“It’s surprisingly easy to get satisfaction, and overcome life’s little — and not so little — inconveniences and setbacks. Sometimes all you need to do is write the right letter to the right person, in the right way. This book will show you how.”

With those words, John Bear prefaces “Complaint Letters for Busy People,” which he co-authored with his daughter, Mariah.

The book includes tips for helping dissatisfied consumers to document their situations clearly, decide what outcome they want, figure out to who to complain and how to write the most effective letter to achieve that result.

Sixty-two sample letters covering a wide range of situations from finding a cockroach in your cereal to complaining about a neighbor’s dog comprise almost a third of the book. The same elements that make them effective make them entertaining to read, as well.

“The whole idea was not to give things for people to copy directly,” Bear said in a recent telephone interview. “It was more for inspiration and also to have something to adapt if they want.”

“Complaint Letters for Busy People” also includes a listing of names and addresses of federal complaint agencies, major corporations and industry associations.

Bear, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., grew up in a family of complainers.

“My parents were the kind of people who would send a meal back to a restaurant if it wasn’t good or hot enough,” he said. “Or if there was a rude taxi driver, they’d write a letter to the commission.

“For me, it was just a way of life.”

Bear said he has learned since that most people don’t complain about bad service or products.

Years ago, when he did his doctoral dissertation on consumer complaints, he was the first person to ever study the concept. What Bear found was that 75 to 95 percent of unhappy consumers don’t complain.

There are several reasons for this, according to Bear.

“A lot of people, and this is especially true in the South, are just too polite,” he said. “Their mothers taught them, ‘You don’t complain. You be a good little girl or boy and just sit there,’ and that seems to be their attitude.’”

Another reason is that people don’t think complaining does any good.

“I think there is very clear evidence that is not the case,” Bear said. “The majority of people who complain properly and reasonably do get satisfaction.”

Bear said he doesn’t think it was chance that Pan American and Eastern, the two airlines with the most complaints in the 1980s, have both gone out of business. “If they’d been giving us good service, they’d probably still be with us,” he said.

What happens a lot of the time is that people don’t file complaints, Bear said, but they stop eating at the restaurant that gave them poor service, or the airline or the hotel chain and so on.

“That’s probably good for them,” he said, “but it doesn’t really help change the world. I think a lot of companies like to get complaints. It helps them figure out what they’re doing wrong.”

Some people also complain by phone. “But by and large, I don’t think the telephone is the way to do it,” Bear said. “It’s very hard to get through to any human, much less a decision maker, and there’s no record of the call.

“I’m really convinced that writing is the way to go for complaining.”

One reason more people don’t write complaint letters, according to Bear’s research, is that they’re not comfortable writing. “A thank-you note for their Christmas present maybe, but that’s about the extent of their year’s writing,” he said.

When contemplating whether to write a complaint letter, Bear said consumers need to decide if the situation warrants the time involved. If someone overcharges you by $2, for example, he said, it may not be worth it.

“The other big issue is the self-satisfaction, the revenge thing,” he said.

Bear said some of the sample letters in the book, published by Career Press in Franklin Lakes, N.J., were his.

Through the years, he has learned what works and what doesn’t.

When the $300 Casio watch he had purchased stopped working earlier this year and the local repairman said he couldn’t fix it, Bear wrote the president of the company to complain.

The president responded with a polite form letter, saying that the warranty had expired.

“I just packed it up well and mailed it to the president of the company,” he said.“That’s hard to ignore. A letter you can easily ignore or send a form letter back.”

Within two weeks, Bear had received a brand new watch in the mail. “No letter, no apology,” he said. “But I didn’t care. I got the watch.”

Bear tried the same technique a little later with a Panasonic boom box he and his wife had used to teach folk dancing.

After his complaint letter yielded the standard form letter, Bear packed up the boom box and mailed it to the company president.

This time, he received a telephone call from the assistant to the president offering him 50 percent off any new product of his choice. “They sent me a catalog,” he said, “and I thought that was fair.”

Bear said it took action on his part to get results. “I had to do it,” he said. “That’s the mindset I have. They were never going to come to me and say, ‘John, we hear you’re unhappy. What can we do to make you happy?’”

“Complaint Letters for Busy People,” which sells for $16.99, is John Bear’s 25th book.

He has collaborated with daughter Mariah, executive editor and publisher of Degree.net Books, on three other books, all of them about higher education.

Bear has also collaborated with another daughter on a cookbook and a son-in-law on a computer book.“It’s been a very nice family enterprise,” he said. He is presently working on a book about earning degrees by long-distance learning and a computer book addressing fears and concerns that people have about the Internet.

And after years of writing non-fiction, Bear and his wife, Marina, a professor of ethics, are collaborating one day a week on a novel.

“It’s going to be in the Arthur Hailey model, which I think of as a nonfiction book that also has a plot attached to it,” he said. “‘Hotel’ and ‘Airport’, those kind of books that are really about an industry and how the world works, and there’s a story connected with it.”

Bear’s father was a successful novelist in the ’40s and ’50s, he said, and that’s one reason he started out writing non-fiction. “It was kind of as if that was his territory.”

Other books by Bear, who earned his Ph.D. from Michigan State University with a study of the ways corporations, politicians and the media deal with consumer complaints, include the bestseller “Guide to Earning College Degrees Nontraditionally” and “Send this Jerk the Bedbug Letter.”

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To order “Complaint Letters for Busy People,” call 1-800-CAREER-1.

The Bears invite readers to e-mail them with suggestions, ideas, complaints and complaint stories at john@ursa.net and mariah@ursa.net.

The eight steps to an effective complaint letter, according to John and Mariah Bear, are as follows:

1. A complaint letter should be businesslike.

2. The letter should include contact information.

3. Address your letter to a real person.

4. Begin your letter with a good reason to read it.

5. State the problem.

6. Back it up with documentation.

7. Ask for what you want.

8. Set a deadline for response.