Whoops...
On Sep 20, 2004, at 5:55 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
If you know of an interesting article, site, argument, whatever, on the topic, I'd very much appreciate it if you could send it my way ASAP.
Here's something else I should have sent before. It deals with Xlibris, the "publishing" house, and the problems they're having now with outsourcing. This was fwd'ed to another list I'm on by a subscriber to "Holt Uncensored", a publishing industry mailing.
Vitriol and polemic aside, it's an interesting tale.
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HOLT UNCENSORED
Contents for Holt Uncensored #389 Wednesday, September 22, 2004
OUTSOURCING AT XLIBRIS CALLING A 'PUBLISHING CONSULTANT' AT XLIBRIS UPDATE ON #388 LETTERS
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OUTSOURCING AT XLIBRIS
My heart sank at the recent news of outsourcing problems at Xlibris, the print-on-demand publisher owned by Random House.
It's not just that Xlibris laid off 35 customer-service workers in Philadelphia and moved the jobs to the Philippines. Or that authors continue to complain about basic services at Xlibris.
It's rather that CEO John Feldcamp doesn't seem to care what it means when a *book publisher* - even a subsidy publisher like Xlibris - tries to quantify, automate and remove itself from its relationship with authors.
Feldcamp sees the whole thing as a no-brainer: As he explained to PW, workers in the Philippines are paid so low that Xlibris can "hire three times the number of customer-service people" than it could in the United States. Outsourcing thus allows Xlibris to cut its U.S. staff from 65 to 25, and increase the overseas staff from 50 to 220.
So this is quite a leap in quantity. But are the authors who are clients of Xlibris grateful?
No, the impatient louts. They want Xlibris's promises to be kept about routine business matters - you know, timetables, processes, schedules, quality. That can't be too much to ask. It's just that, as CEO Feldcamp acknowledged, problems do occur when you insert "a new team of people in new job."
Of course, deep down, the problem doesn't stem from outsourcing. The website at Xlibris.com offers jobs for people in "the writer-centric culture" who are interested in "mission-critical roles." So clearly Xlibris has been dealing with English as a Second Language for a long time.
Not to mention the Xlibris offer to help authors "finalize your manuscript." Such high standards for quality writing abound at Xlibris.
But here's the reason my heart sank. Xlibris sees nothing wrong with outsourcing, or with asking authors to be patient until the "new team of people" get their feet wet.
Feldcamp speaks as though we should all celebrate the low, low salaries of Philippines workers and rush to exploit them at the same time. After all, their standard of living hit the gutter by American standards so long ago that businesses like Xlibris are *helping* the economy by paying starvation wages.
This is the kind of logic that has aided the Wal-Marts, the Gaps, the K-Marts, the Nikes, and the Bush re-election effort (yes, our "buy American" President has outsourced his own campaign). Insisting they can't compete without outsourcing, these folks have contributed to the kind of horror stories we hear about children working for pennies who are chained to their machines and given a patch on the floor to sleep. These are not just slave wages but slave lifetimes, and they have been documented.
True, Xlibris seeks workers on the other end of the spectrum - trained customer service telecommunications agents in foreign countries who learn business English to answer American customers' questions. These hard workers may be the burgeoning middle class of countries like the Philippines, India, Russia, China or others in Southeast Asia.
Amazon uses them, Microsoft uses them, Bush's campaign has used them, so why not Xlibris?
I guess if Xlibris were one of these rag-tag ripoff vanity publishers that makes no bones about skimming the surface and betraying clients' trust, that would be one thing. But Xlibris is owned by Random House, which used to be a class outfit about such matters. Even in its empire-building days, Random House brought professional standards to publishing procedures that were consistent and dependable.
But now the message from Bertelsmann (German owner of Random House) to Xlibris and other Random House subsidiaries seems to be this: Make your profit quota any way you can. We don't care. Tell your authors to quit complaining until the system is ready. That way the customer service representative in the Philippines can understand what is being asked and can select an answer from the list provided. If the formula response does not satisfy, well, there's always the complaint department in Sri Lanka. (That last part I made up.)
Feldcamp implies that Xlibris can't compete with other companies without outsourcing, but that's by now an obsolete argument. Here's why:
-- The backlash against outsourcing has already forced states to stop the practice.
--Customer complaints have convinced companies like Dell to reroute calls from India to Idaho (and you think I make this stuff up).
--Candidates running in November elections are calling for tax incentives to bring the jobs back.
--John Kerry wants to raise consciousness by requiring telemarketers to identify their location as soon as you answer the phone. (This is how the Bush campaign was forced to stop outsourcing: A fund raiser was asked his location, and he said, "The Washington D.C. of Virginia." Can't blame him. The guy was calling from India.)
Maybe Xlibris will learn a lesson from all this, though I doubt it. The company is now too big, too global, too sluggish, too pinned to old formulas to reverse itself or make adjustments quickly.
CALLING A 'PUBLISHING CONSULTANT' AT XLIBRIS
I wanted to see if authors' concerns were being listened to at Xlibris, so I called the number, (888) 795-4274, that Xlibris' website says will put authors in touch with "Publishing Consultants." To keep things simple, I decided to ask only about the company's latest offer to its author clients of "Free Marketing Services in September!"
The first operator said she was located in the Philippines and wanted to register me right away as a prospective author. When I declined, she asked for my home address so Xlibris could send me a kit. She was unable to answer questions about the Free Marketing Services, so she routed the call to another operator located in Philadelphia, the home base of Xlibris.
This person was the very "Publishing Consultant" advertised, and she did know about the Free Marketing Services. Depending on the publishing level at which the author signs up - "Basic," "Professional," "Custom" - these marketing services, she said, will send press releases to "media targets."
"That's it?" I said. "You send press releases?" I said. Well, it's more complicated than that, the woman said. The price list, for example, has three tiers. You could have the press release sent to:
-- 100 media targets - "that's $299 in savings" -- 1,000 media targets - "that's $599 in savings" -- 1,000 plus a "Free Newswire Service" - "that's $1,598 in savings"
"But people in the media get thousands of press releases all the time," I said. I thought I heard the Publishing Consultant murmur that this was true. "Do you offer any follow-up calls or other contact?" The Publishing Consultant said it would be "difficult" for the company to add that component.
Her tone suggested that I wasn't appreciating the benefits Xlibris offered, so she decided to explain that the value of these marketing services lies in the "algorithm search" Xlibris conducts within its "target media database." This means that if I were to write a religious book, I could ask for religious media targets only, or a mix of religious and general, within the number of press releases sent out.
I then asked why these "marketing services" aren't really just a mailing of press releases that most "media targets" will throw away. It's more than that, she said, because Xlibris *writes* the press release for the author.
So there you go. Xlibris offers "marketing services" that cost the author hundreds of dollars - pretending, to put it kindly, that a press release mailing will do the book any good.
Both operators on the phone were polite and attentive as they tried to get me to "commit" to Xlibris' many packages. The problem is that I have experienced more engaging relationships buying dog food over the phone.
True, catalog companies train their telemarketers to take your order and suggest other products you might not have thought of. They're out to take your money, of course, but you don't feel in most cases they're *pretending* that, say, dog food is a shared condo in Paris.
==
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" Excerpt at http://www.nightwares.com/books/Flat_Out.pdf
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