Nimble Books LLC » Detainees

BASIC DOCUMENTS ABOUT THE TREATMENT OF DETAINEES

W. Frederick Zimmerman — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:19:56 +0000

Dear readers,

This book

Basic Documents About the Treatment of Detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib

has a special place in my heart because it was the first one I published. It’s held up pretty well over time.

The cover, of course, is awfully clunky, and I’ve learned that white is not usually a good color for the cover background. If I were doing it today, I’d probably find a U.S. government public domain image of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib to serve as the dominant image and put it over a dark grey background. I would probably choose a different font than the Copperplate Gothic I used here, too–but I have to say that the Copperplate Gothic does have a certain appeal!

The content is still solid. The Taguba report is essential reading for an understanding of Abu Ghraib, and the Supreme Court cases are still controlling law. I would probably add more about the Guantanamo interrogation protocols and include some of the more egregrious Justice Department memoranda.

The interior design is fine. I have no heartburn with anything I did. About two-thirds of the book simply incorporates Supreme Court PDFs of their case reports, which look a bit old-fashioned but are the real deal. That fits with my idea for the book, which is to encourage (force?) people to look at the raw documents whenever possible.

The message of the book is still right on target and I am still proud I published it. The rule of law is the winning strategy in the Global War on Terror, and it was, and is, both foolish and wrong for the Bush administration to pursue a strategy of "taking the gloves off" in the treatment of prisoners.

Financially speaking, the book has been profitable, and sales have been pretty steady. There are more copies of this book in the WorldCat library catalog than any other book I’ve published. Net lifetime revenue ranks 7th out of all my titles. I expect the book will continue to sell well for many more years.

I hope you will add my book to your collection, and even better, buy a copy for your local library. I would hazard that for at least the next hundred years, it will be important that every generation to relearn the lessons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. There’s no better way to do that than to look directly at the original primary documents.

Cordially,

Fred Zimmerman
Publisher, Nimble Books LLC

P.S. I strongly recommend that people interested in this topic also buy
Darius Rejali’s authoritative history of torture. Darius was a
classmate of mine at Swarthmore and I learned more from him there than
from any other single person, professors included.

Torture and Democracy

The bottom line is that regardless of whether torture is wrong (of course it is), it does not work.

Basic Documents About the Treatment of Detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib

wfz-admin — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:31:26 +0000

wfzimmerman’s review: “I published this, my first book, because of my outrage at the Abu Ghraib scandal. The cover is crude, but the content has held up remarkably well, and the book continues to sell at a low but steady pace.

Just yesterday I read an article about Maj General Taguba, the author of the Taguba report (included), who feels he was railroaded out of the military by the civilian defense bureaucracy in 2006. For the record, Rumsfeld’s spokesman said he thought Taguba did a good job under difficult circumstances, and Rumsfeld has been quoted as saying that the worst day of his tenure, by far, was the day that the Abu Ghraib images were released. I heartily agree … but there were so many other days to pick from! ;-0″
W. Frederick Zimmerman (2004), Paperback, 348 pages
tags: first edition

October 2005 review

wfzimmerman — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:13:00 +0000

A busy month with a major revamp of my websites and work proceeding on two new titles. Let’s review status.

I completed the first update for UNAUTHORIZED HARRY POTTER BOOK SEVEN NEWS, released the PDF version to customers, and requested a proof of the new paperback. I will send out a batch of review copies next month. I postponed the pub date for UNAUTHORIZED A FEAST FOR CROWS ANALYSIS to Dec. 15.

Product sales continued to show a satisfactory degree of diversification. Net unit sales included a stronger-than-usual showing from a sentimental favorite, my first publication, Basic Documents about the Treatment of Detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Higher-than-expected returns of The Solomon Key and Beyond were an unpleasant end-of-month surprise. Overall, a down month … all my available products are at down points in their demand cycles. I can only work to make sure that they are properly positioned for the likely upswing.

By far the most cost-effective marketing technique that Nimble Books has used has been to take position its products in the Ingram and Amazon.com catalogs so that they will take advantage of major publicity events driven by third parties (MPE) such as the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It costs me almost nothing in out-of-pocket cash marketing $ to position my products appropriately, and MPE such as publication date announcements have been observed to increase monthly sales by an order of magnitude or more, so the ROI is on the order of 1000%.

Assuming that MPE will occur as expected, and that they will continue to drive potential customers towards my properly positioned products in on-line bookselling catalogs, it follows that the most cost-effective places for me to invest my efforts are:

increasing the number of products offered
improving the conversion rate on items in the catalog

In other words, the focus for next month will be on finishing books, and optimizing catalog metadata.

Ancillary revenue streams contributed proportionally less to revenue this month than last month.

Google Print still has four of my titles “pending,” where they have been for six months plus–despite the fact that all four titles are available electronically to Google via an LSI-Google partnership! Not worth spending any time on Google Print until they dramatically improve their throughput.

I added nicer-looking Amazon “buy this book” links to all my blogs which produced a minor but noticeable increase in Amazon.com Associates revenue.

The website reorganization has cost me AdSense revenue as I moved a lot of content off-line, but switching content management systems has made it possible for me to understand AdSense behavior more analytically. I know now that the best performing channels are Tech Fun, The Solomon Key and Beyond, and What’s New for Book-Lovers. Over the course of the month, What’s New for Book-Lovers drew away from the pack as the channel that is growing fastest, earning most in AdSense revenue, and has the most potential to grow into a significant revenue contributor.

The Solomon Key and Beyond gradually outpaced the “root” Zimmerblog, finishing a strong second among all channels and establishing a distinct user community. Books I Won’t Be Reading struggled with poor usage statistics, although it had a high volume of what I thought were funny posts. I suspect the title is creating a big obstacle to casual readers! I think I will fold it into What’s New for Book-Lovers.

As I look back at the month, I realize that the bottom line is that POD publishing is a much better business model than affiliates program.

Every time I have “success” in AdSense (a click-thru) for What’s New for Book-Lovers, I receive an average of $0.25.
Every time I have “success” in Amazon.com Associates (a referred purchase), I receive around $1.10.
Every time I have “success” in book-selling (fulfill a book-seller’s order), I receive between $5.00 and $15.00.

Onward!