Let me tell you a story I found, then ask you a question about the value of knowledge and effort.
___
A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure out how to fix the engine.
Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a boy. He carried a large bag of tools with him and, when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.
Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed.
A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.
“What!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!” So, they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemised bill.”
The man sent a bill that read:
Tapping with a hammer………………….. $ 5.00
Knowing where to tap……………………. $ 9,995.00
The moral of the story: Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference.
___
Kill Zoners — Sure your ebook may only sell for five dollars, but what’s the value of knowledge and effort inside?
As far as I know, I’m the only author who has identified
1. the correct psychological origins of the Holocaust.
2. a new candidate for Hitler’s mystery grandfather.
3. Hitler’s primary motive for invading Russia.
There have been many books and articles written about the death of Geli Raubal. I believe I’ve deduced (with a certain amount of speculation involved)
4. The whodunit (a slam-dunk; one need not look far for a suspect. Women involved with Hitler had a history of turning up dead, allegedly by suicide.)
5. The whydunit is more complex. There’s a putative motive arrived at by many, but the underlying motive was identical to that of the Holocaust.)
6. The howdunit requires a bit more guesswork, but there are good reasons to conclude that, on the way to Nuremberg on the day of the murder, Hitler’s car held a fourth man never mentioned in the police reports, solving the locked room mystery of 16 Prinzregentenplatz.
I heard a different version of your story many years ago. That one involved a town with an old electric plant that crapped a sandcastle. The mayor found the guy who designed and built it. The fellow tottered in, smacked it a couple of times with a wrench, and let there be light.
I often haul the story out when someone asks why so-and-so gets paid so much for this-and-that.
Thanks, Garry. Hope you’re having a great week.
The actual story comes from Henry Ford and the electrical genius, Charles Steinmetz. This from The Smithsonian:
Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook, pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following: Making chalk mark on generator $1. Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
The value of the knowledge and effort inside the book is $5, of course. Nobody’s gonna pay that $10,000.00 invoice for a few minutes’ or hours’ entertainment.
The version I heard was a broken airplane and the man tightened a bolt. And looking at the prices of sporting events, concerts, and who-knows-what else, I’d say there are a lot of people willing to shell out big bucks for a few hours of entertainment.
However, if your goal as a writer is to rake in the dough, you’re in the wrong business. (For the record, most of my books are $3.99) 🙂
To answer your question, the value is immeasurable. Yesterday, a reader messaged me on Twitter. She’d just finished HALOED and loved it. She said her family’s going through a difficult time (cancer diagnosis) and HALOED allowed her to escape her sorrow. How can anyone put a price on that?
Can’t.
As an editor, I deal at times with author clients who want to haggle over my rates and devalue what I’ve done. Why? Because in hindsight they believe that what I caught was so obvious that they themselves would have caught it eventually, or that their spouses or beta readers would have, before they submitted the manuscript.
I’m a lawyer and this is EVERY client, especially family and friends and acquaintances. Knowledge, which is invisible, is not valued. “You made ONE phone call!” or “You sent a couple letters!”
This is why I’m glad I (a) work in-house for a company handling their contracts and compliance (non traditional legal role) and (b) have been off Facebook since 2017. FB was a huge source of ungrateful people asking me to “just look over” a legal document for free.
Couldn’t agree more. I got out of the trade in 2014 after I had a bellyfull of trying to cobble up excuses for peoples’ lies, bad behavior and lousy choices and getting them ready for what I knew was coming down the pike like a Peterbilt aimed right at them.
In that respect, getting my membership in Club C that year marked an important turning point in my life and led to writing although I don’t do enough of it.
One night on the flight line the Turk said to me, “Robert, we don’t get paid for what we do. We get paid for what we know.”
He was a wise old owl.
The book is worth the price we set, but the value we put into it is priceless. While I can look back and see that I spent X-dollars on writing courses and books over Y-years, how do I put a value on having lived the life I’ve lived which has made me the person I am, and given me the experiences that help shape my stories?
The same goes for readers, as Sue’s comment above beautifully illustrates.
Thanks for this thought-provoking post!
Good post, Garry. And good discussion that you’ve set up. What is the value of services and products?
Since the industrial revolution, with mass production, everything (product) is cheaper to produce, thus cheaper to buy. The problem occurs when that product contains service (knowledge and expertise). How much is that service worth?
And then a whole host of factors comes into play – perceived value, competition, and even government control/pay of services. Then it gets really complicated when the producer/manufacturer of the product has a conflict of interest, because he produces the product, but he doesn’t produce the service. His goal is to sell more of the product. He doesn’t care about the real value of the service (knowledge/quality/expertise) except as it affects sales, he just wants to sell more product. And thus book production is controlled by the publisher, who wants to sell as many books as possible, but wishes the author to provide his services and accept ever decreasing compensation.
The only recourse for the provider of service is to build a reputation for quality and a market of buyers who are willing to pay for fair value – a huge challenge for writers when our books are swimming in an ocean of books.
On that happy note, have a happy remainder of the week.
Good story, Garry. I’ve heard variations of that one before.
I don’t consider the value of my books to be measured in dollars. For me, the effort that goes into writing is a gift, and the value that results is the impact the books have on readers. I intend my work to be both entertaining and thought-provoking. If I can clear that high bar, it is reward enough.
Thanks for putting such an intriguing question out there.
I’d never heard that story, or the variations of it in the comments.
My go-to assessment of “the worth” of my stories? Certainly not money! 🙂
A few years back, a university student who I’ve never met to this day bought one of my books. It took her most of several months to read it, as she stated in the note she hand-wrote and mailed to me. She also stated she’d never thought of “things” the way I’d presented them in my collection of themed short stories, and she thanked me for touching her, and sending her in a new direction.
That note lives on my desk, and has bolstered me over and over again.
Beautiful, Deb.
A different spin on the old yarn, this one true:
On January 28, 1986, as a young safety engineer at a propellant plant, I was killing time in the plant’s roach coach with Dr. Henry M. (Hank) Shuey, one of the foremost experts in the world on explosives and solid rocket motors. He was the consultant the company hired to make sure that the staff safety department (that would be me and mine) were doing their jobs correctly.
We were gathered there not to eat, but to watch the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on the television mounted in the corner near the ceiling. (The company I worked for was backup to Morton Thiokol to produce the solid rocket boosters.)
We were of course horrified to watch the Challenger explode live on TV. On the first replay, Hank looked at me and said, “The O-ring failed.” If anybody wants to get into that, I can discuss the function of the SRB’s O-rings in a later blog post (I can hear those crickets already), but two years and millions of dollars later, the investigating committee, of which Hank became a part, identified many breakdowns in judgments and communications, but as for the proximal cause of the explosion, it was because the O-ring failed.