 Earlier this year I won the Lane Cunningham Award for my short novel Perishables, and then I decided to self-publish it as an e-book and document what was required to sell a copy to 10 people I did not already know. I referred to this experiment as the Perishables Project. Some of the characters in Perishables have their origins in a role-playing game called Vampire the Masked Grey. Role-playing games are an interesting analog to creative comments because they involve a large creative work developed by a publisher and pushed out to a user base who are encouraged to redevelop it for their own creative purposes, specifically their own games. Then within a game, players at the same table are constantly riffing on one another, ripping apart one another's ideas, coming up with something new based on what one another has said. Somebody might show up thinking that they're going to be playing a hero or a brute, and by the end of the night they've been turned into the butt of somebody else's joke. That sort of competitive collaboration at the table eventually becomes the engine that drives the story the game is there to tell. In my own group, we're encouraged to expand the creative experience beyond the game itself. So at one point I took a conversation from a game, turned it into a short story, posted it online in 2006 with a Creative Commons license and zero marketing. And a year later, I was the number three hit on Google for zombie stories. So I started getting emails from people. In the first year, 20 emails, 15 of them were requests for a sequel. One of them was a middle school student who interviewed me for a book report, which was very strange. So I wrote the sequel. In 2008 I did the same thing, got twice as much response. Twice as many personal emails, twice as many requests for a sequel. Literally twice as many middle school book reports. The lesson that I learned from this was that people want access to content. And Creative Commons allowed me to give them access to my content. So I went ahead and I finished the novel. Then I entered a contest. Then I won. Then I found out that nobody would tell me how to self-publish a novel. I had to figure it out. In the course of trying to do so, I started talking to my cover artist, a man named John Ward, and he had this radical idea, which was let's develop the cover in public in front of people on Google+. It'll be great marketing for both of us. It turned out he was right. Other authors especially wanted to know how the process worked, but nobody would tell them. I was perfectly happy to let them watch over my shoulder as long as they got them to look at my work. The conventional wisdom is that an author needs to have a whole bunch of stuff to connect with their readers. It needs to be Facebook and Google and the blog and email and all that jazz, and that's more or less true. But a lot of the initial traffic to those media for me was driven by developing the cover in public. And since then, the project has driven most of my sales. Over the long term, what I've figured out is that people are as interested in my blogging about behind the scenes as they are in my novel. I'm choosing not to analyze what that says about my story. People know that I get a lot of ideas from others and I have some ideas of my own and I'm perfectly willing to mix these together and try them out and see what happens. And I do get a lot of ideas from other people and I act on some of them. For instance, I bought a banner ad on a specific website on the advice of an MBA. I took paper goods to DragonCon this year. Some of them are ideas that I would have never had on my own, like taking an excerpt from the sequel and including it at the end of the first book as a teaser. Sometimes I get advice from people about things that I should never, ever try to do, such as buy a banner ad on a website and take paper goods to a convention. The advice that I receive sometimes is great and sometimes it's terrible. But the lesson is that once I opened up the process, people wanted to become a part of that process. People wanted to share information and ideas for our mutual benefit. In traditional book marketing, somebody somewhere comes up with a whole bunch of ideas and some of them are lousy and maybe some of them are great, but nobody knows which or which because they build a fence around the whole process to protect the good ideas from the people who are correctly perceived as being their competition, namely other authors. They build this sort of combination vacuum and echo chamber and then they go reside within it and nobody has the chance to learn anything. I didn't mind sharing with people what worked and what didn't for me because doing so didn't remove any good ideas from the table. Instead, it greatly expanded the number of good ideas available to me. I now have more good ideas left to try than I ever would have had on my own. The to-do list for the Parish Mills project at this point runs through the middle of 2014. By that point, I'll have written three novels, a collection of short stories, two short stories that are not in the collection, and I'll just be done introducing the cast. All this because in 2006 I wrote a short story I thought nobody would want to read, so I stuck it up online and decided to see what would happen. You can have a copy just for listening and thank you very much for your time. Thank you.