great state of New York's recycling laws. A volunteer committee had compiled the list of stores, complete with addresses and phone numbers, but had not progressed beyond that.

Being a part-time resident of the modern age, I thought, "Okay, I'll google it." After all, everyone's got a website, after all, and surely the name of the store manager is something you'd want to be available, right? I figured it would be a bit of a pain in the ass, but that it would not take a whole lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

I was wrong.

I was wrong about "everyone's got a website" and I was wrong about having the names of store managers on those websites. My web search turned up five names: three managed separate stores from a single supermarket chain (which also lists the manager's name on store receipts). One national home improvement store listed their manager by first name and last initial, only, which means I would have to address his letter as "Dear Mr. M." One other store listed their manager, but that store is actually part of a franchise owned by someone who is actually local. It took me a while to find this out, and then I spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone, calling every store on my list. I got manager names for about half the stores, grudgingly given out by employees who often sounded too busy to bother talking on the phone.

Information Age, schminformation schmage.

Whether this obfuscation of managers is done as a deliberate corporate privacy policy or is because they figure managers aren't likely to stay in those positions that long, and it's such a hardship to change a name on a website, I don't know. I do know it was an incredibly frustrating way to spend an afternoon. And more frustrating was when I would tell the employee who answered the phone what I was after and why, and they would insist on putting the manager on. Just give me the name! The managers typically sounded about as pressed for time as anyone else. They really didn't want to talk about plastic recycling.

I understand why, for example, radio personalities have moved toward giving out their first names only (our local radio personalities include Gomez and Lisa, Big Chuck, and Leslie Ann; I have been on the radio with Big Chuck and Leslie Ann several times (it's a small pond), have met them face-to-face, and still have no idea who they are). As personalities who reach thousands each day, they stand a better than average chance of attracting unwanted attention than the manager of the local Dollar General. Is it possible that someone's going to navigate through a web page just to do this?




Maybe. But it seems to me most issues are going to come after someone meets or sees the manager in the store, where their name is likely to be up on the wall, or emblazoned on their chest in hard plastic.

There's an irony here in a guy who uses his first name only complaining about not being able to find out information about store employees off the web. I get that, I really do, but there's a difference, I think, between what I do here and those other people. I'm not asking for anything other than a name, and while names have power (as just about every mystical fantasy type of book tells us), I'm not looking for home addresses, personal e-mail, or how many kids they have. Just give me a name.

***

On an unrelated note, last week I noticed something rather stunning:

This weekend, we took a drive to do some shopping, and what amazed me was how green the lawns are getting again, and the fact that, here it is, mid-December, and I was able to go out with a light jacket on. I might actually have to get the lawn tractor out before Christmas!

Have a nice week, all.

ATTENTION-GRABBING HEADLINE!

Last night, following a week that has left me physically drained (and isn't over yet; I've got outdoor, work-related stuff tonight and tomorrow), I collapsed in my chair and popped over to Facebook. Pretty much tops on my list--Facebook apparently having it wasn't yet time to arbitrarily change my news feed from 'most recent' to 'top stories'--was an article linked from a friend of mine:

REPORT: AMAZON TO BUY SIMON & SCHUSTER

Whoa.

The teaser below the header said, "The publishing world could be turned onto its head with a recent revelation that Amazon is in talks to purchase big 5 publisher Simon and Schuster."

Double whoa.

I immediately made a comment on the article, along the lines of "I don't think that's a good idea" or something like that. Not that it might not be a good idea for Amazon, or even Simon & Schuster. Something like that could be a boon to both companies (I'm not saying it is; I don't know). The reason such a  thing might be bad is because it would potentially further narrow choices for consumers and for authors, and I believe diversity and competition is better for everyone--including the corporations and companies. Anyway, I made my comment, then I clicked on the link and started reading the article.

Within a few paragraphs, I went back and deleted my original comment, and put on a new one, in which I said I would hold off until I did more research.

And then I reached the end of the article, and I was fairly disgusted.

There were two updates appended to the end of the article (though neither one had a time stamp). The first said 'many sources'--and this was the first mention of any sources at all in the entire article, by the way--were claiming the discussions were about ebook pricing, though the author tried to debunk this. The second update, however, made it clear that the 'negotiations' were about 'a number of issues', mainly aimed at avoiding the sort of mess that Amazon and Hachette are mired in. Hmm. Seems reports of a purchase were way overblown, and were taken from an interview CBS President Les Moonves did with Fortune magazine recently (CBS owns Simon & Schuster). See this article at Publishers Weekly. There's no fire here. There's not even any smoke.

So, rather than yet another massive shakeup in the publishing world, it seems we were victimized by the following:

-an attention-grabbing headline

Should make for some spectacular viewing

-a 'news' story that was more analysis than fact-finding
-a failure to update the headline when the actual facts disputed the headline
-shoddy research

In looking at the original article again, there is no investigation; the writer even says "no one seems to know what the discussions are about". However, someone chose to put an attention-grabbing headline on the top of the 'story' in an effort to drive traffic. This is nothing new; newspapers and magazines have always screamed at us from the newsstands, anything to get you to pick it up and buy it. While this headline didn't quite sink to the level of the Weekly World News, it was provocative, and I bet it got a lot of traffic. The lesson for the day: read all the way to the end, think about what you're reading, and look for other sources. Have a great weekend.

Information Overload

"Too much of everything is just enough" -- I Need A Miracle, John Perry Barlow/Bob Weir

At some point in the latter stages of the last century--and trust me, though we are now a decade into the twenty-first century, I still think of 'the last century' as meaning the 1800's--we entered THE INFORMATION AGE. It is largely great. When I hit the 'publish' button at the top of this page, my thoughts and ramblings will be available to anyone with access to a computer and the internet. If I want to find out more about haberdashers in Victorian England, I can do it without having to leave the comforts of home, without getting buried by a pile of books in my local library, or without having to wait weeks for my library to get those books on inter-library loan. I can get real-time information on stocks, watch a solar eclipse as it happens--in Australia! Check my credit score. I can access nearly any newspaper, check out the traffic at Exit 45 on the Long Island Expressway, or see just what business is  on the corner of Chestnut and Main in Sheboygan.

For writers in my particular stage of development, the Information Age is awesome not just because of what it brings to our work, but because of the speed it allows us to query at, and the window it gives us into the process. But sometimes I have to wonder: Is it too much?

The web giveth, and the web giveth some more. In the case of querying agents, the web giveth uth specific information on each agent. "Send a query and five pages," says Agent X on her agency website. "Submit your query by e-mail along with a synopsis and three chapters embedded in the e-mail," says another. "Attachments are fine," says a third. Great information to have, easily found, and we tailor our queries to give each agent what she wants.

But the web giveth more. The web giveth uth (right, I'll stop that now) pages upon pages on how to write a good query. And the web giveth us sites like Query Shark and The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment (where yours truly is likely to end up some time soon) and Absolute Write's Query Letter Hell, where your query can be deconstructed like it's Dickens in a literature class, ripped apart for you to rebuild into the Six Million Dollar Query, able to stop any agent or editor in their tracks. The web gives us contests to post our queries and first two-fifty, all in the name of helping us get better, helping us get published. And you have myriad sites where you can discuss the craft ad infinitum, where you can ask if prologues are bad and how long your chapters should be, and whether you should use 'that' or 'which'. And while I've wondered before if all this information makes us lazy, the fact is, it's a great thing. But again, is it too much?

Earlier in the week I found myself poking around on Query Tracker, looking at the comments posted about Agents I've Queried and Agents I Plan on Querying. Generally, querying is a 'Fire and Forget' exercise. There are some who are insanely fast (two minutes! My personal record for a rejection was five hours), but by and large, the best thing you can do is send the query, move on to the next one, and when you're done with this batch, get back to writing something new. I've gotten mostly good at doing this, but I've also found myself checking agent blogs and Twitter feeds, trying to see where they are ('status: read all queries through 4/15; if you sent before that and haven't heard anything, resend'), trying to figure out where my little old query is in the process. No doubt, you've seen these kinds of things on boards that deal with this sort of thing: "Oh, no! This person submitted after me and got a request for partial! What does that mean?" Or "SuperAgent's response time to fulls is X weeks and I'm at X weeks + 1 day--should I nudge?"

By and large, the thing to do is chill out. Write the letter, send the letter, log it in your little spreadsheet or notebook or whatever. Fire and forget.

Yeah, right.

Have a great weekend, all!