Book or Blog?

[Sebastian Cocioba]

Hi Everyone,

I've been bouncing around the idea of compiling the 7+ years of plant tissue culture experience I've mustered into articles for my blog for a long time now. I have a ton of content as drafts and galleries of original pictures and whatnot and am stuck at a crossroads and would like some advice. My plan was to keep posting small articles to my blog about the little steps needed to make a transgenic plant in very newbie-friendly detail. A lot of my contacts recommended I just compile a book and publish it so that I can get a little compensation for the information that would be a little hard to come by in that specific format. I have always put teaching people first and tend to forget about supporting myself which is what led me to this intersection. 

Would people rather have a nice free blog that steadily outputs content with some tasteful adds pertaining to relevant companies and products, or pay a small price for a Julia Child-style cookbook of plant tissue culture and transformation recipes concocted by yours truly with plenty of pictures and commentary?

 What would be a good price point?

 Is it worth the delay to have a physical edition one can tote to their bench or is it more useful to have an organized blog website thingy that people can reference digitally?

What would be a good starting project? I was thinking a GUS assay since it covers a bunch of various topics and the plasmid is commercially available and off-patent. I'm not a fan of GFP since the stable ones require harmful UV and I have yet to transform the couple fluorescent plasmids I've optimized into tobacco to verify that long wave UV will work with decent effect. Another option would be anthocyanin knockouts/add-ins or variegation gene introduction but would require further testing. GUS requires a bit more chemicals but the result is a strong insoluble blue precipitate against a white background of ethanol-bleached plants. No fancy equipment necessary! I'm also not stepping foot anywhere near glowing plants for many reasons so please don't ask to make a book about making a glowing plant from scratch. That being said, if you had a plant biotech cookbook, what would be your desired "Hello World" project? Herbicide tolerance alone is boring, non-visual, and controversial/unethical in spread so that's out of the question. It's kinda funny that the perfect intro project would require a lot of research on my part into verifying chromoprotein stability in lower pH (plant cytosol is ~5.6 - 5.8) and shipping things to the vacuole, etc, etc. so any feedback on what you all want to have as the main project of the book (if you even want a book in the first place) would be awesome!

I thought I would ask the community that would be most interested in learning more about the dark-green arts (you gals and guys) if it would even be worth the trouble. I've noticed an overwhelming lack of good plant biotech material out there and there are too many comments about plant culturing being "hard to do" and "unpredictable" which I think is just silly. Anyone can do science and everyone can do plant biotech. The hardest part seems to be aseptic technique and culture-to-culture media decisions but those are the most straight forward. I am a very visual learner so I would include a ton of pictures with various angles and explanations so anyone ages ~8 and up (maybe even earlier if fine motor skills are honed!) can make their own plants. Either way let me know what y'all think about the idea of Book vs Blog for introductory plant tissue culture. I would still maintain my blog for the day to day content and more advanced topics but for the newbie I think a desk reference at a fair price would be ideal. Thanks!

[Dakota Hamill]

Get paid for your time, write a book.

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[Meredith L. Patterson]

You could do both. No Starch Press has published a couple of books that started out as blogs and still remain free online, e.g. http://learnyouahaskell.com/. Bill Pollock, who runs No Starch, is super friendly and approachable -- drop him an email and ask?

Cheers,

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[Sebastian S Cocioba]

Valid point Meredith. Thanks for the tip! I just want to make sure the content is as accessible as possible and if It could also pay for media, tips, and coffee that would be great aswell!

Sebastian S. Cocioba

CEO & Founder

New York Botanics, LLC

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[Simon Quellen Field]

I have found that publishing first on the web, and then in a paper book, increases sales of the paper book considerably.

Culinary Reactions was born of this web site.

An earlier book came out of this web site.

Why is Milk White came from this web site.

Electronics for Artists came from this web site.

I like to get paid several times for the same work.

I describe how to build something on the web, and I get advertising revenue.

I sell that description as an article to Make magazine, and get paid again.

When enough projects are ready, we collect them into a printed book, and I get paid yet again.

And I sell parts to build the projects on the web site.

All of this revenue goes back into inventing more projects for the web sites.

I recommend this strategy to everyone on the list. Getting paid helps to fund more projects, and helps to keep up enthusiasm for the work.

And web sites, printed articles and books help us all.

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[Jérôme Lutz]

Hi Sebastian, Hi everyone, 

what about a wiki? 

I asked myself the same question back in April and decided to put everything I learn about SynBio on my now open and non-profit wiki at www.synbio.info. 

The reasons for this were quite simple: 

• In a blog, everything is structured according to the day you write the blog post. How should one find what he or she is looking for? In a wiki, you have to think about a way how to structure your knowledge so you can easily retrieve it. 
• I am rather new to the field and don't have a biology background, and of course - you can never know everything. Meanwhile we are 33 users, out of which 5-10 are pretty active contributing their own field's of experience. They just start writing and then we talk together on Slack or within the wiki on how to improve the articles. Once we are happy, we share it to our 10.000+ Facebook fans at https://www.facebook.com/synbioinfo
• In a book, you spend years of researching things and then you publish - but our field is advancing way too fast and stuff you write today and publish say in 2 years is often outdated already. Also as a ready, you don't have the chance to dig deeper into a topic when you are interested. In the wiki, we try to put as many links to a topic as relevant and people keep adding they find to the wiki page when they dig deeper. 
• However, a great book I currently read is BioBuilder. I like this as a book, because it gives me all information from A-Z. But well, I read it and then I put it on the book shelf. On the wiki, I am working daily and use it as a "outsourced" brain memory, so when I forget a detail I find it with the search within seconds and that's much faster then skipping through the index of a book and rereading whole passages.  

So a wiki was for me the best choice. Also, I have been setting up knowledge management systems for pretty much all the companies I worked in so choosing Confluence from Atlassian was clear for me as well. The cool thing about this proprietary software is that it's from a pretty cool company and they offer free licenses for the software if you are a non-profit. Since I am a big fan of open knowledge, that just made sense as well. 

But how do we make money? 

Well, we found a very interesting business model for the non-profit: We are mostly software developers and we have to adapt the standard Confluence quite a bit to make this wiki happen the way we want it. So far, we have developed 45+ macros, little pieces of software that e.g. build a glossary for biological terms or manage the content creation process. We will soon start selling those on the Confluence Marketplace, and by this we can finance the servers, do some marketing and maybe even pay authors one day (however, not sure if that's the point of an open wiki.. what do you guys think? I am still uncertain about that point).

If you are interested, I would be happy to show you around the Wiki and we can see if we do something together! Basically, we could either set up a "menu point" on synbio.info for plant biology or even start an own wiki, as we recently did for bio art at http://art.synbio.info. What do you think? 

Talk to you soon and best regards from way too cold Munich, 

Jérôme

[Dakota Hamill]

I'd say Simon has the most experience with this stuff and he has good advice.

Still, I always prefer a nice tangible hardcover or softcover book.  I stare at my screen long enough all day, and I have thousands of bookmarks I'll never go back to and forget about.  I love being able to pick up a book and turn to the page I need. 

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[Jonathan Cline]

openwetware.org wiki
and use lab notebook templates.

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[John Griessen]

On 11/28/2015 01:11 PM, Sebastian S Cocioba wrote:
> Valid point Meredith. Thanks for the tip! I just want to make sure the content is as accessible as possible and if It could also
> pay for media, tips, and coffee that would be great aswell!

maybe find out about this writer starting to use something else besides medium.com only:

https://medium.com/@conoro11/here-s-what-i-m-doing-next-3ab256725021#.pn21qltxm

Conor O’Shea writes: "Since this seems to be a pretty popular topic and there is a lot of curiousity around how to optimize your
writing/publishing experiences, I think I’ll write another post here this week describing my next steps and the tools I’ll use to
get it done. Medium will be one of those tools and yes, I’ll still be here."

He's hinted, but not said what software or sites yet...maybe does not want to have a direct jump ship of medium written on medium.

[Rikke Rasmussen]

Sebastian - I would buy that book. Please write it!

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[Jonathan Cline]

There are several web authors I've read, originally offering their fully typeset books (quite professionally self-PDF-published, too) on their own web sites.  I have noticed that those who first write blogs for their content, end up publishing blog-books which read like blogs - meaning, the content is not as good (there's a difference in writing style when you write a blog entry, or an email, that is time consuming to edit out later, compared to writing a real paper or real book chapter - I can give an example that is sitting on my bookshelf, if you want - especially the organization of material is not great).  I have also noticed that some open-book authors offer these same books on the amazon store as ebooks and have quite reasonable sales of the ebook, even though their amazon description itself offers potential readers the link to go to the author's web site to download the PDF for free.  It turns out that the majority of readers really are willing to pay $2.99, or so forth, for the convenience of wirelessly sync-downloading a book into their Kindle or ebook app.  I'm not one of those, but then again, I'm like seven sigma.  On openwetware or wikipedia I paste the text into vim to edit locally then paste it back.

So if you want to self publish, I'd say your best bet is to start with a real book template.  Publish as a book and also provide a download.  But don't "ebook publish" a blog-style work, the end result is unsatisfying.  Hm, maybe you could also do it thru BioCoder issues if you wanted to spread the publication out - assuming you already have a well organized table of contents and breakdown etc.  The couple technical book authors I've talked to recently simply said they wrote their books in Open Office (back then, at the time) then sent to O'Reilly press.  One even said he made the index by hand.  When I wrote large tomes I used more advanced options like Pagemaker (a while ago, yeah) which is a night-and-day improvement over any end-user document app, and the cost more than made up for itself through ease of use (it's supposed to be fun, not a struggle!).  There's no way I'd use an online web platform to generate content although I've given different platforms a shot multiple times, they are just so incredibly annoying with browser-based-lameness compared to a full blown local application.  I was recently sent two software dev tech books to review/collaborate on, and the author is using .docx with google drive to sync revisions - how frustrating.  There is little on the planet more unsatisfying than using microsoft software and doubly so with revision control enabled.

Maybe Simon wants to share his workflow, what do you say Simon?

Recently I ran across a self pub ebook author who is amazingly prolific and she strongly recommended using text-to-speech apps and writing while walking (not sure how well that would work for highly technical content), and then publishing through amazon (after multiple for-pay editing cycles).  She was writing historical fiction.. multiple books per year, which is phenomenal output.

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[leaking pen]

Both.   Compile the book, publish it, then slowly put up the blog posts on a schedule, with links letting people know they can get it all if they buy the book now. 

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[Simon Quellen Field]

Jonathan is right about how blogs don't usually make good books.

However, reading books on the web does work quite well.

So think book when you are writing (or paper, or article, depending on your publishing target).

Then put that up on the web.

Don't worry about competing with yourself -- the best marketing for my books has been giving away all the content for free on the web. As Jonathan said, many people prefer to read a book as a book, rather than as a web page, whether the book is on a Kindle or on paper. And for my books, people often want to give them as gifts, and somehow giving a paper book gets a different response than giving someone a URL for Christmas. But having a book's worth of text searchable by Google means that you will get a ton of visitors (I get a little over 10,000 unique visitors a day), and that is more people than will walk past the spine of your book in all the bookstores in all the world. Sales go up when it is all up on the web.

I'm about to send my 19th printed book to the publisher (some of my early novels will never see the light of day). Most of them take about a year, either because they are novels, and require lots of craft, planning and editing, or they are how-to books that require that I design, build, and debug projects. But a couple have gone together in a month of 14-hour days, because they required only research (as opposed to invention). Deadlines are great motivation.

The main take-home here is write everything as if you were going to put it into a book that will live longer than you will. The quality shows. People write blogs as if they were having a conversation with a friend. That can work if you have a really good editor, but why not aim for high quality from the start?

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