Categories
2012 apocalypse moon

Five To Doomsday – Day 1: Interview with a time-traveller

Cover of Apocalypse Moon in Japan

Through the magic of tinternet, we’ve managed to get a message to Josh Garcia in Ek Naab. (I posted a comment on his blog, is how. If you haven’t found Josh’s new blog yet, take a look: myinvisiblecity.com)

The prize for BEST QUESTION goes to Tobias Nottingham, who will be receiving a rare signed first edition of any Joshua book. THANKS to everyone who sent a question!

If you had the chance to go to another alternate reality, what would it be like and why? (From Tobias Nottingham)

Hi Tobias. Well you know what? I’ve been to a couple of alternate realities already. I went to a pretty darn horrible alternate future, in which the Sect of Huracan had won. To be frank, I still have nightmares about that. But there was one alternate reality that I can’t get out of my head. There’d been a nuclear war and some really nightmarish stuff in the 1960s, (The Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t turn out so well in that reality.) And quite a lot of the world was basically wiped out.

But there was a whole different attitude there. Nuclear weapons has been completely dismantled. There was no Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, no problems in the Middle East (to be fair, that’s because they’d been bombed badly, too.) The USA and Russia weren’t big powers any more. Brazil, India, Australia and China were the big superpowers. And Mexico was very chilled. It wasn’t like now. In that reality, I had all the money I could every need and my girlfriend and I could have lived pretty happily on the beach. I’m ashamed to admit it, because I shouldn’t have enjoyed a place where so many had suffered so much to make it such a peaceful world. All I can tell you is that I was happy there. Although I missed my Mum, Tyler, Benicio and Emmy.

And I’d go back there. Please don’t hate me for it.

What have you found hardest about your life? (from Henry DeFerrars)

Hmmm – I try not to look backwards too much, so right now I feel pretty good. The moon machine is up and running OK and everything should be cool for the 21st/22nd December (you wouldn’t know about it, since the media seem to have it well under wraps!). Some of the physical stuff was hard at the time. I don’t think about it much now but being shot in the leg was very not-good. But if anything niggles at me, it’s this – Tyler. He’s the real hero, if you ask me. He stood by me when I needed him and what did it get him? He’s ended up back in the Sect of Huracan’s future. And even though I know that we need that alternate reality to exist so that our reality can be the way it is, I feel bad that my best mate had to suffer  – and still has to struggle in that world.

Why didn’t you go back in time to save your father? (from Andrew Lemerand)

I tried, man! I did. That was my whole plan, the main reason that I fixed the Bracelet of Itzamna. Look how that turned out – I found my dad, but he still ended up being transported to the slopes of Mount Orizaba. After that, honestly, I was too sh*t scared to try again. I kept thinking – and I still do – what else could go wrong? You think things can’t be worse but they CAN! Jeez. If I’ve learned anything with the time-travelling it is that.

If the Hurucan do take over the world what will you do and how? (from Calum Webb)

You’re right – it’s not a sure thing that the Sect still won’t find a way to bring about some kind of doomsday! I’m just hoping that we’ve done everything we can to stop the superwave. That would just have made it so much easier for the Sect. But they might not give up. One thing we’ve really got going for us is that we know the formula for hypnoticin – the Sect’s mind-control drug that only they can use. So we’re already working on a drug to block that. If the Sect tried to take over, we’d make that drug available freely, worldwide. If they found some way round that…I dunno. I guess I’d stay in Ek Naab and do what I could from here. But don’t worry. The Sect of Huracan are my sworn enemies. While I’m alive I’ll fight them. 🙂

What if forecast is correct? What can we do to ourselves each if it really happened? Whether there is any relevance to the present situation? (from Amelia Nurkasih)

The thing forecast by the Mayans is going to be OK. It’s all under control now – finally! But if something like that really happened . . . wow. I think your only bet would be if you were one of those ‘doomsday preppers’. Have you heard about those types? Kind of like my dad (Andres Garcia) in the alternate future. He was fully prepped out. had his ‘bug-out’ plan all ready and when the time came, he was off up to the hills with the family (to the Lake District) where he’d been prepping a house with food and stuff that could last them years. (Here’s a website about a TV documentary about Doomsday Preppers.)

Do you sometimes wish you could go back to that Capoeira night, before you went home? (from Jens Hildebrand)
also
Josh, do you want your old life back without knowing Ixchel, Ek Naab, Montoyo or you are glad what you have and don´t want to change it (from Viktória Malotová)

Hey thanks, Jens and Viktoria, that’s almost the same question. Short answer – no. I’ve been through all that.  You might say – well if you could go back, then Camila would still be alive. Well maybe. Or maybe she’d have tried to go after the Ix Codex without me, and been killed anyway? I can’t let myself think that way. It’s like what other-Tyler told me – you can’t stay anywhere for ever. You have to keep moving forward. Might seem like a weird thing for a time-traveller to say, since I can kind of go back. But I can’t go back anywhere inside myself, if you get me.

Do you wish you could’ve done something different? Something to save your sister or your dad? (from Kaelyn Cook)

I wish I’d done lots of things different! I wish I’d spent more time with people that I never saw again. Like my two sisters, Camila and Sofia. I wish I’d hung out more with my dad. It’s weird, now that I actually like all that jazz music, after listening to his iPod, I keep thinking of stuff I’d say to him about Miles Davis and Stan Getz and all those guys. I have this little fantasy where we hook up in some alternate reality, in the past, and go to the Montreal Jazz festival together. (maybe this should have been part of my answer to Tobias…?)
But as for saving them – Kaelyn – no. It’s been hard to accept that there are things I can’t change. It’s like that Butterfly Effect film, have you seen it? I watch it a lot, it all feels verrry familiar now. In that film, he keeps trying, over and over, to go back to a time where things can be perfect. Looking for his own zero moment to correct. You can NOT imagine the temptation to do that.

Maybe I’m starting to get religion again, but I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a force, call it the Universe, or Fate, call it God, that controls certain aspects of our lives. And that some events are like fixed points that can’t be changed, because the  Universe/Fate/God will always arrange things so that one way or another, they happen. I’ve stopped believing in a proper multiverse, in which every possibility is played out. I think, instead, that the different realities are in some kind of relationship with each other. Maybe the Erinsi time-jump device actually created them? I keep wondering about that thing. Why did the Erinsi make it? How? Was it from knowledge they gained from the dying universe, the one that transmitted it’s ‘world memory’ through a black hole? And what is the Oracle that Bosch-I-mean-Itzamna mentioned?

It’s strange to think that Arcadio and Bosch are both still out there, time-travelling. It’s one of the reasons I don’t want to get into it again. Too many cooks spoil the cookies, as my mum says.

 Hey Josh, since you knew that the alternate you loved Emily, do you sometimes wish you could see how things could have turned out with her instead of Ixchel? (from Jeremy Mallia)

Dude…have you got a girlfriend?! Ixchel would NOT like it if I answered that any way except NO!!!

(actually I just asked if I could answer and she said sure why not. Her face was kind of a bit ironic when she said it but I’m going to take girl at her word, K?)

OK. The truth is that – I kissed Emmy a few times, back in Yr 7. In fact – she’s the first girl I kissed. It was at school, in one of the music practice rooms, where we were supposed to be ‘putting a band together’. But it never got beyond a smooch session. I just didn’t know what to do after the kissing bit. I mean, I didn’t know what to say. So it was like, we kissed and then I was just like, you wanna practice doing G-D-A-E a few more times so we can learn this song? and she was just like, OK and putting her gum back in her mouth. And then we went home with our mates and kind of just went ‘see ya’ to each other in front of them. And then she had this mysterious strop at me, honest to God I don’t even know why? And then we basically didn’t speak until Year 9, when we were in the same class for physics and did a coursework project together. Last I heard – swear to GOD – is that Emmy likes girls now. So when I heard that other-Josh and Emmy got it together in a serious way I was like – whoa. Strange days, right?

Thank you Josh Garcia for your answers! Be sure to let us know what you’re up to on 22nd December 2012…

N.B. Beady-eyed fans of a certain TV show will have spotted the reference to a certain TV show’s episode in the title. A free signed book if you can tell me what the reference is, with a full explanation about why it is relevant!

Categories
self-publishing the descendant

The self-publishing experiment #8: Results – The Amazon Kindle free promotion catapult

As promised, about six weeks post launch of THE DESCENDANT here are some early results.

If you remember from my last post THE SELF-PUBLISHING EXPERIMENT PART 7: PUBLICITY AND MARKETING, we (i.e. Darkwater Books) plan to deploy a number of strategies. Not all have been implemented yet.

I’ll cut to the chase. The reboot of the pre-existing Alternate Reality Game brought about 50 ‘likes’ to The Descendant facebook page, where you can read about the competition to win a Kindle Touch. Based on views at Where is Gabi Beltran? and its Youtube channel, I can see that about a hundred people were following the story, at some stage.

This enhanced content around THE DESCENDANT certainly increased the extent of THE DESCENDANT‘s Internet footprint. That is, when you type ‘the descendant’ into a search engine, results that are relevant to this book appear in the top ten results. Not easy to maintain given that in 2011 a major Hollywood movie (‘The Descendants’) and a major Malaysian, Chinese language TV drama (The Descendant, 2012) of the same title are competing for space in those results.

A big Internet footprint won’t sell books – directly. It may, however, contribute to credibility.

In summary, all these promotional activities, including me sending out emails to my mailing list, resulted in sales of around fifty ebooks/books in about four weeks.

Not too spectacular. But then, I doubt any single Joshua Files book sold much more via Amazon, during the same period. Certainly THE DESCENDANT often ranked at a higher level than any of The Joshua Files Kindle books.

I was aware, by then, that discoverability is the be-all and end-all of sales at Amazon. Other self-published authors had been reporting via their blogs that advertising and blogging, Tweeting and posting in Kindle forums etc, was having minimal effect. The only marketing tool what appeared to have any effect was the Kindle free promotion, available to authors who had enrolled in the KDP Select program.

We geared up for a two-day promotion by scheduling the following:

  1. Pre-notifying sites like Pixel of Ink. If you fancy paying for an advert on Kindle Nation Daily, there is that too. (We didn’t)
  2. Prepare an email for any mailing list
  3. Schedule regular tweets. However, be aware that if your project is heavily retweeted, as THE DESCENDANT was (for which many thanks, guys!!!), some people are going to see a lot of tweets about your freebie. It may tip into spam… On the other hand, advertising gurus tell us that in these times of information overload, we need to see something twenty-odd times for it to register. One person’s spam may be another person’s vague awareness of your books’ existence.
  4. Ask any influential contacts to retweet your freebie. I’m massively grateful to Chicklish and SFSignal for their power tweetage of THE DESCENDANT freebie. Once those guys were on board, the book really began to shoot up the charts.
  5. Line up some kind of online news/promotion for when the free-promotion ends. I’d arranged with YA author Luisa Plaja,one of the creators  of the popular Chicklish blog, to have an interview about THE DESCENDANT appear on Chicklish on the Monday after the free weekend. I’d also written a blog post for the Demention Blog, about my favourite post-apocalypse novel. That’s more of a Joshua Files tie-in, but still – on Amazon, all my books are linked.

The free weekend went pretty well! By the last six hours THE DESCENDANT on Amazon UK had shot to #1 on the Free Kindle action & adventure chart, #2 in the thriller chart and at its peak reached #14 in the overall Free Kindle chart.

Which means that for that time, and for all the time it was in the top ten (which was all of the 2nd day), THE DESCENDANT  became visible to anyone browsing the top 10 of Action & Adventure and Thrillers.

Amazon UK Action Adventure chart June 18 2012

Things didn’t go as well on Amazon US, where it only reached #633 in the overall free chart and #17 in Action & Adventure.

The numbers:
Amazon US – 580 free downloads
Amazon UK – 2118 free downloads

What’s the point of giving your book away to the only people who might have bought it? Seems counter intuitive, right?

However, my approach is that your email and Twitter contacts deserve a little something for bothering to keep in touch with an author. If they manage to grab a book they’d like to read while it is free, more power to ’em.

Meanwhile, the Amazon free Kindle promotion acts like a catapult. It shot THE DESCENDANT  from a rank of #70,000 overall to #14 (in the Free chart, but that’s a lot of visibility).

Once the promotion ends, Amazon takes around an hour to calculate its new position in the Paid Kindle chart. Amazon watchers are guessing that recent algorithms count free downloads as 1/10 the ranking value of paid downloads.

(A few months ago the Amazon free Kindle catapult had a more pronounced effect, because the free books were ranked 1:1, but those days are gone. Easy living lasts for so little nowadays…)

THE DESCENDANT hits #191 on Amazon UK

On the Monday after the promotion, THE DESCENDANT  ranked at #3266 in the paid chart. However! Then the real sales catapult began! Now priced at 99p, the rank rose throughout the week. By Friday it had peaked at an overall rank of #191.

Just to stress how unusual that is for me, I have NEVER seen any Joshua Files book at a higher rank than 450 in the Amazon UK chart.

From #191 the book has begun a dignified slide down the chart. At the time of writing it is now #1307. The paperback version is also selling, albeit in very modest figures.

As of now, THE DESCENDANT is my best-selling book on Amazon. Selling even better than APOCALYPSE MOON – which only came out in April.

THE DESCENDANT sold 400 copies (about 380 ebooks, 20 paperbacks) in a single week. Not earth-shattering but not nothing either, and lot more than Amazon sales of The Joshua Files during the same period.

The question is – how to sustain that? This will be the next challenge.

MG Harris books ranked on Amazon UK in bestselling order

 

Categories
ARG self-publishing the descendant

The self-publishing experiment part 7: Publicity and marketing

You really have to take your hat off to some of the work done by successfully self-published authors, who’ve managed to sell bazillions (well, tens of thousands or more) of ebooks. For a comprehensive list of what’s possible, take a look at Jenny Blake’s spreadsheet for the self-published.

It’s important to remember here that you aren’t a traditional publisher, so you shouldn’t waste energy trying to behave like one. Trade (traditional) publishers mainly operate via business-to-business (B2B) marketing. That is, they both sell/market to the trade.

They also engage in a small amount of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing.

The trade (i.e. bookshops) relies on the fact that the publisher will be doing some or all of the work to shift a book; in fact this is an important factor in how heavily a book will be purchased and how prominently a book will be displayed by a bookstore. Big advertising campaign? Hello, truckload of books to display front of house, face out and discount promotion! No consumer marketing at all? We’ll take one copy, please. Spine-out only.

Hence all the fuss you see about new books in The Bookseller, Publishers Weekly and their ilk, is aimed at the trade.

As a self-published author, you don’t need to worry about any of that. You need to go directly to the consumer – your reader.

Indeed, in the digital world it is being suggested that traditional publishers too need to shift to a mainly B2C model.

Instead of telling you what you can do (I refer, again, to the excellent spreadsheet of book marketing), I’m just going to tell you what I’m doing.

    • Publicity – I’ll be emailing my list of Joshua Files readers with information about the new book – a techno-thriller aimed at older readers and set in the fictional world of THE JOSHUA FILES. (click on the logo above if you’d like to sign up!)

  • Press release – apparently Monday morning 7.30-8am is the best time to do a press release. That’s when journos are looking for material. Be sure that your book is listed as IN STOCK on Amazon, etc. Worst times are Thursday afternoon and Friday. Here’s the press release we wrote: Best-selling author self-publishes new technothriller with competition to win a Kindle Touch
    Optimize for SEO and submit to free press release services such as PRLog, 1888PressRelease and freepressrelease.com. Also to your own press contacts if you have them.
  • Advertising – there’s a tiny budget to try this out, either on Goodreads or a popular book blog via Blogads.
  • Giveaways – I’ll probably try this via Goodreads.
  • Starshipsofa.com – this lovely sci-fi podcast like to feature 10min excerpts of authors reading from the opening of their novel. So naturally I volunteered to read from THE DESCENDANT!
  • Review copies – I’ve lined up a small group of readers in the book trade and media to read the book. Hopefully some of them will like it and post a happy review!
  • This series of blog posts about my self-publishing experiment. Well, for now, self-publishing is still a novelty for authors who’ve been successfully published by the trade. It’s vaguely newsworthy. (Enough to get GP Taylor an article in the Daily Mail when he announced his first self-published book.)
  • Price promotion – ebook. The RRP of the ebook will be £1.99. (That’s right – bargain!). During all promotions though, it will be 99p. (Bigger bargain!)

An important factor in marketing is to track the effect of any action. It’s not always easy. One way is to separate the actions and measure sales during each activity. I’ll probably do the advertising at a different time to the ARG. Everything else is scheduled to happen during the first month of the book’s launch.

I’ll report back in about a month!

Meanwhile, next: Things you didn’t ought to do or Easy mistakes in self-publishing – a snagging list.

Categories
self-publishing the descendant

The self-publishing experiment part 3: Designing the experiment

Good old ALCS. Thanks for the bootstrap finance!

Question: How much work does it take to write a self-published book?
Answer: about as much as for a traditionally published books

The first part of any experiment, and in many ways the most enjoyable part, is the experimental design.

I love to design experiments. It’s the beautiful phase, where everything is theoretical, and in your head, everything works. That’s some time before you spill radioactive isotopes in the water bath and incur the wrath of the entire lab.

Even executing the experiment isn’t too bad. It’s the eventual failure of most of them that makes science so hard. Starting out, you know that the experiment will almost certainly fail; either at the pathetic stage of not actually working, because you need better reagents, or at the heart-breaking stage where it worked, but the answer was NO.

No, that is not how I, Nature work. Try again. Or give up. Who cares, puny scientist? For lo, I am Nature.

Remember that – the answer is very often NO. If you can fully accept this setting out and still work hard, stay positive and concentrate on all the details, then you have much of what it takes to be a scientist.

The experimental question is this:

Can a modestly successful, internationally-published author (but not a ‘household name’), produce a quality product that will engage existing and new readers and make the author more money than if the manuscript had been sold for a modest advance?

(N.B. It’s important to stress that whatever the results of the experiment, certain extrapolations will always be invalid. Failure won’t mean that all self-published authors will fail. Success won’t mean the end of traditional publishing. Success/failure can’t even be successfully applied to MY next project. Once in a while an author has a runaway success. More frequently we provide a regular drip of content, slowly building an audience. I’m guessing that I’ll be in the latter category. This isn’t pessimism, just an acknowledgement of the balance of probabilities.)

Let’s say that I might have been able to get £5k for this manuscript. (Given that THE DESCENDANT is an adult novel set in the world of a YA book series, a sale would have been impossible via my own publisher, since Scholastic only publish children’s books, but let’s just use £5k as a representative advance).

My ALCS & PLR fund is about £2,000 this year. I’m a strong believer in bootstrap finance for start-ups, so this means I can use this as surplus profit from The Joshua Files to be invested in my imprint.

£2,000 is the total cash budget. So the book needs to make £7,000 for me to break-even including an opportunity cost*. (but only £2K to recoup the cash.)

Designing this self-publishing experiment, I asked myself a few questions:

  1. Which formats should I produce? ebook only? Enrol in Kindle Select? Make a print version too? POD or short-run offset print?
  2. Availability of any print edition – make available for sale in the UK and US? Or just one of the two?
  3. What kind of revenue model are we looking at? How many copies need to sell at what price to recoup the cash investment?
  4. Marketing – how much to spend and how?

The one thing I never had to consider was this – would I hire an editor.

OF COURSE. No question. Not only that but I’d substantially rewrite the original manuscript, which was the first thing I’d written since my days of Blake’s 7 fan fiction. The manuscript couldn’t be structurally edited too severely, because the Joshua Files mythology and the details of the Alternate Reality Game rest on many elements in THE DESCENDANT.

But edited as much as the manuscript could take? Hell, yeah! The first thing I did was to spend six weeks rewriting the 2005-version of the script.

My accomplice in this was, I’m delighted to say,  the experienced senior children’s book editor, Polly Nolan. Polly and I worked together on ZERO MOMENT and DARK PARALLEL while Polly was Editorial Director of Fiction at Scholastic Children’s Books, UK. When I told Polly my plan to publish THE DESCENDANT, she was incredibly supportive and agreed to take the project on. I couldn’t quite afford the three rounds of editing I’d had with all the Joshua Files books, but I knew Polly well enough to know that if the manuscript isn’t too structurally flawed, she can do most of the job in one round.

Imagine my relief when Polly declared that the manuscript ‘didn’t need too much work, structurally’. (Another nice comment was “I’m enjoying very much.  I can tell it’s one of your early books, but that doesn’t mar my enjoyment of it.” See how lovely it can be to have an editor?)

I had to do my own proof-read. Not ideal, but here’s a tip – use a Kindle and make the font really large. Mistooks juts lep out.

All in all, the actual creation of a manuscript that I felt able to publish took the following: 9 weeks (first draft – intense writing whilst recovering from a broken leg) + 6 weeks rewrite + 3 weeks editing + 1 week typesetting (Amazon help a good deal with hand-holding an author through this). Plus Polly’s fee.

Total time of mine? 19 weeks. ICE SHOCK took less (about 13 weeks) and APOCALYPSE MOON  took more (about 21 weeks).

THE DESCENDANT, at approx 90,000 words, therefore represents a similar authorial effort from me as one of my Joshua Files books.

Next: Design and Decisions: In which I ponder formats (print? ebook? US/UK?)

*:
For pesky business pedants; yes I admit that the opportunity cost is arguably higher. I could have used that time to write another bestseller, or even this book, with a traditional publisher, might have sold more. But creating ‘entertainment products’ is a very unsure thing. No-one knows what will be a hit or not. Nicholas Nassim Taleb correctly identified best-sellers as ‘black swan’ events.

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ARG self-publishing the descendant

The Self-Publishing Experiment part 1

Gareth Stranks's early design drafts for THE DESCENDANT

It seems that for the past six months, all anyone in publishing is talking about is ‘self’ or self-owned-‘indie’ publishing. A few successfully self-published authors are being signed up by traditional publishers. The self-published best-seller Joe Konrath writes a damning indictment of the industry: Do Legacy Publishers Treat Authors Badly? JK Rowling sets up a publishing venture (Pottermore) to promote and sell digital versions of Harry Potter (clever, clever agent for holding on to those rights!). Household-names like Jackie Collins and GP Taylor are self-publishing.

Mega-successful children’s author and screenwriter, Anthony Horowitz, wonders aloud “Do we still need publishers?” and delivers a paean to the tradition of publishing, which also manages to be a stinging rebuke. His comments have some agents and authors on the twittersphere tut-tutting and using the word ‘arrogance’, whilst others quietly retweet and admire the frankness and cojones of an author who has both benefited from having a traditional publisher whilst also making them many times the money he ever earned. If what Anthony Horowitz says is true, then only someone very successful could dare to say it.

Self-publishers document their process and sell how-to books on Kindle. Hundreds of thousands of blog words are devoted to asking theoretical questions: how might the new world of publishing look? Will there be any pie left over after Amazon take their piece?

About fifty per cent of the authors I’ve chatted to in the past few months are thinking of dipping a toe into the self-published waters. Why? Partly it’s down to falling advances and marketing budgets. This means that some manuscripts are being bought for less than an author can afford to write for and will be lightly-marketed, so may be unlikely to sell beyond the advance.

To some, that might give the perception that authors may as well invest their own cash into publishing the manuscript and reap all the potential profits.

Partly too, there is the attraction of the new.

Whoever called e-book publishing a ‘bubble’ is right in one sense; it’s something that a LOT of people are going to want to try. If/when the majority discover that it’s difficult, time-consuming, and elicits too little money; that’s when the bubble might burst.

Most traditionally-published authors I know will probably not try the exercise whilst we’re still in the experimental, bubble-type phase. It’s risky, there’s a cash cost and a substantial opportunity cost to doing the job properly; i.e. treating the manuscript exactly as you might a traditionally published book.

Like most, I would not have thought of trying anything in this phase of the publishing revolution.

But it happens that The Joshua Files is coming to a final chapter, in the UK at least. The books have earned  me some unexpected foreign rights royalties and income from Public Lending Rights and Authors Licensing and Copyright Service, which could be spent on bootstrap investment for a new imprint, owned by my husband and I.

Like many authors who do a huge amount of their own marketing and publicity, I’m extremely curious to know if I can marshal the necessary skills and expertise to execute the whole project. Mr. Harris and I have also started and run a successful technology business (The Oxford Knowledge Company).

Most of all though – I have a spare Joshua Files-related manuscript, first written in 2005 for an adult readership.

THE DESCENDANT has already formed part of the back-story of The Joshua Files. The novel was the basis for the 2009 Alternate Reality Game used to promote ICE SHOCK. It’s unlikely that any publisher the book would publish as fast as I’d like; i.e. roughly around the same time as APOCALYPSE MOON.

You can only dangle so much speculation and theorization in front of a scientist before they’ll rush to the lab to try the experiment.

And dammit – I’m a scientist!

So over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing the details of the experiment, just like a scientific paper. Materials & Methods, Results and Conclusions.

Next: Self-publishing and the barriers to entry, or Why publishers are good at publishing and you are not, and what you can do to narrow the gap.