I have had some good stuff happen, though, mostly connected to publicity for 19th Nervous Breakdown: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce. The most fun was my appearance (if one could be said to appear on the radio) on Around Noon, a talk show on our local NPR affiliate. You can hear me on the page for that episode. My segment starts at about 31:30 into the show.

Another bookseller, Cory Drew, from a store somewhere in New Jersey, has been documenting the liquidation process, vividly and with heartbreaking detail. I encourage all to check out his blog, Bookseller Without Borders,

More later…

Ten thousand booksellers will soon be out of work. Ten. Thousand. (Yes, more than eleven thousand will lose their jobs, but some are in other parts of the company than the sales floor.) And this is in addition to the thousands who lost their jobs in the previous wave of closings, including those from my original store.

Many of them have found other work — but I’m starting to see posts in Facebook and elsewhere that some who had found employment are now also once again hunting for work.

When I went to the doctor this afternoon, we handled several things right away because, in a month or so, I will no longer have health insurance. (For those who live in civilized countries: here, in most of the USA, health insurance is tied to one’s employment. Bizarre but true. In some cases, laid-off workers can continue their insurance through a scheme called COBRA, though that is usually too expensive for the unemployed. That, however, is dependent on the worker’s previous company being in business, which mine will not.)

I think we may see a return to smaller bookshops, much like we had before the big box invasion a few decades ago. But I doubt that there will be enough to employ all ten thousand of us.

I have this fantasy that ten thousand smart, literate unemployed workers could come together, rise up, and do… um.. something. What that might be remains a mystery.

On the one hand, I would love to return to any of several of my former cities (though there are some that I will be glad never to see again). But just the thought of picking up and moving yet again exhausts me, since I’ve moved, on the average. every year or two since 1981 or so.

This area is limiting, though, for those of us without cars. One appeal of the bookstore at which I applied is that it’s straight up a bus route from here. (Another is that it’s one of a chain at which I’ve been enjoying shopping since the 80s, and I like the workers with whom I’ve spoken there.)

After a day off (due to my current store’s inventory Thursday night having scrambled our schedules), I’m back to work in the morning. We’ll see what new mystifying directives we’ll have been handed. Rule of thumb: any announcement of the way things suddenly always have been will be negated by another announcement that may have come before or after it.

Such is life in the big box corporate world. Perhaps the chickens with their heads cut off have finally come home to roost.

I’m having some trouble handing are the customers to whom I sold the $20 rewards cards in the past month or so. I gave them the requisite pitch on how they would save money over the course of a year, as well as how the book of coupons would save them even more and the store credits that would kick in in mid-August would just about make up for the cost of the card.

Let’s see if I can remember how I pitched it — as with most such things I got it down to a pattern that I did pretty much verbatim much of the time: “You might benefit from upgrading to the Rewards Plus card. It gets you ten percent off most items except magazines and electronics, twenty percent off selected hardcovers, and forty percent of hardcover bestsellers. If you do any ordering through the store or online, shipping is free. You get store credits that accrue based on how much you purchase, plus another ten dollars in credits for you to use in the middle of next month. You also get this book of coupons which can save you up to $300 over the course of the next year, including this coupon for $10 off a purchase that will be good starting at the end of July. It costs $20 for the year, but you’d save $xxx on this purchase right now, and with the $10 coupon coming up and the $10 in store credits next month, it will more than pay for itself.”

Yes, we were supposed to pitch this to every customer who didn’t already have the card, and got browbeaten and threatened by upper management if we didn’t. I actually did really well with this, usually getting more sign-ups than most other workers. We were also supposed to pitch our book drive (in which customers would actually buy books from us then donate them to a given charity, without the company doing so much as matching a percentage of the price), the season’s teddy bear or stuffed bunny, the AARP discount, e-Readers, gift cards, and the like. All these pitches were presented as mandatory and non-negotiable, as ordered by people who conveniently never had to experience the reactions of customers who were hit with this barrage when all that they wanted to do was buy stuff.

So we did it. And I signed up a lot of people for the Rewards Plus card, believing that I was telling the truth about the benefits and that the company would not shirk its responsibility to the customers.

I honestly believed, as did most of us, that the company would survive in some way. We thought that some other entity, possibly another retail company, would take things over and, even if they didn’t keep the company’s identity, would find some way to blend the rewards card benefits into their own programs.

No one believed that it would come down to the sudden axe falling and the liquidators taking over within days of the sale. (And it looks like even the bid from another chain to take over thirty or so stores has fallen through.)

Suddenly, the coupons are worthless, the store credits aren’t going to happen, and most other benefits are gone. (The 10% discount for the Plus members will continue, though rumors differ on how long it’ll last, and any policy decisions are subject to negation by later memos of which the workers may or may not be informed.)  Many customers are angry, and take it out on me, since I sold them what turned out to be, effectively, a sham.

The big problem is that we now have, in essence, become zombies. The bodies of the stores are shuffling around, crashing into things and losing body parts as they go. The husks are animated by the faltering force fields of the liquidation company. We’re not the same thing, but we look like it to customers. They want us to honor our commitments — but when the body has gone one way and the soul has gone another, which do you ask to honor what the original entity had said? Those of us on the sales floor look like liars. All we can do is apologize as honestly as we can. But to a customer who has invested in the program it doesn’t matter. It’s as if you walked up to an old girlfriend, and instead of saying “Hello,” she said “Braaaaaains!”

One good thing about the current zombie regime is that we don’t have to pitch the various gimmicks anymore. The customer experience of paying for things has become almost pleasant: they give us what we’re buying, we tally it, they pay for it, and we move on. There are, of course, the moments of human connections in conversations at the registers, the reminder that nothing can be returned, and the rounds of condolences and apologies. But for the most part the transactions are quick and appropriate.

We were talking at the registers today about how tired we’re all getting. A worker who’d been through another liquidation confirmed that it was true then, too. We zoom around the floor, trying to ring up sales, battle entropic shelving, and help customers as we can. But the moment that we step out the door, we lose all energy. I’ve heard of workers falling asleep in their cars in the parking lot before trying to drive home.

I staggered onto the bus after work and fell asleep before we got to the corner. Fortunately, my commuter’s instincts woke me as we got to my stop. I stumbled home, sat down at my desk, and fell asleep in my chair for several hours. Now I’m wide awake again after 4 AM, and should go to bed, so I can wake up by 9. And I have an earlier day on Wednesday, so I can be off work for  radio interview that evening. And civility, at least, suggests that I shouldn’t snore on the air.

(By the way, two links of note: Cory Drew, from a store somewhere in New Jersey, is chronicling his experiences somewhat more eloquently than I in his blog Bookseller Without Borders. And other current and former employees should check out the Facebook group Borders Class of 2011 and before where over 5000 of us have gathered in a sort of slow-motion wake to commemorate and share our past and present times with the company. Whatever sense of disaster we’ve been facing, the current dénouement is beiing well and warmly documented online.)

1. Never buy anything that is not on sale.
2. Never fail to buy anything that is on sale.

The faithful followers of Rule #2 were out in force today.

This was my first day dealing with the company’s Zombie Apocalypse Liquidation Sale. Word went out that everything was up to 40% off. Many customers, of course, conveniently failed to notice the “up to” part, and seemed personally offended that only a few things, such as Blu-Ray discs and magazines, were at 40% off. Most other things were at 10-20%, with some odd areas (such as, mysteriously, business books) jutting up into the 30% range.

Still, those who came went into shopping frenzy. Even with all four of our cash registers going, we had up to several dozen people waiting in the checkout line throughout much of the afternoon. People devoured baskets full of items (basketfulls? There doesn’t seem to be a good way to state that as a unit of measure), even though most things were only 10% off. An item that they wouldn’t have bothered to get at the full retail price of $16 suddenly became a must-get-now bargain at $14.40.

Even with that madness, I get the sense from others’ tales that things were a touch slower at our store than at some others. My hunch is that we have a concentration of really experienced bargain shoppers in our area, and that they will swoop in when the prices drop further.

Of course, we don’t know when that will be. Or when we’ll close. Or what quite a few of our policies are at this point. Or to whom people should complain.

Still, I managed to remain quite cheerful when ringing at the registers today. This threw some people, who expected us all to appear depressed. We could have done so, but there would have been little benefit to it. We still tried to focus on their having the best experience and deals that we could offer (granted, not as much as before) and accepting their condolences with as much grace as we could.

The toughest question was whether I had a new job lined up yet. No, I don’t. And I don’t know what will be possible. I hope that some of the publicity on 19th Nervous Breakdown will help with that, but nothing is certain.

A few days ago, several of us mentioned in conversation that each of our parents had said that we could come home and live in their basements. The downside, of course, would be that we would be living in our parents’ basements, and dealing with all the family drama and ignominy that that would involve. I came up will a possible solution: rather than each of us moving into his or her parents’ basement, we should rotate by one bit, with each of us moving into another worker’s parents’ basement. Eminently logical and equally affordable. But somehow I don’t think that the parents would actually go for it.

I spent my time away from the registers zooming around the floor, helping customers. At first, I tried to keep returning to where the information desk had been, but that proved not to be necessary. Anywhere that I was on the floor was as good as anywhere else — whenever I finished with a customer, I could be certain that either another customer would approach me or the phone would ring within about ten seconds.

I did enjoy helping a customer who turned out to be looking for my book. I asked her (since I often don’t remember faces) whether I had told her about it before. I hadn’t. She had read about it in the Plain Dealer and come in to buy it. That I happened to help her was a coincidence, though she did see my name tag and spot me as the author before I took her to the book.

The downside: we’re now, I believe, completely sold out of the book, and I don’t think we’ll be able to get more copies in. But there are plenty of ways to get it online or through your favorite independent bookseller.

Tomorrow should be about the same as today. Monday is traditionally our slowest day, so things may be a little less frantic. But this is unknown territory, so we will forge ahead with manic smiles, girded for absurdity.

It was a day of little anecdotes and annoyances, rather than massive disruptions. We discovered that we would avoid one bit of embarrassment: by law, stores in our town can’t put “Going Out of Business” signs outside or on our windows. We’ll have them inside the store, in all their hideous black and yellow glory, but the outside will remain relatively pristine.

I understand that the landlords for one store confronted them about some of the letters on the store logo having faded to a different color than the others and insisted that they must be fixed. The response was along the lines of “Yeah, sure, we’ll get right on that.”

We got a big delivery of food for the café. By previous arrangement, the chain had severed its connection with the company who had been running the cafés, and had arranged to run the cafés itself. When we got blindsided by the liquidation, the first shipments for the New Café Order were already en route to the stores. Unfortunately, the cafés will shut down completely at the end of the day Thursday.

Since we weren’t going to be able to sell the food, one barista declared the day to be “Samplepalooza!” and walked around the store distributing sample-sized morsels to workers and customers. Ironically, the food was quite good, tastier and, we think, healthier than we had had before. We think the café would have done much better with the new supplies. But now we’ll never know.

In the largest shock of the day, the company shut down all the computer systems on the sales floor at about 11 AM. Customers continued to ask us to find things for them, and we had to depend on human memory rather than the computers.

We did surprisingly well with that. Over the years, most of us have developed a sort of spider-sense as to where things were. It also helps that the great majority of customers look for one of maybe 300 popular books. (This is the opposite of the Long Tail, and the kind of thing that we handled rather well.) Of course, everyone thinks that he is looking for something unusual, and is amazed when we know right where the books are. One customer nearly fell over when I was able to lead her instantly to Room, Native Son, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

On Thursday, we’ll learn what’s on the other side of the event horizon, once the liquidators take over.

More as it happens…

Much of the talk in the store, and in the conversations of workers online and elsewhere, concerned how long each of us might stay through the liquidation process. Some intend to leave immediately. Some gave notice as of two weeks from now. One person said that she’s stay as long as she could stand it. Another said that he would bail out of his store when the liquidators started moving fixtures around.

The determining factor seemed to be whether the people had been through liquidations before, and how brutal they had found the process. My intention to stay may just be due to my general pollyannaish attitude, a sense of denial, an unrealistic sense of what I’m about to encounter, or sheer stupidity. I also can’t afford to be without health insurance. So here I am, for now.

Many customers, as expected, wanted to know when we were shutting down and when the discounts would start. Many expressed shock and dismay that we were closing, though opinions differed among workers as to how genuine their condolences were.

One of my favorite customers left a message at my website. She had come in once a week, steady as clockwork, picking up the latest romance paperbacks (and usually returning one or two that she discovered that she had bought twice — I wish we had the resources and infrastructure to have helped her track this). She always had all her tools ready when she got to the registers: her Rewards Plus card, her AARP card (each of which saved her 10% on the paperbacks), the current coupon, and sufficient cash (I think — odd to realize that I don’t remember, after ringing her up for years, what form of tender she’s used).

In her message, she said that she’d come in yesterday before I got there, and had hoped to see me, to tell me that she’d enjoyed reading 19th Nervous Breakdown. But after seeing the state of things, she didn’t think she’d be coming in again. “Now,” she wrote, “I’m sitting Shiva for my favorite bookstore.”

I spent what seemed like most of the day at the registers ringing customers. In the afternoon, we steadily had between five and ten people in line. Most, it seemed, were frantically using up ancient gift cards, worried that the cards would melt away if not used immediately.

While the cards will, we think, continue to be good for the duration of the store’s existence, there was more of a chance of their literally melting into goo. The store was hot, and the area at the registers was the hottest. Even with almost opaque shades over the windows behind us, the space turned into a greenhouse.

I dealt with the heat well in the afternoon, since I was able to dart between answering calls for register backup and helping customers out on the general sales floor.

In the evening, though, I was scheduled for three hours straight there. (And “evening” here in Cleveland is an inexact term. Being pretty far north and near the western edge of our time zone, the sun sets late in summer. The sky was still pretty bright when I left at 9 PM.)

I did well for about two hours, ringing up an unending flow of customers. Each engaged me in conversation, almost all with the same questions: Are you shutting down on Friday like the newspaper said? (We aren’t, and it didn’t say that.) When is your last day? (We don’t know.) When do the discounts start? (We don’t know.) When will the current discounts end? (We don’t know.) What will you do for a living? (I don’t know.) But you make a lot of money from writing your books, right? (Hah.)

I kept up a cheerful demeanor throughout all of this, trying not to betray how worried I actually was. But each smile and “thank you” that I gave the customers wore me down a little more.

At about an hour before I was to leave, though, I had a particularly annoying, badgering customer. I’ve seen him most days that I’ve worked: tall, wiry, with a long greying beard and the standard black hat, suit, and shoes and white shirt and socks of the local extreme Orthodox communities. He usually would come in rather late and hover furtively in the Sex and Erotica section.

He stood directly behind the customer that I was ringing up, visibly annoying her.

When the paying customer darting away, he moved in, leaning across the counter and speaking as if to a conspirator. “So, nu, you’re all closing now?”

“Yes, the chain is going to close.”

“So what are the discounts?”

“No discounts now. Things are continuing as usual for now.”

“Nu, you’re closing. You have discounts.”

“No. If you have a Rewards Plus card, or have an AARP card, the usual discounts apply. But there’s nothing new yet.”

He leaned in closer. “Look, you think I’m stupid? I see all the people buying here. I know you have discounts. Why are you not telling me? You give everyone but another yid discounts?” (Yes, he knew that I’m Jewish. When I first started at the store and was living in the attempted Jewish arts colony, I wore a yarmulke. And some friends say that you can’t talk to me for more than three minutes without knowing I’m Jewish.)

“No, there are no new discounts yet. When there are, there will be big signs everywhere announcing it.”

He slammed his fist on the counter, fortunately (I guess) not shattering the glass. “This is how you treat your own people. I won’t shop here again.” He stomped out, yelling the traditional coda of the customer tantrum aria: “This is why you’re going out of business.”

Another customer came up quickly, and I had the usual apparently cheerful conversation with her. In the course of it, however, I began to feel nauseated, and found my attention and balance fading in and out.

As soon as she was gone, I asked for someone to cover the registers since I was suddenly not feeling well. Another worker immediately came up, and I headed for the breakroom. When a customer stomped into my path and started bellowing questions, I darted around her and away. This wasn’t my usual mode, but I figured that throwing up in her shoes would not be effective customer service.

I got to the breakroom, and sat down, then quickly got up and ran to the bathroom. Fortunately, it was a non-emitting queasiness, so I returned to the breakroom, got a cup of water, and sat.

After about fifteen minutes, I felt able to return to the floor. I spotted my manager, and he agreed to let me handle the floor while another worker finished my register shift.

I had the expected rapid succession of customers, and felt a little better. But when a customer really engaged me, looking for some particular books on both jazz and Judaica, the queasiness went away entirely and. while feeling quite tired, I completely got into the swing of things. (I also pitched The Book of Voices to her. She loved the concept, so I showed it to her, disclosed that I wrote it, but also told her that I would not be at all offended if she decided against buying it. She later came up to me to say that she wouldn’t get it immediately, but would google me to find out more.)

When the end of the hour came, I escaped the gauntlet of customers, clocked out and headed to the bus. At the stop, several people asked me the same questions, and I gave the same answers. But it all seemed a bit easier outdoors in the slightly cooler summer breeze.

When she returned to the phone, she asked,”Are you the Joe who wrote the book about the store?”

“Yup, that’s me,” I said.

“Wow!” she replied. “I’m so thrilled — we’re all so psyched and proud of you! It’s so great to see someone put out a real book!”

“Um, thanks,” I said. I gave her the customer’s name, and she said that she’d put the book on hold.

“But tell me,” she said, “is your store swarming with way more cranky people than you usually get on a Monday?”

“Yeah, we are. The news brings out these people, I’m told.”

“Have you heard anything solid?” she asked.

“Nope, just rumors from customers. I’m tempted to stop answering the phone with ‘home of the in-stock guarantee’ and switch to ‘where we don’t know what’s going on either.’”

She laughed. “Well, good luck with the Death Eaters,” she said. “And congrats, again, on the book.”

What word we had gotten wasn’t good, but wasn’t solid. Our chain had gone into Chapter 11 bankruptcy months ago, and had set Tuesday as the deadline for auctioning off the stores. Things had looked hopeful for an equity firm to buy us and keep at lest part of the chain running, but the latest word was that everything was going to fall apart, and that we would be sold to a group of liquidators. Rumors abounded of possible white knights, such as another chain, coming in at the last minute. But nobody knew anything at all for sure.

The store was, indeed, quite busy for a Monday. A good deal of the phone calls consisted of people asking us if we were still open (we were) and by how much everything was marked down (it wasn’t). People whom we had never seen before swarmed in to use their old gift cards and to look for books that they suddenly had to have. Many tried to finagle discounts, but nothing unusual was available.

The store looked like hell. We had been in the midst of several shifts of product around the store, all of which had been put on hold. Many of the people who came in had chains of loud, scruffy children who reveled in pulling books of shelves and throwing them forcibly to the ground. Apparent grown-ups who seemed to believe that their mommies would pick up after them left piles of random books and magazines everywhere, frequently with half-empty cups of coffee balanced precariously on top of the files or at the edges of nearby narrow bookshelves.

It didn’t help that the power to the store (and, I later learned, the whole region) was flickering in and out. I had to recover several aborted transactions after the cash registers lost power in processing them. Apparently, in the current beastly heat and humidity (tolerable by, say, Houston standards, but considered outrageous here), everyone was using their air conditioners at once, and the power stations were having hissy fits.

When I left the store at 4 PM, things were still crazy and undefined.

I walked across the street to Legacy Village, thinking that I would ask both the AT&T store and the Apple Store about some problems with my iPhone. When I got there, I found that several stores had shut down completely due to the power outages. The AT&T store was up and running, but couldn’t answer my questions. At the Apple Store, the Point of Sale and security systems had failed, so their always-chipper workers were standing outside, answering questions but unable to do any transactions.

The heat was particularly bugging me since I’d returned from San Francisco, home of the chilly summer, a few days ago. There, the temperature stayed in the 50s and 60s (Fahrenheit: the city is enlightened, but not yet metric), with a fine mist over most neighborhoods. Here, we’ve been hovering in the humid 90s, and seem destined to stay there for a long time — perhaps until things abruptly start freezing over again.

The people in San Francisco were as warm as the weather was chilly. My book release presentation for 19th Nervous Breakdown went extremely well. As several people noted, it resembled the finale of Lost. My former coworkers and customers from my old store (now closed), who had shared experiences over many years, came together in one evening for a moment of catharsis and reconciliation. My stories and reminiscences garnered laughs and some intense silences. My publisher noted, upon watching the video, that it seemed more like a class reunion than a conventional author event. Still, it was, I think, the right presentation for the occasion.

I thought back on this as I sat at a smoothie bar (blessedly air-conditioned, with chilly drinks) killing time waiting for my bus. But my mind kept being dragged back to wondering what was happening to the store. So for the dozenth (is that a word?) time or so, I pointed my phone at Twitter and scanned for the store name.

And starting a few minutes before, I saw a barrage of tweets announcing that we were liquidating. I’d seen this before, and never believed them until I followed the links.

But this time the links were there, and pointed to the Wall Street Journal, which has, in the course, of this, been right just about all the time.

This is it. We’re liquidating. We were to have an auction on Tuesday, but no one other than the liquidators submitted bids. So we’re skipping the auction and submitting the fait accompli to the judge on Thursday.

Liquidation sales will start at some stores as soon as this Friday. We don’t yet know for sure when ours will. The stores will all be closed by the end of September. Again, I don’t know when ours will.

I called back to the store and told our Sales Manager, who hadn’t heard. I figured that it was better that he get the news, and a pointer to the article, than from a customer. I also sent a text message to our General Manager, who was off today. Then I proceeded to wander around (home, then out again and home again) and write this, trying to let the news sink in.

This is a dramatic moment, and things are inevitably going to get more dramatic and crazier.

I intend to blog a lot during this process, hoping to document what happens in the trenches as the weasels rip our flesh.

I also will need to consider what to do next with my career, though there may be a lag as the shock sets in and then fades. I do know that I desperately want to return to San Francisco, though I have no idea how this might be possible.

Stay tuned.

Be there, or be … not there? (Suddenly I like Yoda sound.)

I think two weeks was about the right amount of time, and the pledge levels that I set were about right. I could have gotten word of the drive out a bit more widely, but was cautious about this first try.

If I try further things like this, I’ll probably go through Kickstarter itself or a similar well-trusted site. But any such projects will have a larger scope and a longer time line, and will be better organized.

And one more thing: I’ve uodated the Buy My Books widget on my home site,  . So buy my books It appears to only be available from Amazon and B&N so far, but the widget will link usefully to other sites such as IndieBound and, I hope, Borders as they catch up.

The retail world should be a meeting place, not a battleground. In shopping and selling, we need to touch people’s hearts and make connections with each other. This book tells of these moments of connection. Its true stories come from my blog, written during my years as Classical CD Guy at Store 0057 in downtown San Francisco. (Most of you know which bookstore chain it was, but I haven’t gotten their official OK to use its name in book-related materials.)

I’m including the press release for the book at the end of this message. You can read an excerpt from the book at http://19nb.wordpress.com/read-a-sample-chapter/

Here’s the short version:

I’m offering incentives to collect funds to get the word out and make copies of the book available. $10 gets you a PDF eBook. $20 gets you a one-hour MP3 audiobook. $25 gets you the audiobook on CD. $100 gets you a limited-edition hardcover of the book.

You can get these by sending the amounts via PayPal to 19NB.offer@gmail.com or by clicking the Donate button below. I’m not a non-profit, registered or otherwise. I’m just openly looking for help in getting the word out.

The offer ends at 11:59 PM EDT, Monday, June 27, 2011.

Here’s the long version:

Getting the book into print has been relatively cheap and easy. I have been able to work with good people over the years, finding out what each did best and enjoyed doing, and asking them for help in doing it. Friends helped with graphics, photography, design, and technical expertise, and with reading, commenting, editing, and criticizing the text. Through them, I learned what my book was really about, and was able to focus and hone it, to be (I hope) informative, moving, and entertaining.

But now I’m hitting a different problem: actually getting the books into people’s hands.

For all but the largest publishers, getting books into physical stores is now close to impossible. The way that the book and music business has traditionally worked would seem ridiculous in most other markets. Publishers print up a whole lot of books and send them out to a whole lot of stores. If the books don’t sell rather quickly, the stores send them back to the publisher. The publisher declares them a loss and grinds them into pulp (sometimes sending them first through the literary equivalent of a cow’s second stomach, the bargain bins).

Unless you are a humongous best-seller (and sometimes even then), this means that someone is going to take a huge loss. For most businesses nowadays, the Prime Directive is to push all risk and loss off onto other parties. No one wants to get caught holding the bag.

In the past decade, though, another model has emerged. When someone orders and pays for a copy of the book, a publisher has it printed and sends it out. Sensible, right? It’s easy, then, to get books into online bookstores from which people can easily order them.

My first book was done the old-fashioned way, back in the Jurassic age, in 1992. But since then, all my other books, now including 19th Nervous Breakdown, follow the new model. People order the books and quickly receive them by mail or by a delivery service.

But there are a few difficulties with this model.

• Getting books into physical bookstores is close to impossible. Like authors and publishers, stores can’t take the risk of getting stuck with unsold books anymore.
• When I do events such as book signings and presentations, I’ll need to have books with me to sell. Yes, I can get books at a much-reduced rate from the publisher, but getting those books in the first place requires a significant outlay of cash upfront.
• Most importantly, the book needs to get into the hands of opinion leaders. It needs to reach people who care about human connections, about business, and about bridging the gaps between the two. I want these people to have the opportunity to read the book, to get what it’s about, and to tell others. You can see from the Advance Praise page of the website (at http://19nb.wordpress.com/advance-praise/ ) how the book has already touched some important people. We need to expand this. We need to get the book to people who might not otherwise order it and read it, people who could make a big impact on the word getting out. I wouldn’t fling the book about wildly, but, rather, would send copies out to a small, selected set of people who could make a difference.

The big problem? This costs money. And neither the publisher nor I can afford to put more money than we already have into this.

Black Angel Press operates within a tight budget. It simply doesn’t have the funds to invest in these copies. I’m scraping by on a bookseller’s budget, which means that I’m just barely able to make ends meet, but don’t have backup funds to invest in what the project needs.

So I’m turning to you.

Here’s what I want to try:

I’m offering some advance, non-print versions of 19th Nervous Breakdown to folks who are willing to donate some small amounts.

• $10 will get you a PDF (Acrobat) format eBook of 19th Nervous Breakdown. The PDF version can be read on any computer or eReader. It looks great and reads easily on computer or tablet screens, but less so on eReaders such as the Kobo, Nook, or Kindle. This will be a special “Thank You” edition, with a first page saying that this is so, and will no longer be made available once the actual book is published. I will email these to you as close to immediately as I can.
• $20 will get you a one-hour audiobook of selected excerpts from 19th Nervous Breakdown. It will be available as DRM-free, well-tagged MP3 files. You will be able to listen to these easily on just about any computer, and to burn them to CD using iTunes or similar tools. I will email a link to these to you no later than July 31st.
• $25 will get you a physical high-quality CD-R of the audiobook, playable on any CD player. It will be mailed out to you via Media Mail no later than July 31st. (If you choose this, please let me know your mailing address.)
• $100 (Why not aim high?!) will get you a special hardcover limited-edition of 19th Nervous Breakdown, mailed to you via Media Mail no later than August 31. (If you choose this, please let me know your mailing address.)

All these offers will expire at 11:59 PM EDT, Monday, June 27, 2011.

Note that these don’t include copies of the paperback original edition of 19th Nervous Breakdown. For a variety of reasons, I’d like you to get those through the normal channels once they are available, whether through online bookstores, physical bookstores that decide to dare the fates and actually stock the book, or through me at personal appearances. (If you want to get a whole lot of copies, say to hand out to your employees… let’s talk.)

Note also that I’m not a non-profit entity, registered or otherwise, and this won’t count toward tax deductions or anything like that. But it would probably make your karma shinier.

Here’s how to do it:

For whichever offer you would like, send that amount via PayPal to 19NB.offer@gmail.com or use this donate button:

If the offer is for the CD-R or hardcover book, please include your (snail)mailing address.

And if you’d be inspired to send more, or not receive any of the items, that’s good, too.

I promise that all the money that I receive from this will go directly to the project of getting 19th Nervous Breakdown out there where people can read it.

Thanks in advance for all you have done and might do!

Joe

P.S. Here’s the Press Release (written by Steven Hart, who does these things really well):

A DOT-COM REFUGEE FINDS THE GOOD LIFE AS A SALESMAN
IN “19th NERVOUS BREAKDOWN,” NEW FROM BLACK ANGEL PRESS

“Sales is service. If you don’t believe that, this book will change your mind.”
Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto

After two decades in the telecom industry, Joseph Zitt found himself out of work and in need of a regular paycheck. Through a combination of luck and innate helpfulness, he was offered a sales job at a large San Francisco retail center. Suddenly, a man who had spent years contacting the world through a PC monitor was face to face with an unending stream of very human customers, many of them confused and unsure about what they were looking for. And something remarkable happened: he found he enjoyed it. In fact, he loved it.

Part memoir, part inspirational story, and part business manual, 19th Nervous Breakdown: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce begins as Joseph Zitt’s journal of self-discovery, but quickly becomes something more. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for Zitt to compile a snarky list of complaints about dumb customers. Instead, he does something unique: he talks about salesmanship as a means to making human connections. In 19th Nervous Breakdown, treating customers as human beings results in relationships that are often amusing, sometimes trying, and occasionally heartbreaking. All are informed by Zitt’s deeply humane perspective and engaging literary style.

But you don’t have to take our word for it. 19th Nervous Breakdown has already won the admiration of everyone from marketing guru Doc Searls to music critic and composer Greg Sandow. Many business books offer guidance on how to be a good salesman:19th Nervous Breakdown offers that, as well as a meditation on what constitutes a good life.

This is what I’ve learned as a book and music seller: In business relationships we can’t simply approach the customer as an undifferentiated source from which we can wring out cash. Each encounter and transaction is a moment in a personal relationship, however fleeting. Each is as much a part of life as our connections within families, in romance, and with our coworkers. In working with customers, we discover and address their personal desires and open up areas in which we can turn them on to new possibilities, based on how we read their tastes and needs.

19th NERVOUS BREAKDOWN: Making Human Connections in the Landscape of Commerce
By Joseph Zitt
A paperback original from Black Angel Press
Published June 2011
ISBN: 978-0-918842-04-6