The trip was meant to be quick and simple.  Fly to Ft. Lauderdale, visit my ailing Grandmother, and return the next day.  Less than 48 hours round trip.

The first obstacle was finding an affordable flight.  Now, I live in Winston-Salem, NC.  There are basically two airport options.  First is Greensboro.  About a 30 minute drive from my house and easy to use.  Second is Charlotte.  An-hour-and-a-quarter from my house, and also an easy airport to get around.  Here's where things get wonky.

Turns out it's cheaper to fly from Greensboro to Charlotte to Ft. Lauderdale than it is just to fly from Charlotte to Ft. Lauderdale.  Besides the obvious screwiness of this set up, it gets stranger because despite the fact that the flight from Greensboro to Charlotte lasts all of 25 minutes, the time it takes to load the plane, taxi to the runway, wait in line, fly, land, taxi to the airport, wait for an open gate adds up to about the same time it takes to drive to Charlotte's airport.  I know airports have all sorts of incentives/penalties that they give out to airlines, but there's no logic I can find that says it's cheaper for an airline to fly two planes instead of one under these circumstances.

Looking back, what I should have done was book the cheaper flight, driven down to Charlotte, and just picked up the second leg of the flight.  I wish I had because on the way home, while waiting in Charlotte, the airline decided to cancel my flight.  Had I driven that leg, my car would've been waiting for me and the airline could cancel to their heart's content as far as I was concerned.  But, alas, that wasn't the situation.  I had to call my wife, have her drive down, pick me up, and drive back.  Then, the next day, I had to drive out to Greensboro to get my car (which, of course, now had another day's parking fees added to it).

Okay, so what's the point of relating this whole inconvenience to you?  Well, I see the same mistakes in the publishing world.  See, there are numerous reasons why the airline industry is suffering.  9/11, rising gas prices, poor fiscal management — all are contributing factors.  But the biggest problem the airlines have is that they forgot where they're supposed to make money — by serving people.  Customer service sucks on all the airlines I've been on in the last decade.  When I was a kid (back in the days of Eastern Airlines, TWA, and Pan Am), making sure you had happy travelers was important.  Of course problems occurred.  Not every travel experience was grand.  But on the whole, they cared about us.  No more.  The airlines are now so concerned with every stinking penny that you can smell it from the moment you buy a ticket.  In fact, most of their money goes into getting you to buy the ticket.  After that, the hell with you.  And it's not the pilot's fault, or the flight attendant's, or the people running the gate.  It's the executives making good decisions for their stock reports but bad decisions for the customer.  Bad decisions we have to live with.

Publishing?  Same thing.  Decades ago, publishers were run by people who loved books.  They weren't so worried about the bottom line — not that they didn't care, but that they would be happy to make a small profit on a writer they believed in and wanted to develop over make a killing off some crap.  In today's world, the publishers, like the airlines, are so concerned with every stinking penny that you can smell how little they care about your experience with their product.  As long as you bought the book, they don't care after that.  And it's not the writer's fault, or the editor's, or the bookseller's.  It's the executives who want to treat publishing like a retail outfit or a grocery store.

It's one reason the indie-publishing scene is thriving.  I can put out my short stories and collections and novels and leave them there forever (they don't spoil).  I can take the time to find new readers slowly.  I don't have to hit it big out of the gate.  If my books are moderately successful and my readers want a sequel, I can write and deliver it without facing the nonsense that has happened to numerous series in the big publishing world — namely, a series doing well (making a profit) but not well enough, so they scrap it, leaving the readers with an incomplete series.  Even though the remaining books would make a profit — the publisher would not lose money — they still cut it off because they are chasing dollars instead of customers.  They think they can make more money off of something else.  Maybe they can, but it pisses off readers — and that means losing customers which means losing money.  I'm sure there's some MBA logic to all this, but I don't get it.

But then, I don't understand the airline industry anymore, either.