How Much Is Advertising Hurting Products?

"It pays to advertise," we've all heard. If products and businesses aren't advertised, how will people know they exist? 

Then again, how many people do you know who actually look at advertisements, or watch TV commercials? Can it really pay to be noticed...as a nuisance? Do you really want an image that subconsciously triggers people to reach for the remote control to get your product off the TV screen?

Some smarty-pants researchers will tell you that you do. For some audiences, it seems, shopping is mindless. The more obnoxious the TV commercial is, the more likely some people are to forget the commercial, remember the brand, and think "Hmmm...wanna try that," when they're wandering through the mall in a hung-over, Homer-Simpson-like state of consciousness. You could bottle sewage and label it sewage and at some times of day Homer would probably look at the bottle, say "Hmmm...sewage," and drink it. So in theory, if you annoy people enough with an advertisement for a box of old broken rusty nails that starts with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, what some shoppers have in the way of a thought process will go "Hmmm...Rusty Nails! Just what the living room shelf needs!" 

Those people are not writers. They are not artists. They are not the people who spend a lot of time using the Internet for things other than games and movies. 

Writers, artists, and early adopters of computer technology generally, have more completely developed brains and nervous systems than Homer Simpson has. They're the ones who either walk out of the store that sells Rusty Nails, or say to the storekeeper, "You're trying to sell old broken rusty nails that are advertised with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, now? What's wrong?" 

A majority of us are introverts. Introverts' social behavior, when it does not consist of moving away from obnoxious extroverts, is based on showing respect. We don't run up and chatter at people because our more completely developed brains contain a set of neurons that might as well be called a conscience, which tells us that people have their own lives and running up and chattering at them is disrespectful. Other people would have no reason to like us if they perceived us as pushy pests. What does that tell you about advertisements? 

And yes, we do remember it when we decide, even in grade six, to stop buying a favorite snack because we found a TV commercial that advertised it annoying. 

I am not making this up. My brother and I stopped buying M&Ms, which had been our treat of choice almost every time we went to the store, during the year he was in grade six because we thought that year's TV commercial campaign was insulting to kids.

People who spend a lot of time using the Internet for things other than games and movies have other things in common besides being introverts. Most of us are, or feel that we are, underpaid, so we shop mindfully and frugally. Many of us go online from work or school rather than having Internet connections at home; at work or school making an impulse purchase online might have repercussions, so a lot of us are never going to make an impulse purchase online. Many of us read Consumer Reports and check the customer reviews before choosing to buy things that cost more than, say, a dollar. Some of us don't buy things that used to cost less and now cost more than a dollar. 

Most of us are security-conscious, so forget all about "targeted advertising." It's true that people in cold climates buy more snow tires than people in the tropics do, that men don't buy a lot of bras, and that very few people whose title is "Rabbi" are going to buy pork sausages...but what you need to know is that security-conscious Internet users don't like the idea that you know which country we're in, unless we told you. Don't try to find out more information about us. The more you seem to know, the more we want to avoid you. If anything, advertising products that are not actually sold in our country gives me a pleasing sense that you're minding your own business and not meddling with mine. 

Less stalking, less of an attempt to get inside our heads and manipulate our thoughts, and more of a straightforward interest in making sure people know about your product, is generally good for your image. Don't try to tell us anything like "You want this" or "You should do this." That kind of message is disrespectful. Tell us what your product is. If you can tell us what it costs, with one price for everyone, that's a plus point.

In real life, promotions that offer discounts for people in certain categories--seniors, teachers, veterans, people who are willing to tell storekeepers if it's their birthday--can work well for stores. Online, that kind of promotion is very bad. It's disrespectful to try to find out whether Internet users actually are dogs. One price for all is the only rule that looks ethical to Americans.

We trust one another more than we trust you. We think the Internet is an ideal place for messages like "Don't buy Brand X cereal--I opened a new box and a live mouse jumped out of it." Don't try to oppose this. Use it. Let people see how seriously you take quality control. That mouse in the box of cereal doesn't have to destroy the brand if you recall the batch, close the plant for cleaning, and of course apologize profusely to the customer. If you don't do those things and your brand suffers, we figure you deserve it.

The appropriate response to the street phrase "Prozac Dementia" would have been to suspend sales of Prozac until it could be made to stop causing dementia. The appropriate response to Glyphosate Awareness would have been to pull all glyphosate products off the market. The appropriate response to the "vaccines cause autism" whine would have been to address the fact that vaccine reactions may include fever, which may cause brain damage, which may include autism, and level with parents about whether diseases like measles are more likely to cause autism than the vaccines are. Trying to censor the complaints, instead, has destroyed the credibility of the entire brands of Bayer, Lilly, and Merck. Their best move would be to pay all claims against them now and then either dissolve, or maintain a very low profile for the next thirty years.

Most of us are White but we are, or like to think we are, hip enough not to mind when disproportionate numbers of advertisements feature non-White models. However, most White people know that styles that look good on a Black person probably won't do much for us. Thousands of short, average-sized blondes may have deluded themselves in 1982 that what looked good on Diana Spencer might work for them, though most of them have learned something from that mistake, but they don't think that what looks good on Nicki Minaj will work for them. Quite a few Internet aficionados are Asian, and some are Black, so there's nothing wrong with designing and marketing styles for non-White people online. Just balance inclusiveness with practicality.

Some of us honestly don't notice or care about clothes as long as they cover as much skin as is required by local law. Some of us are fashion-conscious and may, if we're not thinking about something else, do detailed analyses of what is and isn't working for the celebrity or model on the screen. No, this does not mean that we're attracted to the model. Yes, in fact, any suggestion that we're thinking about the model as anything but part of a fashion image is likely to be offensive.

Even if the primary content is a football game you can never afford to assume that the Internet audience is all male. Even those of us who are male are likely to be in heterosexual relationships. Don't tolerate content, messages, or comments that offend women.

Be cautious even about things that are controversial among different social groups of women. I am a lady, and if you can't avoid calling me in public, the least obnoxious thing to call me is "Ma'am." (I don't particularly like "Ma'am," either, and if you are a store employee "My Lord and Master the Honorable Customer" might be more appropriate, but I ignore people who blat out my name in public and I think people who call strangers by what are generally perceived as terms of endearment need to be in prison.) I don't understand why some women who are not ladies wouldn't want to be included in the category of ladies, but some women don't. So how do you address the female customers in the audience? By showing a product that females buy, of course. Words like "dresses" or "lipstick" are personal enough.

A majority of Internet users, though only a minority of people in the real world, hold political views that could be described as left-of-center. Don't mistake "majority" for "everyone." Don't signal stupidity by participating in stereotypes about "conservatives" being racists or fascists. Don't show bigotry with stereotypes about "DEI hires" being incompetent tokens, either.

A personal site or social media page that shows no political leanings whatsoever loses credibility. There may be no need to endorse candidates or parties but readers will want to know what basis you have for whatever statements you make. Individuals have personal tastes and opinions. A majority of Internet users vote Democrat but those of us who are not in the Democratic Socialists clique, even among D voters, do look for evidence that the individual is observing, thinking, writing, singing, etc., about the real world rather than partisan rhetoric. Ability to work with Rs is a good quality for a D to have. Ability to like and be amused by D extremists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is a good quality even for Rs to have, but seriously backing their bids for presidential campaigns raises questions of credibility.

A business site doesn't need to mention anything that's not directly related to business. A business can have a blog with monthly posts on topics like "How different are this year's blenders from last year's blenders?" or "How to change the ink cartridges in the Model XYZ printer," without losing credibility. 

Some specific rules for Internet advertising can also be included in the category of showing respect. Here's a short list of fifteen:

1. Don't show the same ad in the same place twice. That means that, if people are logged into sites like Youtube or X, you should ask those sites to make sure they don't show the same ad to the same account twice.

2. Require political campaign ads to focus on who the candidate advertised is, what that person has done in the past, and/or what that person hopes to do if elected. Don't focus on the opposition. Advertising tends to arouse reactions on a spectrum from skeptical to hostile, at best, and if a political ad tries to show "the worst of" another candidate the effect on voters can easily be, "The worst of Candidate B looks better than the best of Candidate A." Images showing a candidate shaking someone's hand, debating with an opponent, or posing for a family picture are acceptable as long as they make it absolutely clear whom they're about. E.g., if more than one face can be seen in a photo, be sure the candidate's face is front and center.

3. Don't advertise patent remedies for anything. Don't show or discuss any part of the body in health or disease. (Yes, you can advertise shoes without mentioning feet.) Anyone stupid enough to pay for an advertisement in the genre of "This product may cause blindness, cancer, projectile vomiting even in people who have not heard this advertisement, abnormal growths in bizarre places, and sudden death in people under age . Ask your doctor today whether this product is right for YOUR seasonal allergies!" should not be talking to adults outside the family without supervision.

4. There's nothing wrong with "funny" ads where people show how clueless and confused they can be. There's nothing wrong with ads where people proclaim in authoritative tones that "This product out-performed twenty other competing products at removing stains from a white rug" or "This product contains lavender oil." There is, however, a tedious and offensive stereotype about ads where a woman plays the clueless character and a man speaks with the voice of authority. Don't use that combination. 

5. Actually, considering the sensitivities of some Internet users, it's a good idea to try to avoid using images of living people in advertisements at all. You can display pictures of shirts on hangers, food on tables, cars on roads, etc., without showing a single human face. Try it! It saves the cost of paying models!

6, If you really want to attract the eye to an ad, turn off all the sound. People who are in the habit of ignoring commercial natter will look at the screen to see what's wrong. That's when they'll see your product and associate it with a feeling of relief--"Oh, it's only a quiet advertisement." 

7. One advertisement among fifty social media posts is acceptable. The current formula at X, e.g., is not acceptable. For me to go back to using X regularly I'd need to see a solid majority of posts from the free accounts of private people and a minimum of posts from corporations or politicians. That includes news headlines. I used to use Twitter for the news headlines but that was before the Trusted News Initiative. I don't want to support censored news sites in any way; until the New York Times has fully repudiated TNI and run whole front-section features about why people should not use those profitable products whose manufacturers wanted censorship, I'd as soon be seen looking at porn as looking at a NYT headline.  

8.. Up to two minutes of advertisement per hour of video content is acceptable, provided that the ad does not interrupt a speech or a piece of music. If the choice is between 2:01 minutes and 1:35 minutes, always go with 1:35.

9. Understand that, if you want to sell anything to Internet users, your best bet would be to discard the advertisements and pay Internet users to produce content about your products' reviews and ratings. The experience of reading those reviews and ratings in order to write an article or present a photo essay about what people who did use it liked about your product is more likely than anything else to make Internet users think thoughts like "I might find a use for a blender some day, and if I did Brand X seems to be a good brand." Sometimes it might even get your product onto an Amazon Wish List.

10. People who read other people's personal blogs will probably skip the product reviews. If they do read the product reviews, they're looking for a flippant, snarky tone, not a gush of praise that nobody's going to believe. The overall tone of a good personal product review is favorable to the product, but phrasings that show that it's an individual's thoughts NOT a Madison Avenue advertisement are also important. 

Seriously. As a bookseller I've found that sparing use of certain phrases that living writers don't like to see in book reviews consistently moves books:

* "I don't like this kind of thing myself, but some people do."

* "This book has a strong enough sense of place to make me feel glad that, whatever else may be going wrong, I'm not in the place this book is written about."

* "This writer completely misunderstands (women, vegetarians, people who buy canned soup) and shouldn't have tried to write about them."

* "There is some good material in this book. All of that good material is better expressed in other books on the subject, such as __, __, and __. What is uniquely found in this book is a load of pants."

* "The funny stories in this book didn't make me laugh, but some of the serious exposition did."

Book readers will buy books, and other things, just to see which side of a difference they are on. If the product is salty garlic-flavored toothpaste, and some people say "That's a disgusting idea" and others say "That's a refreshing change from sweet mint- or cinnamon-flavored toothpaste," book readers will want to find out firsthand where they stand in this controversy. So don't be afraid to ask bloggers for honest product reviews, even if what they say about some products is "The product arrived with an important working part broken, and while it was on the porch the neighbor's dog expressed his opinion of the product in such a way that I've never actually used it as advertised, but it makes a nice $79 flowerpot." 

11. The key to using individual bloggers' research pieces about product ratings is to plan on a slow steady trickle of results. Many Internet users are poor; many are "retired"; many have disabilities. We aren't going to buy sports cars. We do, however, have young relatives who might be interested in such things. We can say to them, "Well, the Gran Gasto seems to run about twice as long on average as the Depense Extreme runs before breaking down. The Molto Costoso has a lot of transmission problems," and they pass this along to their friends, and the overall result may sell a few dozen Gran Gastos. If you are planning to downgrade the Gran Gasto once you've attracted interest to the name, you are not a nice person and we'll make sure everybody knows that too. Plan on at least a five-year sales cycle for the Gran Gasto.

12. There are brands that do "sell themselves." They sell the stores that retail them. Stores in my neighborhood don't hang out signs saying "Try 'Carhartt' brand workwear"; they hang out signs saying "We have Carhartt." I suppose there might once have been ads for Carhartt but the way people my age found out about it was probably going to a job site in some cute little outfit we had worn to a few college classes, and having a senior co-worker say, while snapping the cuffs up or down on his insulated coveralls, "What you need is a Carhartt." Or they read a report from some place that had had a problem with bogus disaster relief volunteers whose real interest was access to the contents of damaged houses in a nicer neighborhood than their own, and the writer said, "If you come around here offering to help rebuild houses, and I don't see your tool kit and Carhartt..." That is the kind of "advertising" Internet users trust, ourselves, and the kind you want to let us help you build...if your product deserves it. Be honest with yourself. The only way to get the kind of free advertising Carhartt gets is to deliver the kind of product Carhartt delivers.

13. If yours is one of the brands that advertise its retailers more than vice versa, consider whether cutting advertising expenses might be more profitable than any kind of advertising. The world does not need another Coca-Cola ad jingle. Most people can sing two or three different ones already. Coca-Cola might benefit from more sales, and at this point the way it could get them would be to stop advertising and cut the price of a 2L bottle back to 89 cents. What we all learned from the "make soda pop controversial and raise the price" campaign is that a lot of former Coca-Cola drinkers find that generic cola drinks aren't bad.

14. Unless your product is exclusively for some sort of minority lifestyle choice, avoid associating it with any specific lifestyle choice. People avoid buying things they associate with people they don't want to be like. They may give you credit for niceness if your ad for children's play clothes features a child in a wheelchair or even a child wearing glasses, but they'll buy the clothes modelled by a child in perfect health. Most men don't want anything worn or used by a male model shown touching another man, either--they don't want to invite that kind of attention. Relatively thin women don't buy things they've seen modelled by fatter women. Some people in their thirties even avoid things they've seen modelled by people in their sixties. And you do not want to put a spokesman for anything as controversial as, say, choosing not to homeschool when the choice was available, at the front of an ad campaign.

15. Music or words. Not both. Never, never, never keep a drum beating in the background while someone brays about your product. It sounds so much like an old-school used car advertisement that it would turn me off even an old-school used car dealership. Music playing while the words you want to associate with the product appear on the screen makes the important statement that you're a polite, respectful company. People talking--normally, never loudly, never using the imperative mood--can help clear up any confusion shoppers may have expressed about whether the garlic paste in the tube is meant to go on toothbrushes, on sandwiches, or both. But choose between words or music.

Should Web Sites Remove Misleading Health Information?

The breakthrough occurred during the coronavirus panic, while so many adults who had been using the Internet from work or school were offline. The multitudes of polls and surveys on this subject finally told some people what they wanted to hear: a Yahoo News survey found a sample of Web users who wanted web sites to protect them from “misleading information” about health matters.

Interesting. Wonder why I didn’t get that survey? Maybe because the subjects were set up to respond as they did by watching a movie, which my computer wouldn’t have played, that pretended to “document” blatantly false, upsetting “information” about COVID-19 having been deliberately bioengineered.

No points for guessing that the survey was sponsored by some corporation whose executives hoped the survey could be used to suppress accurate information by association with the misleading kind. It is in fact misleading to state that “Vaccines cause autism,” so Merck and other pharmaceutical companies’ official are no doubt drooling with the hope of persuading web sites to suppress more accurate information like “Individual reactions to vaccines can include fevers high enough to do permanent brain damage, which may produce or aggravate autism.”

It’s hairsplitting, but surely everyone sees the difference? Masses of people who are not autistic have had vaccines, so obviously vaccines don’t always cause autism. On the other hand hundreds of children who seemed normal before having certain vaccines have seemed autistic afterward, so, equally obviously, vaccines had something to do with their autism. The simple physical process by which some vaccine reactions produce or aggravate autism has been accepted by responsible pediatricians for more then sixty years. It’s not news. In fact, denying that a measles vaccination may make all the difference in whether a given child will become or seem autistic would be misleading information.

How do people recognize "fake news"? Well, on a five-minute timed test, they don't--and this came as a shock to some people. 

During the Trump Administration a hurricane left many people without electricity or drinking water in Puerto Rico. This web site was one of several that posted nags like our little ditty, "Our territories we'll protect, we said, come flood, come fire. If we don't stand by Puerto Rico, then we are a liar. A liar, a liar, we'll be a big fat LIIIIar..." Naomi Parker, whose blog is about knitting patterns, posted more political comments on Twitter and was also vocal about our obligations to Puerto Rico. So some Tweep of hers teased her and her other Tweeps with a bit of fake news. Trump had invited Puerto Rican hurricane victims to stay in Florida, but he was going to seize their passports and make them pay to get them back. 

Instantly NP and I posted comments like "How tacky can you get?" 

Then, because this was a qiestion of human rights and not merely budgeting, I asked first: "They have passports? People on that income level usually don't have passports. Why would they need passports anyway--they are U.S. citizens. They can visit any State for as long as they want and go back to their own Territory when they want."

And then we recognized that the news item was fake news. "Gotcha!" the joker scored off, by now, a couple dozen of NP's Tweeps who'd posted things like "How tacky can you get?" There has always been some fake news out there. Much of it slips past people because they don't really care. When people care whether a news story is true or not, they may not recognize fake news on sight but they can and do recognize it by following up on it. 

I say large multi-user web sites should continue to assume no responsibility for whatever facts, opinions, or outright lies people choose to post. I say people who read the words, if not people who believe whatever they see in a movie, are capable of remembering that anybody can post anything on Twitter, including typographical errors like omitting negative particles. That is, it’s possible for people to intend to tweet “It’s not raining outside” and actually post “It’s raining outside.” So if you see outright lies, e.g. “Glyphosate is safe” or “Measles is a deadly disease from which measles vaccines, which are harmless, keep us safe” or “The temperature in Virginia was 69 degrees Celsius at the time of writing,” on Twitter you check the facts elsewhere. You know that few people would survive if the temperature were 69 degrees Celsius so you automatically think “The person meant 69 degrees Fahrenheit.” About other things people say out loud or post on forum sites as if they were facts, you might need more work to reach a less positive conclusion.

Measles is a mostly trivial disease that can cause complications, including high fevers, brain or nerve damage most often associated with blindness, and death, in a minority of vulnerable individuals. Measles vaccines are a mostly non-fatal cure that can cause complications, including high fevers, brain or nerve damage most often associated with conditions that resemble autism, and death, in a minority of vulnerable individuals. Measles is a virus, which means vaccines contain live virus and are extremely susceptible to contamination. It also means the virus can mutate, so measles vaccines do not necessarily guarantee lifelong immunity to measles; people who’ve had either measles or the vaccine don’t “come down” with the disease but they can have unmistakable symptoms of it, twenty or thirty years later. The facts about measles and vaccines generally may not be as prejudicial to Merck as the facts about certain specific batches of Merck vaccines have been, but the facts are not “product-supportive.” After exposure to accurate facts on this topic many, if not most, people will not want the vaccine. And accurately reported facts will dramatically reduce sales of flu vaccine and other vaccines against minor diseases, too.

About health matters, the corporations will frantically admit when confronted with the product-unfriendly facts, there are, um, er, a lot more opinions than facts. This is true. For example, “[Cows’] milk is the perfect food [for humans]” definitely qualifies as misleading information, but what about “Cows’ milk has some place in a healthy diet for humans”? The majority of humans, worldwide, lose lactose tolerance at least by the age of fifteen! “Cheese is more digestible than milk, so restaurants should decorate everything with cheese”? Demonstrably false for some people, like me, who can still drink a glass of milk and keep it down, but cannot eat a slice of cheese and keep it down. (That cheese smells like vomit is an officially confirmed fact. That the vomit-like odor of cheese is disgusting and should be confined to a separate, fully enclosed room in restaurants that do continue to serve cheese is my opinion.) “Some humans do absorb some nutrition from milk, even as adults, so milk should still be sold as a food product” is less misleading, but it’s still an opinion. I happen to like ice cream but, if web sites are held responsible for any harm done to anyone by potentially misleading information about other people’s opinions, Twitter would have had to censor my encouragement to Ben & Jerry’s to keep their considerable weight behind the cause of making ice cream glyphosate-free again...because some people really do not need the suggestion that ice cream is food. For me ice cream is food; for many people it's toxic waste.

What about gluten? I saw this prompt on a survivalist site. What is gluten and should you be concerned about it when stocking your emergency supply of food? Several plant proteins are described as glutens, and in fact a few people may be unable to digest the others too, but wheat gluten intolerance is the kind that’s a problem for a large number of people. As many as one out of four or five people of Celtic descent may have some difficulty digesting wheat gluten but, during periods of history when wheat had not been treated with certain chemicals, serious health problems caused by this genetic trait were found in about one of every ten thousand people in Ireland, one in a hundred thousand in other parts of Western Europe, with no known incidence in non-Celtic populations. (The word “celiac,” the name for these people and their gene, is not related to the word “Celtic.”) As recently as 2008 it was possible to say that, although the gluten-free plates offered in some institutions tended to contain better and fresher food than the stale bread-based alternatives, for most people wheat gluten was a valuable source of protein and nutrients. Vegetarians actually throve on high-gluten bread! Then in 2009 glyphosate, which had previously been used only as a pesticide, went generic and manufacturers encouraged farmers to spray it directly onto grains, nuts, fruits and vegetables as a ripening agent to allow them to harvest more crops at one time. Masses of people became ill, didn’t get accurate information or helpful treatment, and found that adopting a gluten-free diet helped—somewhat—for a while—because avoiding gluten reduced the amount of glyphosate in their food. People have died from the unacknowledged effects of the glyphosate reactions they were having, some of which resembled celiacs’ gluten reactions, some of which did not. When stocking your emergency supply of food, if you’re not a celiac you should not have to worry about wheat gluten, which ought by rights to be a safe healthy food to store. Unfortunately the glyphosate that’s been added to the existing supply of wheat in the United States has killed many non-celiacs already and will probably kill more. Survivalists, very unfortunately, currently need to avoid stockpiling wheat. In fact almost any commercial plant-based food grown in the United States, including overpriced "organic" food, contains enough glyphosate to make you sick. And the corporate weasels have worked to prevent farmers from telling you if any of their crops do happen to be safe to eat. Many "gluten-free" foods trigger celiac reactions because they're not glyphosate-free...and the industry has attacked, and sabotaged, food processors who've tried to offer products that were glyphosate/GMO-free. 

Should web sites remove the misleading suggestion that wheat, other grains, nuts, vegetables, fruit, or meat commercially grown in the United States are safe for humans to eat? Or touch? In many cases, due to the extreme level of glyphosate contamination the industry is fighting so hard to maintain, that’s not true. If web sites are held to account for allowing people to post “misleading health information,” anyone who tries a yummy vegan recipe somebody posted on Tumblr and develops massive bleeding ulcers from ingesting glyphosate-poisoned tomatoes and glyphosate-poisoned spinach will be able to sue Tumblr. Is this really the way we want American society to be?

We need to put coronairus behind us and get back to work on the glyphosate contamination issue. We need to accept the fact that, during the coronavirus panic, even the most authoritative sources spouted “misleading information” about the dreaded virus, and because they were really reporting hasty opinions based on incomplete information about something new, “misleading” was the only kind of information about coronavirus that existed.

The value of the Internet is that it allows rapid transfer of information. Whenever news is breaking, some of that information is certain to be incomplete and, therefore, misleading. That is the nature of early information.

In order for the Internet—or daily newspapers—to be useful, people need to be reminded that some of the information they convey is going to be misleading. There will always be items like “Four people died in the fire” reports that have to be followed by next week’s “No, actually seven, counting the three who were taken to hospitals but not revived,” or “Candidate A won a close race in the Eastern States” followed by “But then Candidate B’s party rallied the vote and swept the polls in the West, so B won the popular vote.” On interactive sites there will also be items like “John Doe has an apartment for rent—oh no he doesn’t, his grandfather just moved into it,” and “Jack and Jill’s wedding will take placenext Sunday—or no, wait, it won’t take place at all, now that Jill got a good long look at Jack’s porn collection,” or “Suzy Q’s boutique has X on sale...erm, make that ‘had’.” And there will also be “Celebrity X just collapsed...was it a heart attack, an overdose? No, doctors now say it looked more like diabetes. No, wait, it’s not diabetes, it’s...” and similar “misleading health information” whenever any piece of health news, private or public, trivial or substantial, is either new, or bitterly resisted by unethical profit-oriented corporations.

The best way to reduce the harm done by misleading information is to allow prompt correction. Therefore web sites need to avoid clogging the flow of information by any kind of censorship. Instead they should rely on disclaimers, like “Individual users are responsible for the information they post here.”

--At least, that is what reason has been telling web site owners from the beginning of the Internet. However, web site owners are fallible mortals, and as a Twitter Insider I had opportunities to see firsthand how the marketing department wheedled, “Oh please, can’t we offer big corporate sponsors the brand-friendly benefits of corporate censorship, just like all those TV news channels that Real Twits dislike, distrust, and avoid for that reason? Yes, of course Twitter will lose all redeeming social value if it becomes the voice of the big corporations, another form of television, and Real Twits will detest and abandon Twitter if it does...but can’t we destroy Twitter, grab the money and run? Please please pleeeeasse?” 

I don’t really expect web site owners to grow enough of a spine to tell the marketing departments that, if that’s what it takes to make their web sites profitable, they might as well just shut down the web sites while their individual names still have some credibility, or while the basically unsustainable Internet retains enough users to make it usable for any purpose. I expect the Internet to self-destruct, actually; the way things are going now, I give it three years.

But, if any web sites are going to be around five years from now, I think they’ll be the ones that rely on disclaimers rather than censorship to avoid the horror of being held responsible for misleading information. 

As for the sites, like Elon Musk's X.com, that agree to censor content that hurts sales of sponsors' products--i.e. whistleblowing on vaccines that are more likely to kill previously healthy people than COVID was, or glyphosate, or cigarettes...I think we all know what decent people do about them.

Proven Strategies to Enhance Web Site Users' Experience

Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a network that compiles lists of writers' questions and e-mails them to other writers. It's like Quora or Answers.com, except that the answers are private and may be published in a glossy magazine.

Anybody can join HARO but obviously the service is more useful to some writers than others. Obviously the writers asking questions know what search engines are for. Obviously they already know people who can answer questions like '"The great majority of their questions are for specialists. They look for business owners and managers as well as doctors, lawyers, and dietitians. Some writers are also looking for answers from ordinary people who've had a certain experience--anything from "making the most of just one day at a major amusement park" to "surviving brain surgery." Others are looking for answers from a brain surgeon. 

The writers aren't required to pay for answers. Many of them don't. Well...if they've not paid for the answer I gave them, that answer is likely to turn up as a blog post. It's something a publisher was paying them to research so it is probably something a lot of readers want to know about. I'm thinking of making it a weekly feature: Content I Offered or Gave Away for Free to Someone Who's Not Paid Yet. (Actually, the most common reason why my HARO content has not been rewritten as "interviews" in magazines is that the magazines demanded face pictures.)

So, why should readers look for answers here instead of at glossy magazine site? Here's why. Glossy magazines are funded by advertisers. The funding and the advertising can shape the content of the answers the magazines provide. That means that they might recommend some $500 product for use in a situation where soap and water would work better. That is not a problem for this web site.

Also, this web site may offer them a better visit experience. 

Here's what I know about enhancing web site users' experience: 

Keep it simple, safe, and respectful.

1. From time to time, visit your own web site using the oldest, slowest, klunkiest device you can find. Try to find one that's "not receiving updates" and is therefore, in some people's minds, "effectively unusable." People use those things. You want to be accessible to those people. So, avoid any bells-and-whistles add-ons that can be avoided. If your web site exists to sell clothes you probably need a lot of color photos showing what is meant to be worn, where, when, by whom, with what else. If it exists to sell music you can economize on the visual element and focus on the sound. If it exists to sell car parts, washing machines, or books, you don't really need either pictures or sound---all people need to know about your merchandise can be said with the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks on the keyboard.

You can add doodads like a map showing your store's address or a video showing how someone uses your product, if they work for your customers. People who can't watch movie clips or listen to music clips aren't going to hang out at a site that sells movies or music, so you can do what works. However, the more doodads you add, the more memory they'll use and the less well they're likely to work. If you have difficulties using Windows 95, remove some of the clutter.

Generally avoid

* anything that pops up, jumps across the screen, flashes, blinks, or moves in any way unless the customer clicks on a button to play a video

* recognizable images of people. Distant figures in a crowd are less problematic. Images of hands holding or operating a product are generally inoffensive. Images of parts of the body that might be considered sensitive or rpeeulsive are best avoided. Avoid photos or even drawings of any part of a human body in between the shoulders and the knees. Images of damaged body parts, even hands or feet, are also best avoided if you want to sell anything. The word "sunburn" is always preferable to a picture of a sunburnt arm.

* pale-colored text on a pale-colored background. In finding a balance between what does least damage to the eyes and what communicates information, black text on a white background and serif fonts are helpful. Sans serif fonts ar most effective as arty print fabric motifs, though they can work in one-word headings like "Item--Small--Medium--Large." Avoid displaying more than two or three words together in a sans serif font. 

* showing large amounts of text as an "image" or "table." Large amounts of text are going to be printed so that people can actually read them, and they need to be easily formatted to fit the paper used. 

2. If you use a hosting service like Google, Wordpress, Squarespace, etc., your site  will have cookies. If you don't have the technical skills to create, build, and secure your own web site out of thin air, it's better to use a reliable hosting service. But don't add any cookies. If you do build your own site without any corporation's help, make it cookie-free. 

3. You don't want to know any more about your customers than they've told you. There are ways to get people to answer marketing-type questions like "Where do you live?" and "Do you ever buy things for children?" but it's generally a good idea not to ask. The less information is customized "For You," the more trustworthy it appears to be.

* Never even mention ph*n* n*mb*rs.

* Not everyone has a blog feed but, for those who do, a "blog" or "news" page where any changes to your site show up in the blog feed is much nicer than automated e-mail. Some hosting sites, like Wordpress, offer the options of displaying new blog posts in my blog feed or in my e-mail...the blog feed is better. 

* Some people live in places that have a doorman on duty to receive parcels from a delivery service all day. Most people don't. If you are really saving a lot of money using a service that delivers to the door and can't deliver to post office boxes, you can have separate shipping charges for those who put only a mailing address on the Internet. Never ask for anyone's home address. You look like a burglar just by asking.

* On the Internet no one knows if you're a dog...but it's good to assume that anyone who's willing to type bank information into a computer is a dog. Online payment services will be viable again if we get a federal law requiring them to pay all funds collected to the customer, on demand, using the customer's preferred method of payment which may include delivering cash. Until that happens, it's best to accept checks and postal money orders by mail, rather than taking responsibility for handling bank information online.

* Always remember that Internet transactions are never really private. People transact legitimate business far more often than the illegitimate kind, so yes, just as there are lots of people who have left their cars parked with the doors unlocked and the windows down, and still found their cars in the same place when they came back for them, there are also several people who have typed their real names, home addresses, and credit card access codes into a computer and never been robbed or even harassd. Nobody can afford to assume that that will happen again. Your responsibility is to avoid collecting data that someone else might be able to steal from you and use to harm people. So just don't touch credit cards. Period.

* So, discourage any use of real names. You can't stop the clueless from using part or all of their real names as screen names, but you can set up interactive forms that prompt people to type in a screen name, not just "name," which prompts some people to type in their real names without thinking. 

"Safe" should be understood, not to mean "sheltered from having to read opinions that differ from your own," but to mean "not exposing any personal information to anyone who might use that information 'against' you in any way."

4. Paying attention to what people do choose to tell you, during a conversation = good. Trying to find things out about people outside of that conversation = bad. So, if you have a large enough and diverse enough inventory (as it might be of books or music) that you can suggest something for each individual customer, be sure to take your suggestions from their correspondence or published content for that day, NOT yesterday. Don't be like that idiotic program Amazon used to have that kept trying to sell me the book I'd reviewed the day before. Hello? Sometimes people's other recent Internet activity consists of trying to unload things they already have and don't want to keep. Durrrr!

5. Even if your product is regulated differently in different States, it is better to publish that information than it is to ask inappropriate questions. If your site spells out something like "Alaska residents add __ shipping fee" or "Regular model $500, Special California Earthquake-Insurable Model $750," people may agree that an extra charge is reasonable, or may be motivated to change it. If you ask questions before stating a price, you create an assumption that your pricing system is discriminatory, and even if you offer the best deal in town people may feel proud of paying more, somewhere else, rather than taking any benefit from preferential discrimination. 

6. It's a good idea to avoid using "sales personnel" (real or virtual) or anything that looks like a "sales funnel." Paying people to do research about a product can be a good way to create a predisposition in favor of that product, assuming that its customer reviews are good. You need to understand, though, that the nature of the Internet guarantees a lot of "Looky Lou's" who are never going to buy your product. The Internet is where teenyboppers can gawk and giggle at products designed for people with different kinds of bodies than theirs, without embarrassment. It's where people on strict diets can look at pictures of steak or ice cream while taking meal replacer drinks or tube feedings. It's where wheelchair dwellers play fantasy football. It's even where hack writers are being paid to read about your product so they can write about how someone else's product is better. And it is also where you can conceal, and then forget all about, your resentment of those people while building an informative site that will predispose some of the gawkers to consider your product if, say, they ever get a job requiring them to use something they're not interested in using at home. Informing, rather than trying to push for a sale, is the key to those potential future sales. 

7. Customers are adults. They can deal with an occasional mention of a sensitive topic, as long as the sensitive topic is not being exploited to manipulate them. 

If you do feel tempted to post something about abortion, homosexuality, or transgender-ism, try this: Replace the content with an equal amount of content on the topic of either "castration" or "colostomy." If your immediate reaction is "THAT's not going to boost sales!", chances are that the topics people feel more comfortable pontificating about aren't going to boost sales, either. If your reaction is "Yes, my market niche is 'All Offensive Content All the Time,'" go ahead and use the big hot-potato topics, and why not use coprophagy, too, while you're there.(I will not visit your site. I prefer to limit my gross-outs to images of fungi or caterpillars.)

If you're not trying to exploit the sensitive topic but to respond to questions you've been asked, as a doctor, a philosopher, a religious teacher, etc., to explain your views on the topic to readers, it's probably best to do that in a private letter. Save a copy in case you want to answer another letter. If you become a successful author in an appropriate market niche, you can publish it as a pamphlet--"Dr. Whatever Answers Readers' Questions About Coprophagy." 

(What's coprophagy? It's destined to be the next fad after fashion victims have the opportunity to discover that the human body does not digest insect bodies. As a food fad it will burn out even faster.)

8. Diversity costs nothing as long as it's not producing a strained, and counterproductive, overall effect. As a bookseller, for example, you want to stock books by and about members of ethnic minority groups. For most large groups there are several good ones to choose from and you're not even limited to books whose titles might as well be "Me, Me, Me, Boring Little Me, a Member of Group X with No Talent for Writing." But if you succumb to pressure to "represent" some newly selfconscious tiny group, you may get stuck trying to sell copies of "Me, Me, Me..." at the expense of space from, and the benefits of, selling Shakespeare and Thoreau and Tolkien and Amy Tan and Ngaio Marsh. 

Far too many books by White male writers were published, and some of them were not only boring but vile, in years gone by when books by women and non-White writers were viewed with prejudice. Now publishers are scrambling to try to make the list of books in print reflect the demographics of the real world. Since White male writers had about a thousand-year start on everyone else writing in English, that now results in 

(a) discriminatory publishing policies, many of which are still boiling down to "We want to see manuscripts by women and members of ethnic minority groups. If you're a White man you must send us ten dollars just to get a rejection slip." I'm a woman, at this time of year I have enough "color" that strangers aren't sure which language to speak to me, and I find these policies disgusting. Winning a contest for some specific type of writers and writing--"Biracial Writers on Their Biracial Experience" or "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Memoirs by Members of the Michigan Group," is one thing. (Though even then, please, can we admit that the differences among the Michigan Group, the Canada Group, and the New York Group were produced by variations in word usage and we all had basically the same disease?)  But "Everybody But White Men Will Be Considered, Black Women Preferred, Black Lesbians Guaranteed Preference, White Men Pay for Rejection Slips" is tacky. Some of The Nephews are, by now, White men, and they deserve equal treatment with the rest of humankind.

(b) low standards for the coveted handful of Black lesbian writers, who were tiresome enough to read, often enough, when they were Audre Lorde and I'm not sure why anybody should bother reading the new ones who are less talented than Audre Lorde. These days anyone who happens to be a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller can use a computer program to spin a whole book out of "I is a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller. I never reads nuffin cos nobody else look like me dig. Never goes nowhere nor talks to nobody needer. So all I gots to say is I is a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller and I also gots bowel trouble. And I iz tryna sell my body for drugz but that aint workin less I finds me a rich White dude who beez into coprophagy." Right. I admit it. I made that up, but if you think it's impossibly bad, you should read some of the "poems" that win those prizes White men have to pay $10 to be snubbed by. Due to contractual obligations my parody is actually cleaner than some of the winning drivel I've read, but not worse.

Don't do these things. It's not a sin to be born White and male. It is a sin to be so prejudiced, and make others so prejudiced, against Laotian-American wheelchair dwellers that you mistake the worst writers in that group for the best. 

9. Strictly limit non-text content on your site. Fifteen years ago, as the early "content farms" (where so many of us hack writers were so contented) broke up, we all thought we wanted Google Ads, which at that time were modest little ads for weird Internet-based stuff nobody wanted. Now an ing number of my e-friends have Google Ads on their blogs, and...Google Ads now advertise more interesting products. Which is a pity and a shame, because the way they advertise those products is so counterproductive. The ads are irrelevant, distractig, browser-crashing. A person who had not been following these writers for many years wouldn't even try to read their posts. 

The site that used to be Twitter, now known as X--the crossed-out cancelled site, the site that used to be so much fun for so many people--recently revised its terms of service, in a weaselly way that ought to be illegal, to admit that they;ll censor honest content that adversely affects their advertising. They want to make X all commercial all the time, like television. So they're selling lots and lots of ads! And they're getting lots of views...from advertisers! And, hello, where have all the real people gone? Back to reading each other's blogs the way we did before we joined Twitter, of course. X is no longer useful to us. And, hello, we're the people who don't already work for the advertisers, who might some day have bought some of their junk. Elon Musk is a genius but he's also very young. Because he's a genius there is still hope that he will learn, some day, what a mistake this was. Possibly someone else could, meanwhile, launch a site like the original version of Twitter--calling it something like "Tweetsy"--block access from countries where anyone is still squalling for censorship, which are cordially invited to sink in their own wretched pit, and earn a comfortable profit selling small friendly ads to Americans who remember that Original Twitter really worked for everyone who used it. 

Don't let outside advertisements eat your web site. I'm in favor of advertising as long as it's not allowed to damage the primary content. Do consider dropping into your content a keyword that supports an advertiser's content, but, unless the advertiser is paying all the expenses of maintaining your site, don't make your site about the advertiser or their products. Do insist that, if you allow lipstick ads at all, you're going to display images of women looking much nicer because they're not making their mouths the focal point, because a woman is not a lamprey eel and is likely to look her best when she's not trying to look like one. Do reject ads for toxic products that ought to be banned--and do consider joining boycotts of sites that accept that kind of ads. No matter how much they're paying, advertisements for cigarettes, for alcohol as something to drink, for "pesticide" poison sprays, for "medications" that are known to make significant minorities of patients sicker, for politicians whose parties fail to denounce censorship, or any other evil thing, can only harm your site.

10. Don't invest too much in the Internet. Until the right to freedom of online "speech" is solidly guaranteed by law, you have to think of your web site as something that's likely to be destroyed just because a competitor, or the opposition party, or somebody you never even considered as opposition before, has paid somebody to pull it down. A censored site is a dead site, and a censored Internet will be a dead Internet, but some people don't care about that. Save your own copies of your own material and always be prepared to go back to publicizing your work in the post-Internet world. And never pay a penny to any corporation that offers you a contract that they reserve the right to change to suit themselves. If they want to make hosting profitable, let them come out to where you are and take a blood oath to defend freedom of speech with their lives.

Can Linda Yaccarino Save Twitter?

I'm not optimistic. If our Republican Congress don't grow the backbones so many of them have lacked for so long and crack down hard on the Party of Censorship, it's hard to see grounds for optimism about anything in cyberspace. A censored web site is a dead web site; a censored Internet will be a dead Internet. While fretting about the lack of moderators to pull down content thought to contain "animal cruelty," Twitter's new CEO continued to allow an algorithm to delay a "Please help this shelter dog" message until after the dog was scheduled to be killed. 

I do think it's possible for a good thing to come out of the World Economic Forum--screaming, tearing its hair, running frantically for the place as far as that convention of cartoon villains as it's possible to get.

Does this look like a good thing to you?

 

Not as much, perhaps, as little Greta Thunberg in that video where she was surrounded on the street and badgered by a gaggle of much bigger, older reporters, but Yaccarino has had more practice. She does look frazzled. 

I have a dream in which that hair makes her feel desperate enough to listen to an older woman who can tell her: "When I was eighteen my hair looked like that. When I was thirty I discovered a way that even my hair could look good, for the first time in my life. Together, you and I can guide the world back to a condition in which even your and my hair can look good again." 

I had a dream in which my husband's ex was not lying through her teeth about being in contact with their adoptive son, and we could become a blended family before my husband died, too, eighteen years ago.

But there is a way Yaccarino can save Twitter, in the short term, and actually make it pay...not as much as the stockholders may want, but it can pay...if she's serious about taking it back to first principles.

The relevant first principle would be: Twitter reached the size it reached because it provided instant communication for private individuals, before the corporate advertisers got there. The world did not need another commercial medium, would not have supported one, and won't support one. The world did need a social medium that would flash messages like "Please help! This dog is scheduled to be killed tomorrow morning," around the world, from anybody to any number of other bodies wherever people were interested in dogs.

People will expect Yaccarino to make Twitter work just like NBC. It won't. There is neither a need nor a desire nor a space in this world for any more of NBC. Yaccarino needs to sell her friends at NBC the first principle that TWITTER IS RADICALLY DIFFERENT FROM NBC.

That does not mean that Twitter can't serve them. It merely means that Twitter will fail to serve them if Yaccarino indulges them with another moment of thinking that Twitter can be made into more of NBC. She must help them understand that, in order to be profitable, Twitter needs to remain very, very different from NBC...while serving (some of) the same sponsors.

The key difference, and I say this as a disenchanted former Twitter Insider who's been watching the site and helping it grow for many years--the key difference is the difference between television and social media. 

Television is a medium where corporate sponsors, and the bloat in government that functions as a de facto corporate sponsor, incessantly blare their message to passive viewers who are seldom paying full attention to the broadcasted message. 

People don't interact with the TV set, unless they're pathetic dead-end kids like the TV cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead. Actually, my favorite people don't even turn on the TV set very often, if they even have one. When people I know do turn on the TV set, there are a few shows they actually sit down to watch--weather forecasts, "Jeopardy," and an occasional live broadcast of some special event. Even then, they talk, move around, and step out of the room during the ever-increasing commercial breaks. Most TV programs function as background noise in front of which people can avoid actual conversation while eating, snogging, or falling asleep. The sponsors can say anything they want in the part of the TV broadcast that matters to them, because nobody engages with it, nobody even consciously listens to it or looks at it, and so all they have to do is pound the name of their brand into people's ears. 

Does it work? Maybe. Maybe not. The companies that invest heavily in advertising products on television also invest heavily in getting those products well placed in the right stores. Awareness that brands exist may influence people to be a little more willing to buy those brands, but it does not actually hypnotize people into buying anything. As mentioned before at this web site, as a child I memorized the commercial jingles that were broadcast during the child-friendly shows I watched on family road trips, but although I can still sing some of those jingles today I've never bought the products they advertised.

What TV broadcasts do undeniably do is add stress to people's lives, mild or even benign stress for some people, toxic stress for others. For those who want to watch the ball game or talent show, the effect of the stress is limited to keeping them from sleeping, meditating, or exercising; only when this becomes a long-term pattern does it do any harm. For the family member who hates those ball games or talent shows and hears each one as a fresh display of ingratitude and ill will, every minute the TV blares is another brick in the wall. When couples want to be reconciled, or parents want children to focus and calm down and do well in school, their chances of success are better if they unplug the TV.

For those who want TV broadcasts, there are already plenty of TV broadcasts out there. Nobody is going to pay for an Internet connection that delivers the same experience as a TV broadcast. 

In order for a web site to interest anyone but the advertisers, the web site needs to deliver an experience that's very different from a TV broadcast. So Yaccarino might start by writing down a complete list of everything the sponsors want a TV program to be, then writing a list of what would be the opposite of that, throwing away the first list, and putting the second list on every wall.

Or I could just tell her what attracted so many people who don't watch TV, if we can avoid it, to Twitter as Jack Dorsey built it--something new, something useful, something that has only two things in common with television: (1) it appears on a screen, and (2) it can be used to display images and advertisements for products.

Here are the most obvious salient features Twitter absolutely must keep in order to stay different from television, to attract Real Twits, and to exist. These descriptions aren't necessarily true of Twitter today, but they are true of the original, viable Twitter. They must be true of "Twitter 2.0" if Twitter 2.0 isn't going to go the way of My Space, Google +, or Niume.

1. Twitter is silent unless a site visitor clicks on a button to play an audio clip. 

2. Twitter contains more words than pictures. This is no longer always obvious, but it used to be. Just accept it: People who choose the Internet over television prefer words to pictures. You never, never want to allow a picture to fill up the screen, as the pictures do on some social media sites like Gettr, unless someone deliberately clicks on a button to enlarge it. You want each picture to take up less of the screen than the words that introduce it. You don't ever want a picture to "move," or "pop," or "flash," unless someone deliberately clicks on a button to allow that.

3. Twitter is rich in the content site visitors are actually looking for. Original Twitter ran about fifty tweets from accounts the individual visitors had chosen to follow in between every one "promoted tweet" from an advertiser. That was, of course, because Twitter had to achieve viability on its own before it had a lot of advertisers. However, it's also a feature that made it possible for Twitter to achieve viability, while other social media sites crashed and burned. I personally feel that it wouldn't hurt the Twitter experience to allow a steady stream of advertising messages to occupy the right side of the screen--provided that the ads are clearly subordinated to the tweets. The center column should remain wider than the sidebars. Paid ads should contain text and thumbnail pictures only until Twits click on a button to expand them. Twits know that Twitter needs sponsors, but sponsors need to have it firmly in mind, at all times, that the different benefits people get from Twitter come from keeping the individual tweets dominant over the paid ads, at all times, in all ways.

(Yes, this can be of benefit directly to the sponsors, but they're going to have to think outside the box to accept the potential benefit. They might need to take a break or do some deep breathing to cope with the cognitive dissonance.)

4. Twitter's safety is maintained by site visitors' control of their own experience. Nobody wants to watch a video that starts with someone saying "Today we're going to beat up a younger kid" or "Today I'm going to slash my wrists," right? Yes, people did things like that on Facebook, and while other people sat there horrified, unable to believe what they were watching, these deranged Facebookers actually committed suicide and real crimes, in real time, live on social media. What have we learned from this? No, NOT to try to filter out bad content so that people don't see it. That's what will NOT help, so don't ever even think about it again. What helps is to watch for the bad content and take it seriously. Somebody posts, "Today we're going to beat up a younger kid." Leave that message where it is! Police should have someone watching. In case they don't, the social media site should have a prominently displayed "hot button" that notifies a site monitor to call the police. Police can trace the signal, find the source of the bad content, and probably stop the crime before it happens, while the malicious user is still bragging about what he's going to do. 

You need to trust individual users, now that people realize that these things are possible, to call the police and then click on to something more pleasant to watch. Which they will do. People love letting other people take care of problems. One of Junior's little friends just threatened suicide, notify the authorities, now back to the chat with the person whose screen image is a woman in a low-cut blouse.

5. Twitter's content is spontaneous and uncensored. People exchange PERFECTLY FRANK opinions of the sponsors' products. You know how that works. People do not actually say, like the character in the Totally Amateurish Radio Drama put together by the characters in an old radio serial that was re-broadcast when I was a kid, "I can find it because I have my new Brand X flashlight. It runs on two 'D' batteries and cost 79 cents at Store Y." Fifty-one weeks in a year they go to Wal-Mart, buy a few dozen staples they use every day, come home, and never think about posting anything as basic and boring as that they have this weekly ritual of buying things they enjoy using at this store. Then the week something goes wrong, they get on social media and flame that Wal-Mart where they expect they should be able to enjoy, in a bland boring way, buying the things they use every day. They never type a word about why they like that Wal-Mart better than the Target, or vice versa. Nor do they type about all the groceries and toiletries they like to use every day. Only when something goes wrong do they flame the everlovin' daylights out of the store and/or the product that disappointed them.

Yes, we all understand the TV sponsors hate this. Yes, we all understand it's the one thing TV sponsors want to censor out of existence in TV Land. But that's what makes live, uncensored, unfiltered social media fun...and what can make them useful to sponsors. They just have to accept this: The Twits who made Twitter great do not live in TV Land, nor do many of them even visit TV Land. Sposnors have to venture into our neighborhood. To do that safely, as when they visit the neighborhoods of the Black friends they all claim to have or at least want, they need to show respect.

What do sponsors do when somebody...like me, because in this respect I am, if anything, a harder sell than the typical Twit, yet it is possible to sell me things...somebody who never thinks of tweeting "We just went to Wal-Mart and bought our favorite brands of groceries and toiletries: Brand X, Y, Z... What fun!" as person might easily do fifty times in a year, does, unfortunately, think of tweeting "Wal-Mart was out of the Brand X soap, the Brand Y printer paper, AND the Brand Z rice I always buy there, AND THE CLERK WAS RUDE!!!"? 

First, it's OK to pound a fist on the table or mutter the rude words that come to the sponsors' minds. Everyone can understand that. 

Now, having acknowledged and released those emotions, the sponsors should be ready to think creatively about how to spin these moments in the direction of profits.

Some people are Difficult Customers and proud of it. We are both made and born this way. Some people voted for Jimmy Carter because they've always gone through life thinking "Why not the best?", but they've been made to feel ashamed of it. Others have embraced it. I was brought up by a well-known Difficult Customer. I preferred spending time with milder-mannered adults rather than my Drill Sergeant Dad, and didn't think I wanted to grow up like him, so I didn't always complain about things as a young woman. I even went to one of those churches where the False Gospel of Nicely-Nice Verbal Abuse had crept in and some people may actually have been able to believe that it was nice not to tell people what they needed to improve...for a short time. Then I got out into the grown-up world of work and realized that well-known Difficult Customers were my best customers. They didn't have to sound like total old-school drill sergeants. Dad was one and sounded like one, but more successful Difficult Customers were fractionally more tactful than that. Fractionally. And I even had the pleasure of voting for one of them for President. I really like a Difficult Customer who is tough, but fair, and I decided before it was too late that I did want to grow up and be one. So now I am.

What makes people choose to be Difficult Customers is that we know that indulging people in undesirable behavior, such as imagining that the seller is ever "on equal terms" with a Customer, is not doing those people any favors. That's it, and that's all. We can be pleased--and we actually enjoy rewarding people when we are pleased. But you do have to earn the rating you want. You have to please us. 

That's where social media come in as the way to market your products to us. We can be pleased. We want to be pleased. And, because you are not wired to be able to understand how to please us, on social media we'll tell you exactly what you need to know.

You just have to think outside the TV advertising box. You cannot go on social media to pound your words into our minds; that's killed other social media sites already, and it can kill both Facebook and Twitter, too. You can go on social media and regain our good will by doing what it takes to please us. 

Not by looking for any rewards before you've earned them. I've been known to give zero stars if the "rate the service you received" screen pops up before I say it's time for it to pop up. 

Not by just trying to smooth over the "feelings" while ignoring the facts. Emotional feelings come and go. They last approximately ninety seconds, then fade quickly if they're not aggravated by feeding them more attention than they deserve. So if, let us say, you represent a shoe store where somebody tried on a pair of shoes, told the clerk they'd take that pair, accepted a wrapped box, took it home, opened the box, and discovered a completely different pair of shoes that didn't even match inside the box, you do not need to waste time with "I can tell you're upset." 

(Number one: if you believe you're a psychotherapist, what are you doing in customer service? Number two: you don't know which people use "upset" to mean a milder form of "angry" and which use it to mean a milder form of "nauseated," but you don't want the conversation to be about either of those things. Number three: the customer may be a woman, in which case, if you've CUTESIPATED her by ignoring a statement of FACT and babbling about her supposed "feelings," you have just outed yourself as a hater and made it her goal to get you fired. From your next ten jobs after this one, likely.) 

You need to own your feelings, approximately as frankly as the customer has just expressed per own feelings, as in "I'm very sorry that happened! It makes me feel like an idiot! Please let me send you the pair of shoes you intended to buy. If you could be so kind as to bring back the box, just in case we have another pair that look just like them somewhere and can donate both pairs to a secondhand store, I'd be grateful." 

Now you're making your store look good. Window dressing is all very well, but you're displaying honesty and a commitment to good service. Now the customer is motivated to reward you. Don't push; let it come naturally. You may have to grovel to a customer who you think is making unreasonable, unrealistic demands, repeatedly, depending on how deeply the customer is set in that dissatisfaction groove, but eventually you'll get free advertising from this customer. And if other people agree with you that this customer is unusually hard to please,per recommendations rate. People automatically discredit everything you say about your products or your honesty or your commitment to customer service, but if you get full marks from that customer, you are obviously doing something right--they'll try a box of whatever you're selling, too.

Before social media, it might have taken months or years for the Difficult Customer to feel confident enough to give you a positive recommendation. Maybe in real life he's never had a conversation about shoes with anyone outside the store. Maybe in real life she has no friends and her grandchildren avoid talking to her long enough to hear her opinions. But on social media, all of the Difficult Customer's followers can see your conversation. Maybe they agree that the customer expects too much; maybe they agree that you're doing a good job. Either way, you've just demonstrated to them, without either paying for an advertisement or automatically self-discrediting by advertising, that your store is a place to look for honest, courteous service. They have not only noticed your brand; they've laid down a foundation of agreement with your message. That kind of advertisement is like motherly love: there's no price tag on it, because it's beyond price.

Of course, some complaints are harder to turn into super-value publicity than others are. Everyone understands that Wal-Mart is so big that some complaints are inevitable. The person who posted the complaint about not finding X, Y, and Z at Wal-Mart will probably be back in the store next week, as will the people who read the complaint. What about "I used your product, as directed, and the doctor reckons that's why I now have cancer"? What about "Taking the guns away from patients only makes Prozac Dementia homicide-suicides deadlier--we have to monitor use of the DRUGS!"? 

This is where Yaccarino has the opportunity to be of real, lasting service to humankind. She needs to stand firm on those first principles.No censorship, ever. 

In fact she should consider making it part of Twitter's Terms of Service: "If a sponsor tries in any way to suppress complaints about a product, that will be taken as an admission that the product is harmful and the sponsor is not trying to repair the damage, so the sponsor will be permanently banned." And stick to that, however big and rich the corporaiton is and however much they offer. Make that an advertising point for Twitter. "Bayer tried to suppress the Glyphosate Awareness movement? Bayer's gone. Lilly failed to encourage the newspapers to print the results of an analysis of a homicide-suicide's blood tests? Lilly will never be seen on Twitter. Merck had the gall to say rude things to and about people whose children were harmed by vaccines? Die, Merck, die." 

If people have, inadvertently and in good faith, made a product that turned out to be more harmful than they thought it would be, then the way for them to demonstrate that good faith is to take everything the indignant customers throw at them. Humbly. Gratefully. With sincere penitence. "Yes, Sir, it's possible that our product hastened the progress of your cancer. Please accept our deepest apologies and know that your widow and orphans will never be poor," s all Bayer should have had to say--over and over, with different specifics and pronouns--since the total global ban onglyphosate that should have gone into effect in 2018. 

It's been said that, if you look out the window and see a little old lady being beaten until blood drips on the pavement, and you don't feel a reaction, you are what they call a psychopath. Well, I happen to be a little old lady, and I've been battered by repeated glyphosate poisoning--of the air, of food, of water--many times. So far I've not gushed blood onto pavement--only a bathroom floor, once, and you may be sure I scrubbed that floor. But there've been enough days in the past two years when I've stayed home, because I was likely to gush blood onto pavement, that I now classify myself as disabled. I do not want a pension. I want to go back to work. I want that glyphosate ban. And if you don't feel a reaction, you might want to talk to a psychiatrist about that. 

Feel that reaction, Yaccarino, and reconnect the global Glyphosate Awareness network Twitter helped me build, before the coward-boy Agrawal let Bayer interfere with our telling the truth. We've all heard and heard and heard about the coronavirus panic and the fear that people might not be saved by the vaccines that turned out to make them more vulnerable to the way the virus had mutated by the time the vaccine was available...oh well, anyway, it seemed to be so terribly necessary to censor anti-vaccine tweets so that...BOSH, I say. Everyone in Glyphosate Awareness knows the corporate censorship started with us, after political censorship had found a way to exploit the system during the 2016 elections. (Lilly had been leaning on newspapers not to print the most important fact in every homicide-suicide story since 2001, and Merck may have been gaslighting and insulting people with vaccine injury claims before that.) 

Twitter needs to take a firm stand on its first principles. Sponsors with genuine good intentions need to support that firm stand. Nothing must be offered to those who want to censor the unpleasant truth about their products except endless, boundless contempt.

If a corporation has any right to continue to exist, its executives and stockholders need to accept that market forces are what nature intended to impose morality on the corporation. Censorship must not be allowed to protect the corporation's profits. Rather,, any attempt to suppress the facts about a product must cut so deeply into the corporation's profits that nobody would dare to suggest such an immoral, unethical, stupid idea.

And if that means the Democratic Party has a lot of apologizing to do for having hidden behind the filthy coattails of the corporate censors, during even one election--and if that little venture into censorship costs all Democrats any chance at State or federal office for another decade!--even that would serve the Ds right. They didn't start apologizing and purging their ranks soon enough. They need to be doing that, nonstop, from now until November.

Everything Will Find a Home in Its Own Place

It's only an online hobby that I pursue during down time, but when people maintain blogs consistently over time, I find it fascinating to read back and study what they've done with their blogs. The individual posts may not be of interest to me. I'm not especially interested in the history of gas prices in a city where I've never lived, but I was interested in the way an otherwise interesting blogger  chose to make gas prices in per city a recurring theme at per web site.

So I was reading back through an e-friend's blog and came to where, during the week after person had found this blog, person observed that per own book collection was "totally personal. Who'd be interested in obscure cookbooks and manuals for oldfashioned appliances?" 

Hmm. Very interesting. Was person talking about per own bookshelves, or about some of the book reviews that were still at the top of this blog's list when person discovered it? 

Let me say this, first. If you don't particularly want to maintain a blog but just want to follow blogs, I love Blogspot's "Reading List" feature. When you set up a Blogspot blog, whether you post daily or monthly or once every few years, you have access to all kinds of features behind the scenes, which are there for your benefit and are not visible to your readers. One of them is the Reading List. It displays the headlines, usually a thumbnail view of the first image, and the first few words of each post at each of the blogs you follow. These entries are supposed to appear in chronological order but sometimes, especially with WordPress blogs, they get mixed up. Anyway this feature keeps you posted on what's going on at hundreds of other web sites all through cyberspace. If big blogs with dozens of posts every day, like The Blaze and The Daily Kos, are filling up your list you can filter them out and see only posts at the smaller blogs, or at one specific blog if you think you may have missed something there. When you follow a lot of blogs it will not be possible to read every post. Usually the headline is enough. You look at the headlines in your Reading List, and see that Martha DeMeo and granddaughter cooked something you wouldn't want to eat, again, nice to know that they're still active and healthy, and scroll on, and see that this web site reviewed some book you wouldn't want to read, again, nice to know that I'm still active and healthy, and scroll on, until you come to a post you really want to read. I still open dozens of tabs every day and don't get to all of them by the end of the day, but for a lot of things it's good to read the headlines without having to click on anything.

So, if you like me as a person or a writer but you do not want to read about the cookbook and manual that came with pressure cookers sold in 1953, I recommend you add this web site to a Blogspot Reading List. That way you can open only the posts that interest you, and you never have to bother opening and deleting e-mails about the posts that don't.

But about the book reviews...Books are a niche topic at best, and within the world of bookselling some books fit into smaller niches than others. What that means is that, although I wouldn't try to base a business on obscure books alone...the more "totally personal" you think one of your book choices was, actually, the more likely I am to sell it before I even have time to write a review about it.

Seriously. 

I am, I admit it, currently having retail problems. There are still at least three good empty buildings just standing around, deteriorating, while prospective investors hem and haw about whether we'd make enough money to pay for the buildings. At the gift shop the retailer who was stocking my newest and oldest books backed out, almost all the way out of the whole shop, due to illness in the family. At the place that's been stocking my midrange books, the retailer who's been opening sporadically hasn't been opening, for the same reason. At the secondhand store where I've put the books Amazon tells me are least valuable, they're still moving briskly along, but as that store doesn't sort books at all, I have to check all 35 shelves to see what's sold and what's not, but let's just say the books move. 

My philosophy of bookselling is that, if you can keep a book from actively growing and spreading mold or vermin, somebody wants it. Experience keeps proving this to be the case. Moving the books B. Dalton or Barnes & Noble would never have touched is merely a matter of identifying who ever did want them, why they were printed, and letting the person who wants them know where they are. 

When I've had books on a permanent display at an indoor market or hauled them out to an open-air market...I've not had people ask for the vintage car repair manuals (yes, I've sold some) but I have been asked, more than once, about the obscure cookbooks. I am not making this up. Especially the "Our School, Club, Office, Church, or Family's Recipes" books, that are printed at the group's expense and sold as fundraisers. Those things are waaay more collectible than postcards or Beanie Babies. They actually move faster than Barbie dolls. I've had people who didn't even come to the market say to me, in town, in a car pool, "Oh I hear you're the one who sells books--have you got any local cookbooks, like church cookbooks? I collect those." 

What's hardest to sell are last year's bestselling novels. Old bestsellers do move; a couple of times a year some young person who's just discovered Stephen King or James Patterson will be starting a collection and will happily pay for The Dark Tower. But there comes a time when, no matter how many people agree that it's good, just about all the people who want a copy already own one. 

Dave Barry. I never mind having a Dave Barry book handy for rereading if nothing is going on in a store, but Dave Barry's best books are hard to sell because I'm in a town from which 19-year-old nest builders are usually moving away, and only 19-year-old nest builders ever buy Dave Barry's best books from further back than, say, two years ago. Everyone else with any claim to a sense of humor already has a complete collection.

But the titles that guarantee instant rejection from some booksellers? I'll take them, thank you. They are golden. 

You don't have to send these books to me. You can always put them up on Amazon, E-Bay, Abebooks, wherever you prefer. I particularly recommend this option to friends who'd like to sell certain pillow books that nobody would want to be seen reading in a store in a town like mine. In a small town people can know each other entirely too well for anyone to want the neighbors to know whether they bought The Book of Love or The Ideal Marriage or whatever else. Well, thanks to online bookstore sites, you don't have to let them know. 

One market dynamic I often observe in all secondhand stores is that, if people are telling you "It's junk, it's clutter, it's embarrassing," this year, in another thirty years the sales of it will be fast and furious. The trick will be pricing it in a way that allows people to haggle in a sympathetic way, telling you, "I used to have one just like this, and I let someone talk me into donating it to St Vincent de Paul, or my mother/husband/wife/children sneaked it out with the garbage, because they thought it was junk."

The market trends for different types of books vary from place to place, to some extent between "upscale" and "downscale" stores or neighborhoods. In my part of the world, though, I don't notice the "class" distinction that some people want to see, at all.

Now, admittedly, even in the United States where "class" is a completely separate thing from income, ethnicity, or whether people own or rent their homes, there is a class distinction. Are class distinctions, plural. It's just that books are by definition classy, and there's very little remaining distinction among book buyers, except that a preference for shiny new books is a total nouveau-bourgeois status indicator. (There was even a fad, which I believe is over, for old books as decor items when status-seeking types observed that old-line Virginians cherish battered old books.) In other words, the kind of woman who says "I never did well in school, dropped out during my third year in grade nine to marry my first husband, but my children went to college and Tracy has an MBA!" wants shiny new books. The kind of people I enjoy selling books to, from the former coal miner who can converse with anybody because he read all the nonfiction books at the public library, through the child who does too have friends but just happens to like grown-ups better than other children, on up to the teachers, ministers, and writers, like a mix of old and new books and aren't going to throw out their first editions just because a shiny new reprint is on the market. Not that they have anything against new titles, crisp new dust jackets, sharp new corners, etc., but they look for the actual contents of books and are not guided entirely by the different scents of new and old glue.

There are certainly differences in what people read, and how much. Some people become very well informed and selective book buyers because they spend very little time actually reading--they're so busy with their jobs, if young, or their eyes feel tired so quickly, if older. Some people buy a romance or a detective story every week. Booksellers do form stereotypes about older women buying detective stories and people who are still growing buying horror stories. But for a certain real-world friend who's concerned about "upscale" and "downscale" stores...Two things: Number one, no matter what a good Republican you are or how many local Republicans love you, and they do, and they have good reasons, you still do not belong on any town council anywhere, because that way of thinking ruins towns and neighborhoods. Communities get their resiliency and their truly "nice," as distinct from merely expensive, quality from having a good mix of ages and incomes; in the United States age tends to determine income. And, number two, books appeal to classy people rather than any particular income category, but this is not a problem, because if there are any present-time coal miners who like books, they would be the kind of coal miners the teachers and writers would like to know. You don't see coal dust or motor oil on working men when they shop for books--you see abrasions where they've literally scrubbed their hands "painfully clean." 

That said, here's a Top 15 List of what sells well in local markets:

1. Reference books: When people want to give someone a gift that's classy and not very personal, dictionaries, Bibles, and "The Desktop Encyclopedia of..." are good safe choices. When I was working the Friday Market I rarely had to take one reference book out twice.

2. Mainstream Christian: Anything by Billy Graham, C.S. Lewis, J. Vernon McGee, Charles L. Swindoll, Beth Moore, or a similar non-denominational mainstream Protestant author, sells fast.

3. Other religious/spiritual perspectives: Catholic, charismatic, Seventh-Day Adventist, independent individual preachers', and non-Christian writings on religious/spiritual topics sell steadily, but not usually very fast. I don't believe anyone currently living in my town is Jewish but a lot of people, as whole-Bible Christians, read Jewish books, and also support Jewish charities. 

Arthur S. Maxwell's Bible Stories and Bedtime Stories are the exception. Maxwell was a devout, hard-line Adventist and his books for adults fit into that category, but his children's books are non-denominational mainstream Protestant books that happened to be beautifully illustrated. I've never displayed one of those books in English. There's a list.

4. Local history: All local history books are critically read, and almost all local book buyers will buy them unless they've spotted a mistake. Some local history books have been successfully "killed." If they're accurate, books with local names and pictures in them sell fast.

5. Southern history: The Tennessee crowd love general "Southern" content that includes them, too, sort of. 

6. History, generally: Most book buyers seem inteested in history generally. They don't have to feel any personal connection to the places and people they read about, either. 

7. Clean jokes: Even the classic canonical works of Dave Barry (Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, e.g.) will eventually sell. Newer or older, harder-to-find comedy sells briskly. 

8. Cookbooks: And the more obscure, the better. 

9..Nostalgia-trip books: Some people collect books from specific decades, partly as decor items, partly as nostalgia trips or memory triggers. These people buy anything from the right years. Third grade English grammar books? That study of the annual rainfall in different cities, worldwide, from back when the scientific study of weather was a new thing? Campaign books by people who weren't even elected? Bring'em on. This is a small group, not represented in every day's shopping crowd, but they carry cash and spend it freely.

10. Any illustrated book of instructions for any art or craft: Even if crafters don't want to make the objects shown, there is probably a technique or motif they want to adapt for their own original work. Or they have a friend or relative who thinks there will be, when a gift-giving occasion draws near.

11. Nature, science, field guides: Smaller group, more conservative buyers, but they snap up the good books in this niche.

12. Places other than here: Some people actually travel, some "armchair-travel," some think books by and about people in Other Places will be educational for the children. To some extent interest in specific places forms fads (interest in China seems to have peaked, interest in Michigan may be passing a peak, interest in Maine now seems even to me like a souvenir from 1990), but some interest remains constant. 

13. The Western States, specifically: The Western States are madly appealing to many people who intend to spend their whole lives in an Eastern State. People watch "Western" movies and TV shows and read the books on which they were based, and even read serious nonfiction books about that part of the world.

14, Personal health care: Especially if it's responsibly written books by M.D.'s, not spammy-looking stuff with crass words for and/or images of body parts on the cover. Eating wheat does cause inflammation in many people's abdominal region as we react to gluten, glyphosate, or both, but the authors of books titled Wheat B... and Your Angry G... would have done much better, locally, with titles like Your Sensitive Digestive System or How Some Bodies React to Certain Foods. 

15. Celebrity memoirs and biographies: Even when people say they hate an entertainer (meaning person's act, of course) they tend to buy books allegedly written by people they've seen on television. I doubt that half of these people have even read their books, much less written them...whatever. 

Fiction moves, too, and people do ask for genre fiction, graphic fiction, serious nonfiction discussed on C-SPAN or NPR, "classics," and trendy new books, but the fifteen categories above are guaranteed to sell with a high probability of selling within two hours on display. 

What's almost guaranteed not to sell is the LGTBQIA category. People here don't publicly buy anything they'd feel embarrassed having to explain to their grandchildren. They might buy it online or even when they're in a city, but they're not going to pick it up and be seen holding it, here. 

When do you start selling your personal treasures? I have a few rules:

1. When it's no longer a treasure. If it's a knitting pattern book, I've knitted all the patterns. If it's a normal book bought for pleasure reading, I've read it. If it's a cookbook, I've copied all the recipes to a computer file, so now someone else can have the book. Most Americans have bought a lot more things that they never wanted to keep all their lives than I've bought. You bought something for the pleasure of watching people see it for the first time, and now they've seen it and everyone would be happier seeing it in a different setting. Sell it. You collected a lot of souvenirs of your ex's favorite team, band, etc., and you never were a real fan and now...Sell them. You collect books by certain authors or on certain topics, and while enjoying your collection you notice that you've somehow acquired two or three copies of one book. Sell the surplus.

2. When there's a demand for it. If it's furniture, take it to a neighborhood where a lot of nest-builders are starting to buy furniture. If it's clothing in good condition, its lifespan in "fashion" stores is a matter of weeks, but if it's a practical cotton garment people can wear around the house, just put the right price on it and it'll sell. If it's baby things, the time to sell it is when someone else in your neighborhood has a baby of the appropriate size...unless, of course, the parents of that baby are poor enough that you choose to barter rather than sell.

3. When it's occupying space you want to use for something else. I sold a lot of things I'd always intended and wanted to keep, and moved a lot more to the "merchandise" category, just because I couldn't afford to repair the Professional Bad Neighbor's damage to the storage barn and I didn't want to have things in it when it collapses. I don't plan to replace that barn. If and when I can afford to build a barn, that's not where it will be, and meanwhile the stuff my parents stashed in the barn might as well be in use by people who want it. All the blue glass was sold during Mother's lifetime. I do have some window panes, suitable for painting if they don't fit any vintage windows at your house, and a tragic glass fish tank that's been washed with soap, but might still make a lovely terrarium.

4. When it's worth money and I need the money more than I need the object. I've made samizdat copies of several books, including that (never actually displayed) 200-year-old edition of Horace in Latin, so I could sell the books.

5. Not when someone who obviously does not have enough worries of per own tells me it's junk. That person obviously needs some more things to think about, such as why I'm not talking to person any more. There are two valid responses to anyone's presuming to volunteer an opinion about anything any other person chooses to keep being junk. One is to keep the object and wear or display it conspicuously for at least three months after the annoying mouth has been shut. The other is to buy a half-dozen more just like it. 

When selling...it's always a personal decision how long you want to wait for the right person to buy each item. If I were going to display my 200-year-old edition of Horace all in Latin, I'd do it at a "research" type college where Latin is appreciated, not in an open-air market. Baseball cards, Beanie Babies, Barbies, NASCAR memorabilia, glass and pottery, all sell well to the right people but, even in flea markets, you may wait several days before the right people come along. The Internet may or may not speed up sales, since the person who wants the stuff you want to sell does not necessarily buy anything, even books, online. 

For people who don't actually want to make bookselling or junk selling a hobby or build it into a business, a day or two is often all the time they want to put into waiting to find the right person for each item. There's nothing at all wrong with donating things to a legitimate charity store that can use them, at that point. The only problem is that in some places the charity stores are overstocked and may be sending donations to the landfill.

If I were just startng to think about what to do with books, while I could still enjoy reading them...I'd be in no hurry. I'd make it a policy to invite each visiting relative and friend to take home a book after each visit, emphasizing that the only reason to limit them to one book per visit was to prevent resentment if one person got all the good ones. After everyone invited to visit my home had had a chance to indicate which ones wanted more than one book, I'd let the ones who wanted multiple books fill their trunks.

Then, I'd load the remaining books up and offer them to different secondhand sellers. Obviously most secondhand sellers aren't going to pay what shoppers at yard sales and flea markets pay. Secondhand sellers are more likely to appreciate really valuable books enough to pay five or ten dollars instead of holding out for ten dollars a dozen. Secondhand sellers are also more likely to say, well, they'll take all your recent books for a dime or a quarter apiece. at which point it's up to you, of course, but personally I'd load the books up again and drive off to become my own bookseller. That's what I did.

Then, if I wanted to clear shelf space fast and/or claim a tax deduction, or if I knew someone else who wanted a tax deduction, it'd be time to consider a donation. Know your charity stores. Some are managed by morons, naming no names such as TRAVIS...,who will try to sell some books for more than they're worth and dump fresher donations while trying to force people to pay, say, 59 cents for a load of paperback romances whose value, in aid of a good charity, might be a dime. Others will display everything and give people a chance to buy it at a fair price, and thus give your discarded books a fair chance of being appreciated.

Before dumping books or thrusting them upon people who don't want them, I'd send them to someone like me who could reasonably anticipate a few more years to sell them. And if you still enjoy travelling, by all means come out and meet me in Gate City. I've inherited seven big lifetime book collections and I can still get through my house because, whatever your first impression of the book review list at this web site may be, I do find the person for each book, especially the ones you might think nobody would ever want. But I still have a lot of books waiting to be read, reviewed, and sold, so you should offer your collection to your friends, relatives, and neighbors before bringing it to me.

I want only your clinkers! But especially any and all knitting, crochet, and needlework patterns, and cookbooks, even if they have no local interest and won't sell before they are displayed.