 So, I want to tell you where this book came from. I have come to think of books, maybe all books, but certainly my book here as Matroshka dolls. You know those Russian nesting dolls, like the big doll on the outside and smaller, smaller, smaller, all down to the teeny, tiny little sort of lima bean of a doll on the inside. And each of those layers is some stage in its development. I think for some books they're kind of more smushed together for others, and for mine they're actually quite distinct. You can really pick out those individual layers. You can open up the dolls and inspect each one in turn. This novel, and there's no exaggeration at all here. I mean, this is just the honest truth. You can trace it back almost sort of in a mathematical way. This novel began with a single tweet, and it wasn't even my own tweet. I stole it from someone else. I was scrolling through the tweets on my phone as one does, sort of, you know, ignoring the world around me, and a friend of mine who was at that time a student in the U.K., so several hours ahead, it was nighttime there, she had just tweeted. And her tweet said the following, just misread a sign for a 24-hour book drop as 24-hour book shop. My disappointment is beyond words, which I thought was pretty funny. It made me smile. It made me think for a moment there on Clement Street about 24-hour bookstores or the lack thereof. Some of you may know Green Apple Books is there, and they're open till 10, which feels really late for a bookstore and for a San Francisco bookstore, but still it's just 10 p.m. And I was close to Green Apple, and so I just, you know, wandered a block, sort of thinking about a 24-hour book shop and, you know, what if it really had been one of those, and what would she have seen inside? And I wish I could tell you. I should probably change my story. From now on, I'm just going to lie and make it a better story and say that the entire, this is the last honest rendition of this origin story, because I wish I could say that, like, the whole story just leapt fully-formed into my mind at that instant. But of course, that's not the case. That never actually happens. Instead, I made a very good decision in retrospect. I wrote it down. If there are any other writers in the room, or maybe you know writers, you know that a writer is never without her notebook, or at least, you know, pen and the back of her seat, you're always capturing the names of streets that you pass, or little scraps of conversation you over here in a cafe, or just weird little things that strike you as you're walking down the street. And so I wrote it down. I copied down the text of that tweet. And then probably forgot about it for many months. So that's the seed. That's the tiniest Matryoshka doll. The next one is probably a little bit more interesting. I decided that I was going to start writing these short stories. Again, I should just establish that I was an aspiring fiction writer, which didn't actually mean that I wrote any fiction. It meant that I thought about it a lot, and I talked about it a lot, and I read a lot of fiction, and I sort of haunted the shelves at Green Apple and sort of, you know, coveted the placement of the new paperbacks. I was like, I could write one of those. But the truth is that I couldn't. I didn't have the muscles for it. I recognized this at the time, and so I was in a program of self-improvement. I was going to cross train and build those writing muscles back up. And for me what that meant was short stories. I was going to write a series of very short stories. It's a fiction that I could finish in a long weekend. You know, I could kind of tear through a draft and have my momentum carry me to the end, and hopefully that would become something interesting. You know, I wanted to feel like I could finish something. So one of the very first stories that I sat down and wrote in my little apartment there, just off Clement Street, well, I should start at the beginning. I sat down, didn't know what I wanted to write about. All I knew is I wanted to write a short story. I opened up my notes, you know, a file on my computer into which I transcribed all those things I collected, and they're floating near the top at the time was this notion of a 24-hour bookshop. And there I will admit something did happen, some sort of alchemy. It just seemed to me obvious that something interesting would happen in a 24-hour bookstore, and obviously such a 24-hour bookstore would be located in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. And obviously a young narrator with a voice somewhat like my own would stumble in and decide to get a job work in the night shift and, of course, discover that it's much more mysterious than it at first appears. And all that kind of came tumbling out in this first draft that I completed in the course of a long weekend. I mean, I really kind of just banged it out. I'm actually curious, have any of you read that short story? Have you found it online, or maybe you read it years ago? No. So it is available. It sort of revs up in the same way. It's like, ooh, San Francisco, and there's a mysterious bookstore, and our hero gets a job and cracks the code. The end, you know, it's just very abrupt. It's not a very long story. The important thing, though, is that I finished it, right? This was one of the very first stories I had actually finished and felt proud of, proud enough to share with other people and get feedback on. I had a sort of a writing group, some other aspiring fiction writers that I worked with at the time. We were in the habit of sharing drafts of one another. And so I did, and they gave me some great notes. I did not send it to a publisher or an agent or any of the things that I presume people have done with short stories for the last 50 years or 100 years. Instead, I did what seemed entirely natural to me. I put it on the internet. I posted it on my own website. And I put it up for sale in that Amazon Kindle store, which was then still pretty new and pretty unfamiliar. It's become, I think, a little more familiar now. It's kind of part of the reading landscape. Back in 2009, people had Kindles, but not as many. And it was a new thing that you could essentially self publish your own work. And it could be anything you wanted in the Kindle store. All you had to do was design a little cover and give it a title and set a price. So I set my price, which was $0.99. And I put this short story up for sale. So that's the next little shell in this matryoshka doll. And it goes without saying that I did not make my fortune that year selling copies of this short story for $1 each. But I did find some readers. And it's really important to say people who know publishing or have published books or just kind of know the industry, you'll know this already. But I want to be really clear for folks who don't. That year, I would estimate that I sold in the neighborhood of 1,000 copies of that, copies, digital copies of that story. Maybe that was over the course of nine months or 10 months for $0.99 each. Now, in the context of traditional publishing, to do a project, even a very small project and put up for sale and sell $1,000 would be considered a failure. For me, the fact that I had done it under my own steam, I decided I wanted to write this story, decided I wanted to publish it, put it out there, and actually reach people, that was magic. That was incredible. So heartened by that, and also feeling that my fictional muscles were getting a little bit stronger, just the slight suggestion of some sort of muscle tone was appearing in the furrows of my brain, I guess. I wrote some more stories. I published them in the same way. And then that fall, I decided I was going to take my next step into the next level of challenge or complexity for a fiction writer. That was to write a novella. It had this sort of dark mystery to it, as well as some fun and some sort of humor and Douglas Adams-y wackiness. And this one I published using a site called Kickstarter. Now, I presume that some people in the stream have heard of Kickstarter, right? Yeah, so some have, some haven't. It's not obviously kind of at the cultural level that Amazon and the Kindle are. For those of you who have never encountered Kickstarter, I'll say just really briefly. It's a site several years old now that allows anyone to propose a creative project and you assign a budget to it. You say, hey, I need $10,000 to do this, or I want to raise $900 to print a run of these books. And then people can pay up front. They can say, I believe in this vision, OK. And all in all, again, I had about 1,000 people on the line for one of these print books, this novella that I was going to write. Once again, in the context of traditional publishing, a print run of 1,000, not so great. Maybe not even worth doing it at all. In the context of me, Robin Sloan, aspiring fiction writer trying to get better at this stuff, it was a huge success. I could hardly believe it that I was going to now actually have the resources, have the time, essentially, the money and the time to sit down and write this thing, print it on a real paper, and send it out to people. So I did that. From there, the story is in some ways less interesting because it gets a lot more traditional. It was because of that project that I met a few traditional book agents. One of them was the obvious sort of fit for me. We just got along famously. We had the same ideas about fiction and this new world we found ourselves in and the opportunities. And she likes what I had written. And it was she who said, the first story you published, Mr. Pernumber's 24-Hour Bookstore, that was really good. Have you ever considered or wondered if there's a bigger story awaiting there? And almost as soon as she said it, I realized there is. There definitely is. So again, this is a story you've heard before. I spent about the whole next year working, laboring, struggling on a draft of my first full-length novel. I started with that short story as sort of the seed, but it grew into something much more complicated and I think much more accomplished. But I always take great pains to sketch out those earlier steps and not just kind of, I feel like sometimes, actually, people go through a similar process and they want to scrub all that away. I want to be like, yes, I've always been a successful author giving a readings and things like that. In fact, of course, of course I ended up here. I don't feel that way. I still don't feel that way and I don't think that I ever will because those steps along the way were so tenuous. But also, I'm very conscious of the fact that I use so many tools that were not even available to aspiring writers five years ago, 10 years ago. The fact that I could do all that under my own steam without asking for permission or kind of waiting and hoping that some great god of fortune would smile upon me, that made all the difference. I was able to take those first steps on my own. So I'm going to share a graph with you. This is Sloan's theory of 21st century creative dynamics. I think this really does encapsulate my experience with this process. So if you imagine that there's this graph here, any other economics majors in the room? I'm just curious. No, not even one. Not even one. One, one econ major. Imagine a graph and it has two axes. This axis is effort. I'll just call it whatever. And when I say effort, what I really mean is me at my kitchen table putting in the time, working on a short story, working on a novella, laboring on this draft of a full length novel. It's exercising those muscles. It's just the creative work that you have to put in to produce something. This axis is a little fuzzier. But I think you'll get it. This is reward. But when I say reward, I mean money because you do want to get paid for your work at some point. That's what kind of just frees up more space to let you do more of it. And it's a form of validation and everything else. So that's part of it. But it's also like just emotional reward. It's that whole cocktail of things, right? It's feeling like your work is not just falling down the well and like you never hear the splash. It's a sense that all this effort you're expending is actually generating something out there in the world. That's just your reward. The reasons, you can think of the whole basket of reasons that people want to make art in the first place. The reasons people want to dance. The reasons they want to play the flute. The reasons they want to write short stories. So given those two axes, I think we can generalize the shape of a creative career, certainly a creative writing career. For a really long time, almost without exception, this is how it looked. You work and work and work and work and work and you work. And that's the writer at her desk just toiling, laboring, getting better, finishing the draft of a whole novel and deciding that it's like junk and throwing it in the drawer and starting a new one, right? You work and work and work. You work. And then your break, right? You send it to an editor or an agent and she loves it. And she says, this is awesome. This is going to be a best seller, right? Or at least it's going to be on the shelves of the San Francisco Public Library. And editor agrees and you get it published. And suddenly you get this big bump of reward all at once. And that means money, right? It means some kind of advance or something. There's going to be some money involved with that. But I think more significantly, it does mean you see your book on the shelf of a library or you see it reviewed in a newspaper or you start to get letters or emails from people who have read it or a book club chooses it for their selection in April. It comes all at once in this little avalanche. And then lots of different things can happen. I mean, you can decide that's enough. You're like, OK, I wrote my book. And return to what you're doing. You can sort of work on another one and then jump up again. You can write the Hunger Games, in which case I think it just keeps going straight up forever, is my impression. A lot of things can happen. But the point is this initial leap, that's the key. And I think for any writer, there's exceptions, of course. But for almost any writer of the books that we know and love, the classics that we grew up with and cherish behind it is a structure that looks something like that. There is, however, another shape. This is the shape we know about because that leap is what delivered their books to us. There is another shape. And of course, it was very prevalent. And that shape looks like this. You work and work and work and work and work and work and work and work and work and work and work and you give up or you die, which is pretty depressing. What happened or failed to happen? I would argue that maybe in a few of those cases, there was some justice to that. If you inspected that work along the way as an objective reader, you might say, I'm not sure that ever really deserved an audience. If that ever was the truth, I think there was like one person for whom that was the case. And it was someone really evil, someone truly terrible. I think in almost all of these cases, it was just bad luck. They never mailed it to the right person. They didn't know who to mail it to. They mailed it to exactly the right person. But on the day that manuscript was at the top of the slush pile, that reader had indigestion from a bad roast beef sandwich. And so she was in a bad mood. And she was like, I don't have time for this. And it went into the trash can. Who knows what can happen or what can fail to happen? It's a really clunky, finicky human process that has vaulted and still vaults people up like this. But it is my strong belief that we've missed out on a lot of good stuff. I think there were a lot of manuscripts out there that maybe wouldn't have spoken to millions of people, but they absolutely would have spoken and spoken quite effectively and viscerally to thousands, or hundreds or dozens. That's enough for a manuscript, for a piece of writing to be worthwhile. Good news to counterbalance this really depressing line. I think that as of right now, 2014, as of the last five and maybe 10 years, there's a new shape available. There's a new path that a creative career can take. And I think this is the one that mine has taken, at least so far. It looks like this. You work and work and work, and you work and work and work, and then you get a little reward. Because you publish a short story in the Kindle Store. And it's not all of this. No book clubs are reading it. It's not being selected for any library reading programs. Libraries haven't heard of you yet. But it is something. It's fuel. It's a little bit of positive reward. And it's enough to make you feel like you want to keep working. So you work a little more, and then you get a little more reward. Because you self-publish a book using Kickstarter, right? And it reaches another 1,000 people. And that's really exciting. So then you work and work and work some more. Then maybe you meet an agent, and you work and work and work. And then maybe you do end up in the same place. There's a couple of things about this other shape that are, for me, interesting and actually quite exciting. One is the simple fact that even if I knew that, or really believed that this moment was waiting somewhere in the far distance, speaking for myself, I don't know if I would have the endurance to make it. Sometimes this is a long, long slog. And for a certain kind of person, a certain temperament, they're going to make that slog no matter what. I think there's plenty of people out there who have wonderful books and other works of art waiting inside of them who would kind of decide to do something else with their life, maybe here or here or here. And so for that kind of person, and again, I'm one of them, to start getting some positive feedback earlier on means you're actually going to make it. It's really important. Maybe we are weaker-hearted. We have this tribe, but that doesn't mean that our books are worthless. So one thing I think is exciting about this is that it gives a path to those people. The other thing that I think is easy to overlook is the fact that now there's all these little plateaus along the way, there's all these little steps. And the truth is, you don't have to go all the way to the top. You can stop anywhere you want and find yourself in a really comfortable spot. And in fact, the really exciting thing about markets like the Kindle Store and other things online is there's a lot of people who are maybe like here. And they're again, they're not in libraries, they're not on bestseller lists, but maybe they write a new chapter in their ongoing series of mysteries about pirate ninja librarians. Every quarter there's a new episode and they release it and a few hundred people or a few thousand people hungrily gobble it up and that buys a few fancy dinners that month. I think that's really exciting. And maybe that's perfect for that writer. Maybe they found a really happy place for them to perch and they have other things going on in their life and that's it. That wasn't available before. You had to either be down here toiling in obscurity or up here on bookstore shelves. And now you can beat all these points in between. So I realize that's extremely nerdy and I hope it made sense to at least some of you. This is how I think about things and the reason I tell people about it is because I guess this is where I'll turn not just descriptive but a little prescriptive. I think this old path is really hard. We glamorize it in our stories of artists and writers and kind of the biopic versions of these lives but they're always like super sad and drunk and these are not the life that I want. I don't think it's the life that a lot of people do want. I'm not convinced that it's a very good life at all. And I think that this path, the one with the steps along the way can be healthier, more positive and I think it can still produce really tremendous results. I don't think there's any sense in which this is restricted to light commercial stuff. In fact, this can be scaffolding for work that is far weirder and far more provocative and perhaps tenuous than this old scheme. So the prescriptive part, if there's anyone in the room who is working on fiction or any kind of art now or has dreamed of doing it or still thinks about it, I implore you or rather I should say I just wanna make sure you know that you don't have to be a champion polevolter. You can take the stairs instead and I encourage you to do so. That's what I did and if it weren't for the stairs I wouldn't be standing here on this stage. So that's where this book, Mr. Pernumbers, 24 Hour Bookstore came from. You're looking at the final form, the hard outer shell but now you know that there are these levels inside, these smaller sort of works all bundled up in here. The thing that I find most lovely actually is that even though we ended up with this, well this is kind of beat up but the real object, the one that's got that wonderful glow in the dark book jacket, it's a beautiful physical object, right? It has all the characteristics of a great printed book but at its heart it's digital and if it weren't for these internet tools, if it weren't for Amazon and Kickstarter and blogs and the internet and Twitter I wouldn't have ended up with this nice suit of armor. So I think there's room for all those tools in the 21st century. So with that I will close and say thank you very much for your attention. And I'll be happy to take any questions. We have a good chunk of time so I should be able to take several. It looks like we have a microphone to pass around. I was wondering if you had started on a sequel to the book. That's a great question. No, the answer is I have no sequel planned. I should say though that there is a, for folks who don't know, there's a short prequel to the book that is available. It's actually sort of, it comes full circle. The prequel is digital only. It's in all the e-book stores and forlown in the library e-book lending platforms. It's called Ajax Panumbra 1969 and it is a story set in San Francisco in the year 1969 and it tells the tale of how this man, Mr. Panumbra, came to the city and why he decided to stay. So that, it kind of continues the story in a different direction. As far as I know the story is over. I thought it was over as I wrote those last few pages. When I reread it now I still think it's over but of course when I wrote the short story I never knew it would be a novel. So never say never. There might still be something waiting. Next, there. I've been too lazy to check. Are there really votes along the Bart line? The question is it's, I guess it's not too much of a spoiler. In the short prequel, I mentioned these boats and San Francisco history buffs will recognize this in the days of the gold rush. People sailed here in ships. Apparently spent so much time talking up the riches to be made in the gold fields along the way that as soon as the ships docked both the passengers and the crews abandoned them like running for the fields. And it is a true historical fact that those ships then became strange establishments like inns and dry goods stores and brothels and all sorts of things. I don't think there were any bookstores but there are remains of those ships now entombed in the San Francisco that sort of grew over them as it was extended into the bay. And every so often in some great construction project when they're digging a new building they'll discover the spar or the bow of some old ship that came here a hundred years ago. Why a glow in the dark cover? Oh, yes. Did everyone know that the book's cover glows in the dark? Any? Yeah, so now some of you know now. I think there's a very good answer to that actually and it has more to do, it's not just whimsy. I mean, maybe it's 80% whimsy. But why would you make a book's jacket glow in the dark in the year 2014? I think it's because, this is my opinion. I won't speak for the publisher here. It was they're doing their wonderful design. They figured out where to get glow in the dark ink by the barrel full. But I think in the year 2014 print books have a huge place and they will for a long time to come. However, I do think that given the alternative of e-books I think print books have to up their game a little bit. I don't think it's enough to just be a print book printed on paper with a cover. I think they have to take advantage of the fact that they are real and material and tactile and they can do things in the physical world that an e-book cannot. And that doesn't have to be in the glow in the dark cover, it could be really beautiful paper. I've seen books with really lovely work on the spine. They've almost died the spine. It can be a crazy cover that's furry or tactile or embossed. There's a million things you can do, but I do think you have to do something. So this was our something. This was our way of saying, that's right, it's a physical object. Is the cover design a code? If it was a code, would I reveal it? I'm gonna tell you the truth. I don't think so, but enough people have asked that question and I have sort of thought about it enough that it has occurred to me that it is possible that Rodrigo Corral, the book jacket designer, inserted a code and then didn't tell me. So I, not that long ago, it was only about two months ago, I sat down with the book and started to sort of count. I was like, oh, there's been a code this whole time on my own book and I didn't know. I couldn't find one and I did the basic stuff. I was looking for kind of like a, you know, alphabetic code or something. So if it is there, it is subtle indeed and they neglected to tell me. So, one more question, sure, last one. If there are any out there. How did you come up with the puzzles and how they were reprogrammed? How did I come up with the puzzles? That's a great question. I thought about them quite a bit and I decided pretty early on that I wanted to make them interesting and plausible to people who really like puzzles, but I also didn't want it to be the case that the book was no fun or made no sense or was like a dead end if you were not that person because I just knew that more people were not gonna be like, let me sharpen my pencil. Most people would just want to just read the book. And so the result is that, and you and other readers may have detected this, the result is that you can read the book, kind of understanding that there are these puzzles and that they're solving them but not maybe totally getting it. You get all the way to the end and it's fine. I think you've had a good experience. If you decide you wanna take an interest in what's actually happening, there are some Easter eggs there and it's things large and small. There's one code that sort of strung to the pages that upon reflection I myself would not be able to crack if I was given this book. I'm pretty sure I made it too hard, maybe impossibly hard, but it's there. And all the way down to little things, anytime there's a number or in many cases a name, rather than use something arbitrary, I decided this is, it's a book about meaningful symbols. It's a book about carefully chosen words. Nothing can be arbitrary. So any little throwaway thing and address, the number on a check, an amount of dollars, it's all something. It's a wink, it's a mathematical joke. It's a very sort of circuitous historical reference but there's something there. I'll say actually, and this is a nice little puzzle to close on for the intrepid researcher. Most of the names in the book have some significance. Clay, Janon, Clay of course is sort of obvious. He's a, as we've established he was a little, he's sort of a mutable character and Clay is kind of his nature in some ways. Janon though, what is Janon? If you Google, if you use the search engine of your choice to look up Janon, typography, mystery, I guarantee that you'll find something interesting a very interesting real life typographical mystery. And that's why I gave him that name. Thank you. I'll just say, thank you so much for your time and attention for coming out and I'll just add that I'll be set up to sign people's books and if you have other questions that you wanna ask in person, that will be fine too. So thanks again.