Friday evening April 23rd, starting at 6PM Pacific time, I’ll be reading in Second Life from At The Queen’s Command again. On the 9th I read for four straight hours and got through the first twelve chapters. I’ll start with a synopsis of what’s happened up to this point, and then begin reading at Chapter Thirteen.

I’m doing this as a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. You pay, I read, and keep reading as long as folks are there to listen. On the 9th we had folks from all around the world and raised about $200.00 for the cause. That would be US dollars, not game dollars.

Second Life, as I’ve mentioned before, is free, graphically-based chat software which supports voice-chat. I’ve been using it for over two years now for readings, classes and just chatting with folks during my weekly Office Hours.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the software, and registered with Second Life, you can click this link to be teleported to where the auction will take place. That same link will bring you to where I have office hours. There you can ask questions about writing, and get my take on issues facing writers each Wednesday evening—including this evening, at 6 PM Pacific Time.

I noted above that Second Life is free. This is true, but it does have its own economy. You can purchase game dollars to pay for me to continue reading. My partner and I set a price of $10 an hour for the reading, and many folks were far more generous than that. (That’s $10 in the aggregate, not individually—I’m a good reader, but not that good.) Second Life has been very supportive of RFL. Last year we were part of the effort which raised over a quarter of a million dollars for cancer research. It was during RFL last year that I lost my very good friend Dave Arneson to cancer, bringing home both the tragedy of the illness, and the need to fund research.

At The Queen’s Command is my latest novel. It’s a fantasy set in a parallel world, during the American Colonial period—though names have been changed to protect the innocent and so I can do cool things in messing with history. For example, Tharyngia, which is the analog to France, had a revolution about a hundred years earlier in which an insane and superstitious king was overthrown by scientists and natural philosophers. As a result, the nation is ruled by the Laureates, whose scientific research methods are viewed suspiciously by others, and who have become very successful with magick because they treat it as a science.

Anyway, think Last of the Mohicans with flintlocks and dragons and magick and you’ve got the idea.

At The Queen’s Command is coming out from Night Shade Books in November, just in time for all your holiday gift-giving needs. But if you want to experience it now, just download Second Life and get a listen to what you’ll be able to read in November.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, tonight, 6 PM Pacific time, I’ll be doing a reading of my new story, Chance Corrigan and the Tick-tock King of the Nile in Second Life. Second Life, as I’ve mentioned before, is free, graphically-based chat software which supports voice-chat. I’ve been using it for over two years now for readings, classes and just chatting with folks during my weekly Office Hours.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the software, and registered with Second Life, you can click this link to be teleported to where the reading will take place.

The reading is a benefit for the American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life. We will be accepting donation in Second Life during the event. If you would like to contribute, but won’t be able to make the reading, you can visit my personal RFL page and donate there.

I look forward to seeing you at the reading. Should take about an hour and will be a lot of fun.

I mentioned last week that I had some pictures taken by Heather Hill, and right over there is the first of them. When I first started in the business, the only authors who needed pictures were the ones with big hardback books. Now everyone seems to want them. I guess it’s a mark of how much more visual our society has become—which some would see as code-wording for “less literate.” I really don’t think that’s the case, it’s just a shifting of taste and as long as I have a brilliant photographer making me look sharp, I’m good with it.

On Thursday evening, at 6 PM Pacific time, I’ll be doing a reading of my new story, Chance Corrigan and the Tick-tock King of the Nile in Second Life. Second Life, as I’ve mentioned before, is free, graphically-based chat software which supports voice-chat. I’ve been using it for over two years now for readings, classes and just chatting with folks during my weekly Office Hours.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the software, and registered with Second Life, you can click this link to be teleported to where the reading will take place. That same link will bring you to where I have office hours. There you can ask questions about writing, and get my take on issues facing writers each Wednesday evening. (Though not this week, since it’s St. Patrick’s Day, and I’ll be out listening to music.)

I noted above that Second Life is free. This is true, but it does have its own economy. You can purchase game dollars to spend on all sorts of stuff. I mention this because the reading on Thursday is part of our effort to raise money in conjunction with the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. Second Life has been very supportive of RFL. Last year we were part of the effort which raised over a quarter of a million dollars for cancer research. It was during RFL last year that I lost my very good friend Dave Arneson to cancer, bringing home both the tragedy of the illness, and the need to fund research.

Last Saturday I did one reading as part of the Bookstacks organization’s Horrorfest. Instead of taking tips, I put out an RFL kiosk for donations. During the reading we raised about 3,000 game dollars, which boils down to about $12 US—25 game dollars is about a dime. As with that reading, the reading on Thursday will be to raise money for cancer research.

And to forestall questions in the comments section, no, I won’t be recording the reading to an MP3 file. The story contract actually prohibits that for a year after the story is published. The only way you’ll hear it is to come to the reading.

During the RFL season, I’ll also be doing two other things:

Classes: By request I will be offering the same classes I do at Origins, Gencon and DragonCon as fundraisers for RFL. The classes will cost 2,000 game dollars (or $8 US, which is what you’d pay at the convention). First one up will be my 21 Days to a Novel class on April 17, at 3 PM Pacific time. It will run two hours.

Readings from At The Queen’s Command: I’m really excited about this prospect. I will be reading from my new novel, At the Queen’s Command, on a series of Friday evenings. The first is April 9, the second is April 23. And here’s the deal. I will stay and read as long as folks want to stay and donate. You’ll get about four chapters an hour. There’s 71 chapters in the book, and RFL runs through early July. In about 25 hours I figure we can get through the entire thing, all 192,000 words.

For RFL we’ll have a lot more stuff going on in Second Life, including auctions for things that you can use in the game or have fun with in your every day life, like autographed books and the chance to enjoy literary immortality as a character in a story. Not only is it for a good cause, but it’s also great fun.

The reading will be conducted via Second Life. Second Life is a graphics based chat software suite that includes VOIP. I use it for my weekly chats and it works really well. The software and registration is free, so you can download them and click on this link to take you to the site of the reading.

If you show up early we can make sure you’re set up to hear sound.

I’ve been doing the edits on this novel, and I’m really excited about it. I’m also looking forward to sharing the beginning with all of you.

In an article in Publisher’s Weekly on 19 October—which presages a year’s worth of monthly articles—Cory Doctorow announced that he was going to engage in an “experiment.” He noted that “Free e-books work for me,” and that “People want proof that this works.” To accomplish this proof, Cory lays out an experiment in great detail, going to great lengths to present the reader with a reasoned and scientific explanation of how he will prove the claim that “free e-books work.”

Though it is a tedious undertaking, a careful examination of his methodology is critical to understanding what is really going on here. Cory Doctorow is using the language of science to legitimize a marketing scheme and making it appear as if it, or the data generated by it, has validity in the real world and significant impact on the future of publishing. As you will see below, nothing he offers has any bearing upon his thesis, methods of reportage are wholly unreliable, and his “experiment” is simply a promotional ploy worthy of P. T. Barnum and the legions of snake-oil salesmen who have gone before him.

The concession to “Science”

To establish the legitimacy of his experiment, he offers his book Overclocked (2007 Thunder’s Mouth) as his control—since all good scientific experiments have controls. He points out that the book had no publisher support, but was reprinted several times and “continues to do well.” He still gets royalty checks from it. He will use its numbers to establish the baseline against which the success of his experimental book, With a Little Help, attains—though he never actually gives us any of those numbers.

Cory’s methodology for the experiment

Cory says, just like doctors who vow to “do no harm,” he’s “taken an oath to lose no money” in this experiment. Cash in will be cash out, and he’ll keep his expenses as low as possible. That’s actually a great business plan, and the world economy would be much better off if everyone took his oath of financial responsibility.

He runs down the list of things he will be doing in his experiment, aptly pointing out that they will cost little or nothing to produce and that he will be carrying no significant inventory. His list includes:

E-books: multiple formats, distributed at the cost of bandwidth (unspecified), delivered free

Audiobooks: multiple formats, distributed at the cost of bandwidth (unspecified), created (read and engineered) by volunteers (cost unspecified), distributed free

Donations: accepted in recompense for the free work

Print-on-Demand trade paperbacks: Drop-shipped from Lulu.com, requiring no inventory. Costs: Document preparation (free, his mom will be doing the editing); production of covers by a variety of artists (compensation unspecified) and the option of custom covers for short runs, estimated set-up charge being $300.

Premium Hardcover edition: $250, limited run of 250, prepped in lots of 20 for roughly $65 US per book. Cost of each run is $1300, and if the order is not placed until there are 6 pre-orders in hand, the run is immediately profitable. The cost of the book includes $5 per for custom flashdrives, price estimate based on a net search for the unit he specifies in lots of 50.

Commissioned Story: A millionaire friend commissioned a brand new story for $10,000.

Advertisements: to be included in the POD and free e-books, price unspecified

Donation of Books: He maintains a list of places that would like a copy of the book (libraries, hospitals) and allows fans to purchase copies for those locations. His agent and Lulu are going to handle fulfillment, revenue neutral.

PW Income: PW paid $900 for the initial article, and is paying $400 for the monthly updates

Reporting of results

Cory says that each month he will compile data and let us know how his experiment is going. At the end of twelve months, we’ll know whether or not his experiment is a success.

All in all, a very ambitious program.

What’s wrong with this experiment?

In a word, his “experiment” is rubbish.

Unreliable data

The first and most important point that can be made about this experiment is the most fundamental. All of Cory Doctorow’s claims about his successes are self-generated and unaudited. We have Cory’s word alone that he’s doing well and has had wonderful success with giving away e-books. But he doesn’t supply numbers to back up these claims. As noted above, he didn’t even supply numbers on his “control” (see below) to lay out his baseline.

If Cory were as successful as he claims, his books would consistently appear on the bestseller lists. Industry news would be full of rumors of six and seven figure advances paid for his books. They aren’t. Cory himself, in laying out his experiment, notes that people want “proof” he’s not “deluded or a con artist,” but he provides no evidence to indicate that he’s not one or both.

In terms of the experiment, without clear and verified numbers, any results are meaningless.

Poorly defined thesis

Second, nothing in Cory’s program for With a Little Help supports, tests or proves his thesis: that giving away free e-books works. Giving away free e-books works at what exactly? Does it increase sales? Does it increase notoriety? Does it increase visibility or website traffic? What are we measuring, and how are we going to verify the numbers? Cory gives us no goal, no way to measure success or failure—beyond, apparently, not going broke.

The mythical “control”

Cory’s “control” is an illusion and is undercut in his very description of his control. In the article he says that all of his story collections have been released “for free” the day they were published. Since this is true of Overclocked, there is simply no way it can serve as a control to test the effects of free e-books. It had free e-book distribution. The only control to test free e-book distribution would be a book that did not have it.

Valid metrics

Third, and very importantly, if we are going to test the thesis that free distribution of e-books has an effect on sales of print books, we simply need three sets of numbers: e-books released, print books sold, and the ratio comparing the two. That’s it. We compare that to sales of similar books that didn’t have free e-book distribution and we can determine if and how much of an impact free content distribution has on print books.

If we wish to go further, we survey all those who downloaded the free e-book after three months and ask three questions: Did you read the free e-book? Did you purchase a physical copy of the book? Did receiving the free e-book prompt you to purchase the physical copy? Get those results and tally them against the aforementioned set of numbers and measure what effect free e-book distribution actually has on physical book sales.

What is Cory testing?

Fourth, the way Cory has set his experiment up is to keep score with dollars. He’s going to compare “earnings” between the previous book and this one. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being profitable. Being profitable equals success for any business venture.

Cory’s starting with $10,900 in the bank and has another $4,800 coming from Publisher’s Weekly. He’ll be out of pocket $1,300 for the first run of the limited hardback, and profitable after the sale of six books. Assuming that donations amount to enough to cover his bandwidth, that advertisements bring in any income, and that his POD books sell any copies at all, the wonder will not be if he profits, but if he actually loses any money.

But Cory is managing to keep his costs artificially low. He’s not reporting what he’ll be charged for artwork, bandwidth, website design and support. Those are legitimate costs for his experiment, and he can probably piggy-back the web expenses on Boing Boing, so they don’t appear to be an expense. For anyone else, however, they would be.

Cory’s enlisted a whole bunch of friends to do stuff for him, which is great, but is volunteer labor a sustainable business model? Voice talent of the caliber he’s using on his project can cost upwards of $2,000 a day, not including studio rental. Everyone else seems to be donating or discounting their services to him which, again, is wonderful, but results in unaccounted overhead which should be charged against the project.

What is Cory’s experiment?

Here’s what Cory’s real thesis is: Give any author $15,700 (Cory’s commission plus the PW fees) and a manuscript, and see what the return on that investment is after a year. Properly pumped in his business, utilizing the tools that Cory talks about (and plenty other new media tools he’s ignoring) my guess would be that the return on investment in a year should be at least 50%. In fact, doing just that sort of experiment is exactly the way science would test his claims. (And if someone wants to put the money up, I’ve got a manuscript.)

And, of course, in this experiment, the results would be independently accounted, audited and reported.

After that, we could then debate whether or not new media makes cottage-industry publishing a viable alternative to the modern publishing business model.

Trust, but verify

It might seem harsh to harp on the need for independent verification of numbers, but I do so for two reasons. First, in his “experiment” piece, Cory says that through podcast distribution he expects to reach “300,000 fans.” This number is unsourced and delusional.

I’ve been part of podcasting since before podcasting existed (having hosted audio files on my website in 2003 to promote my novel The Grand Crusade). I’ve won awards for my podcasting. I co-host Dragonpage Cover to Cover with Michael R. Mennenga, the founder and CEO of the Farpoint Media Network, and co-host of Slice of Scifi. Michael is one of the pioneers of podcasting and a leader in the science fiction end of podcasting. He considers 300,000 to be grossly overblown.

And even if Cory were talking about individual downloads, and not hits or page-views, that still doesn’t translate into individual listeners. Moreover, there’s no proof that a single audio file actually ever gets listened to. There is just no reporting mechanism—save for anecdotal reportage—to determine if anyone out there is listening.

In short, numbers Cory provides are fuzzy and unreliable, by a factor of at least two, and likely much more.

The second reason I’m a stickler for verification is this: in the last half-dozen years, as I’ve been working in podcasting and putting out digital media—being the first author to have books for sale in the Apple Appstore and having sold e-book material from my website since 2004—I have had people tell me that Cory Doctorow has been wildly successful. I’ve heard speakers at writers’ conferences tell beginners that Cory has used free e-book distribution to become a successful writer. And yet every single one of those individuals, when challenged to source their information, can only trace it back to what Cory has said about himself.

Cory is a fantastic self-promoter. I am in awe of his ability to talk Publisher’s Weekly into financing his “experiment” and anointing him as a guru of new media. But none of that means his claims are true. None of that means his claims are accurate. Repetition of those claims by legitimate sources means that countless people who cannot or will not use critical thinking skills to examine his claims will spend a lot of time and money on frustrating efforts that will get them nowhere. Worse, it will set them back financially and will rob them of time they could have used for improving their craft.

It is a shame that Publisher’s Weekly allowed itself to be hoodwinked. Sure, hire Cory because he’s a figure who promotes himself and, thereby, will promote you. That I get. But letting him frame a simple hustle as a defining and scientific experiment that will be used to judge the efficacy of new media as applied to the world of publication? Maybe in a land where Creationism is accepted as science, but not in the real world.

Cory’s experiment isn’t science.The only thing being tested here is our gullibility in believing this heaping serving of nonsense will prove anything at all.

TOMORROW: What Cory’s Doing Right!
MONDAY: What Cory isn’t doing, and should be.

This really is the culmination of two years of very hard work—Kat does the heavy lifting—in creating a place and atmosphere where readers and writers and podcasters and fans can all come together to share the things they love. Anyone who has been to a convention will immediately understand the vibe: it’s a fun community where folks can be a little bit outrageous, a great deal of entertaining, and where creativity and cleverness are highly lauded. Kat and I both realized that the ease of communication afforded by a program like Second Life means that a writer or artist can literally appear in everyone’s living room—performing, teaching, conversing. This level of interaction is one of the most powerful tools we have to reach out to others.

Our Grand Opening celebration, as I noted before, will last a week. We have contests, concerts, classes, readings and more scheduled for the entire week. (Saturday and Sunday are especially loaded.)

Getting into Second Life is easy, and doesn’t cost a cent. Set up an account, download the software, and then you can click here. That will take you to the heart of our new home, and you can join right in the festivities.

I look forward to seeing you all there.

My soccer game is late on Sunday, and I want to celebrate being the first author ever selling fiction for the iPhone/iPod Touch. So, what I’m going to do is another reading.

I’m going to be reading the story The Silver Knife. It’s one of the stories I have for sale in my store, in Second Life and for the iPhone/Ipod Touch. It was a story I’d wanted to write for roughly 13 years before I got around to doing it. Set in 1923 London it involves all sorts of weirdness, including Tsarist exiles, German Mystics, Mycroft Holmes and the insane politics of Europe between the wars. It’s one of my favorite stories, and I can’t wait to read it for you.

So, how can you come to this reading? I’ll be reading in Second Life, at 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific (which is also game time). I’ll be doing the reading in voice-chat, so you’ll need to enable that function and have a pair of headphones. The reading should take about an hour, including a question-and-answer session afterward.

The event is free and will be a bunch of fun.

Boilerplate below about Second Life. You can learn more at The Second Life web page. Check it out, download the software, and come on in and chat.

Second Life, for those who have never chatted online, is a graphical chat interface. It does not cost money to register or use. It operates on a “micro-economy” model, which is to say that you can uses it for free, but you can do a lot more if you just pay a little more here and there. I sell books in Second Life to cover the costs of promoting my work and having the space to hold seminars. Lots of other wildly creative people turn out really cool products to feed their habits, too.

If you hit the link above, download the software and head into Second Life, you can find me by searching for “Noble Charron.” That’s the name of my alter-ego in the world of SL. You can find the bookstore by searching on books, or ThirdLife, or clicking on this convenient link, which will take you directly there. When you arrive, please click on the sign at the front of Wordsmith Hall, so you can be added to the ThirdLife group, so I can get you announcements about things we will be doing.

I’m going to be reading the first two chapters from In Hero Years… I’m Dead. That is the novel I wrote last fall. It’s a noir take on a superhero world where the greatest generation has all retired, and the world has shifted in tone and focus. But, of course, not everyone agrees with how the world has progressed. Forces gather to make changes and our hero, who has been away from Capital City for twenty years, returns just in time to be caught right in the middle.

So, how can you come to this reading? I’ll be reading in Second Life, at 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific (which is also game time). I’ll be doing the reading in voice-chat, so you’ll need to enable that function and have a pair of headphones. The reading should take about an hour, including a question-and-answer session afterward.

The event is free and will be a bunch of fun. It’s your chance to get a first look/listen at my latest novel.

Boilerplate below about Second Life. You can learn more at The Second Life web page. Check it out, download the software, and come on in and chat.

Second Life, for those who have never chatted online, is a graphical chat interface. It does not cost money to register or use. It operates on a “micro-economy” model, which is to say that you can uses it for free, but you can do a lot more if you just pay a little more here and there. I sell books in Second Life to cover the costs of promoting my work and having the space to hold seminars. Lots of other wildly creative people turn out really cool products to feed their habits, too.

If you hit the link above, download the software and head into Second Life, you can find me by searching for “Noble Charron.” That’s the name of my alter-ego in the world of SL. You can find the bookstore by searching on books, or ThirdLife, or clicking on this convenient link, which will take you directly there. When you arrive, please click on the sign at the front of Wordsmith Hall, so you can be added to the ThirdLife group, so I can get you announcements about things we will be doing.