A new book and videos in other places

I've literally just pulled up on the driveway and I've just got home from Chicago after an awesome time in the States and I thought I'd make a quick video before it gets dark because I'm not going to be on YouTube for the next two months. So this is just mostly a little update video for our viewers to just let you know what's going on. I've just been in Traverse City at the Michigan Small Farm Conference and spoke for two days. Extremely jet lagged and apparently I killed it. Not quite sure what I think of that as a statement, but apparently it was well received and I had a lot of gratitude from people there and I really appreciated meeting a bunch of you. I know some of the people that follow us here on YouTube and a whole bunch of other people and it was really great to meet some of the holistic management crew out there. And yeah, it was inspiring. I really enjoyed it and I was really glad I made it out there. Similar weather to here, so it felt quite homely. But now I'm back and I've set aside the next two months on my schedule to write this book and get it done. So I'm really closing off to the outside world as much as possible. Now we've sort of arranged our schedules here with Johanna and to fit around caring for our son Ragnar, but to allow me to try and concentrate on a riding retreat for the next two months, staying at the farm as long as possible. If it doesn't work, I might have to find a little retreat space somewhere else, but I want to be able to manage other things going on at the farm. We're packing out a lot of tools. I know a bunch of you are waiting for me to come back to pack pallets of tools to go out around Europe to get you started for this season. So I'm excited to do all that too. But I really want to get this book done and I think for those of you aren't aware, I'm radically updating and overhauling my book, Making Small Farms Work. We've sent that out to about 90 countries now and I'm adding quite a lot of chapters to it. About pastured turkeys, pastured pigs, about beef and charcuterie and how to manage with people, and greatly extending the market garden chapters and finance and economy stuff. It's basically going to be also integrating the book I started writing last winter, which was about a comparative analysis of all the enterprises that fit in regenerative enterprise. It's a massive work and I've already Done a lot on it, but I think this is going to be a new book that sets the standard for this field, if I say so myself. But I think I'm saying that because there's nothing really like it out there at all that's so wide and comprehensive and yet goes into depth of how to plan from the large landscape patterns all the way down to business details and marketing and all of that stuff and how to manage people, etc. So I'm really excited. I think it's totally going to replace Making Small Farms Work. And I've been talking with some publishers, but I'm erring on the side of self publishing again because one thing I will share openly is that I feel like the publishing industry hasn't moved on a very long way and media, social media has totally changed the way the world works with communication, etc. And for my little snowy village in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, I can reach people all over the world through this channel and through our other activities and I don't have an especially large following. But it's never been my intention. My intention is to put information out for the niche group of people that really want what we are sharing. And I feel like that's where I'm at with the book publishers has the benefit of being able to put us in front of more people potentially. But I'm not necessarily, you know, I don't need this book to be in libraries or in bookstores because it's not aimed at the sort of people that would pick up and browse this book. It's a very niche book and I've got a lot of author friends, some of the most well known authors in the field and I'm not so happy with the economy of going with a publisher. It used to be that you had to go with a publisher or if you self published, it was seen as because you couldn't get published. But that's no longer the case at all and I feel like the contracts I've been passed in the past just look really bad economically. And I know many of my author friends have felt a bit hard done by with the returns they get on their book. And so having had such great success self publishing, making small farms work, I've come back round to thinking I'm going to self publish that again. I might run a crowdsourcing campaign to get the print run cost together as it's produced and I won't. I don't think I'm going to be reprinting Making Small Farms Work. That's available as an ebook always, and that's in the links below. But I don't have any hard copies anymore and I don't think I'm going to get it printed because I'm aiming to have this book finished and edited by April and it's a major work. So I hope to get that done. And I'm still open to talk to publishers, but they would have to radically rethink the way that they traditionally make contracts because quite frankly, it's, you know, there's a lot of money being made out of authors who are not getting fairly compensated, in my view, because I know what shipping costs and I know what marketing costs and I know, you know, I've seen it from both sides and I'm very happy that I self published and I feel like I want to speak more openly about that. And if I self publish again, I probably will because I feel like it's something that's not talked about. And you know, we're well known now for talking about numbers and facts and figures and that's what people need. And I think same with authors. You know, a lot of people sign contracts that they haven't really put into a spreadsheet and really looked at closely or they don't realize that there's an alternative pathway. And yeah, you know, I'm just up for open discourse and I feel like it's still shaded in a bit of secrecy in that industry and I don't, yeah, there's elements of that I just don't appreciate. So anyway, that's a bit of what's going on for me. You can let me know what you think in the comments below and let us know if you're excited to get a copy of the book. I'll probably offer some kind of perks for a crowdsourcing campaign just to get a big shipment printed is, you know, it's a big financial outlay. But yeah, my next two months is just riding basically. And so I hope to just be head down and get that done. And it's. A lot has already taken place, but there's still a lot to do. I'm probably halfway through, I guess. But to those of you that like our videos and want to be engaged in some way, I would say the best way to do that is to follow our online training, which is over 80 hours of footage and nearly all of that is stuff that hasn't made it to YouTube. And it's a highly structured educational course. There's classroom trainings where you have, you know, hour and a Half lectures on all kinds of things and then there's dedicated videos of someone filming with me in the field. So it's a lot of different content that you would have seen on YouTube. It's also got all of our spreadsheets and a load of downloads, health and safety codes for running a slaughtery and all these different things. And it's also a network of other people who are uploading their designs and asking each other questions because it's set out in a structured way, mirroring the chapters of making small farms work. And then at the end of each task, it's giving you activities to do. So you build up a whole holistic plan of your farm. And I think it's the most broad, deep training you'll find in a regenerative ag field. It covers all the things that we're doing, including whole farm design, etc. And over 80 hours of footage, as I said. And it's put out at a very low cost. We've seen this trend of all these online courses that cost frankly a lot of money. And I could say they're probably worth it if you're going into that thing. But what I wanted to do based on the feedback I get from people around the world, is make that accessible to anyone. So it's on a month to month subscription basis where you have access to all the material immediately from when you sign up and you can cancel that subscription whenever you like. So it's €89 for a full subscription and we have a video only subscription for €59amonth. But that doesn't have any of the downloads or the questions and answers. And one thing I'll add there is, I'm thinking to up the question and answers to twice a month, every fortnight. So the next one's coming up soon and I'm thinking to add a lot more live interaction on that course. So I won't be doing that here on YouTube for a while now as I knuckle down and finish this book, hopefully. But I will be interacting with people there. So if you haven't looked at our online training, it's definitely worth a look. And I'd say you'll never find a better value way to access so much dense information in a highly structured and organized way. So I hope to see some of you in there. That's it for now. I'm going to knuckle down and pack up tools and then put myself into the studio and start riding again. But I'll keep you updated in some kind of way along the way. Thanks so much for your support folks. I really appreciate it and great to meet those of you out in America looking forward to try and organize a tour in America maybe next winter or some other time to spend a much longer time doing deeper trainings. Because that's my passion, really sharing intimate information. And it's great doing conferences and meeting people and firing people up. But I love to do long form, much deeper training. So people want to start thinking about U.S. tour Canada tour next winter and want to host us for a training then. You can be in touch and I'll see the rest of you on here some other time. Thanks so much for watching. Check out the show notes below. We'll see you in the video soon. Sam.