Discounts and Remainders


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Earlier this year I announced my plans to sell a set of CD-Rs that contains the entire Documents Folder on my hard drive ... so there are 7 sets left.

"My unwritten book is longer than yours" or ....

I just got that. I agree with Daunce that reading and writing on Objectivist boards - or, also, for me, numismatics boards - is warm-up, a keyboard exercise. I don't spend a lot of time here. So, I missed the allusion to the unsold book, until I caught GHS's reprise as a Recent New Content.

Now, myself, I have no unsold books. For one thing, I write articles. I sold 300 of them. But, I confess, that going through about 100 old 3.25-inch floppies, I found two unsold, so I copied them in to rework.

I read Atlas as a teenager as so many of us did. So, as I progressed through school and work and work and school, I adhered to Rand's mandate that knowledge must be integrated. When I started writing, I read from Heinlein never to leave a work unsold, and that resonated with sales training that I had a few years earlier. I "got" the process of submitting queries. I submitted them before I wrote anything. Overall, I never wrote an article that was not sold first. So, I have very few unsold works.

I never beat on doors. My brother is a professional musician who works more sides than most streets have. While recording in the gararge, he started in rack sales for a distributor. Now, 40 years later, he makes more from resales of rights than from direct sales of his own works. (Styrenes. "Terry Riley In C" is probably best known, though "Drano in Your Veins" is a classic.) Long, long ago, discussing the process of sales, he said, "No reply means no interest." If an editor takes a letter for the Readers column, I am encouraged. Short of that, I never look back.

Personally, as a consequence of conceptual integration, I never do anything for just a good reason, but only when there are several from different aspects or perspectives or contexts. That stems from an understanding of science and the scientific method. The atheist Republican Robert G. Ingersoll was not alone in pointing out that every fact supports every other fact. When I decided to complete the four-year degree I never needed when all you had to do was work hard and be smart, I chose criminal justice specifically because I chose to take all the government money I could get - as Ayn Rand so famously recommended - and of all the things government finances, policing (etc.) is the only one I knew to be justifiable on any grounds. That was 2005. I finished an associate's in criminal justice in 2007, a bachelor of science in crimiology administration in 2008, and completed a master of arts in social science in 2010. I never found work.

I had three interviews for security management, but in every case, the hiring body was a committee of retired cops. It was obvious from the handshake that this was going nowhere. As I was finishing the master's, I started applying to teach. After 40 applications, I got one phone interview. In fact, I wrote to every Objectivist college professor I knew from online (except Tibor Machan) asking if they could suggest a program to apply to. Of the eight query letters that I mailed out, none garnered any reply. No reply means no interest.

Ann Arbor is pretty much Starnesville. It is a one-party state. The automotive industry is dead, though the newspapers and Republicans tout the Toyota Technical Center. Pfizer Pharmeceuticals pulled out, putting 800 researchers (and 80 security guards) on the street. Now, Borders is in Chapter 11. So, we are moving. Over the years, my wife and I lived in Lansing, Columbus, and Albuquerque, and a couple other places. We are looking at Austin. This week, I start boxing up the books.

Edited by Michael E. Marotta
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