Winter creativity

Welcome back to another episode, folks. I'm just getting up and away from the screen. I've been doing a lot of computer time working on the Ridgedale Builds book, which I'm falling in love with. You'll have a little peek at it in a moment. It's really a lot of fun to be working with, but we're about a third of the way through the Kickstarter for regenerative farming and I wanted to just talk a bit about self publishing and why I love running Kickstarters. It's something that I talk a lot about with other people in when they're here at the farm and other authors. I've got a lot of author friends and to be honest, most people know that authors don't get into writing books for making money, they're sharing their passion and life experience. But it's got to be said that I've always felt like the publishing industry is a bit outdated. The publishers typically take the vast majority of the income from the sale of books, and essentially, whilst they do put up the risk of printing and warehousing and shipping books, I feel like not enough goes to authors. And I think many other authors who follow the channel agree with that. And knowing a lot of key authors in the field and knowing how the economy looks, I think self publishing has been the single best decision that I've ever made in my life. Now, it's important to consider the fact that I've also built up a YouTube following and that's quite important. You need to be able to promote your book. Making a book is one thing and it's quite a big effort, but you have to be able to sell it too. But essentially, today, with social media, we have access to amazing abilities to advertise and market to the people we want to reach, and the only real difference that a publisher could have given me. I've had all of the major publishers in the field contact me over the years, but economy all looks quite similar and it just didn't cut it for me. I wanted to have a higher percentage for the work that I've done because not only did I write the text and collect the photos and the data behind a book like Regenerative Agriculture, I also put the book together and that was really important to me as part of my creative process. And whilst it's got some errors and mistakes and probably a professional team of editors could do a way better job, there's something I really appreciate and love about putting it together and sending it out from the farm direct from the farmer. To you. We've sent this to over 90 countries around the world and we've had amazing feedback from it. I know a lot of people have started their business based on this manual, which really is, you know, a university level textbook, you could say. And it's been a lot of joy to produce. My eyes tend to find all the errors when I do look back through it. But that's okay. It's rough and ready. And sure, a team of professional editors working five months could tidy it up and polish it more, but they would also require quite a huge cut of the income generated from the book to do that. And it's just not necessary. I know those of you that follow our channel have put up with my bad audio and poor filming skills over the years because it's the content that's important. And that's exactly what I feel about the book too. I've really enjoyed the creative process of working to put books together and I feel that time and energy needs to be compensated. And to be honest, I haven't seen a publishing contract that even, you know, half tickles my fancy. And then I tried to get this book on Amazon because a lot of our following is in America and Canada to make it more accessible over there because it's taking a long time for books to get shipped out. With the coronavirus especially the shipping industry seems to have just gone into total meltdown. We're trying to get set up with FedEx to see if we can improve that service and add tracking at the same cost as shipping is now. But it's surprisingly convoluted and hard to actually do all this stuff. Now having said that, we do have ebooks of all the books that we publish, so you can have instant access to those if you want them. But this really is a manual that should be in printed form because it's such a big reference book. It's not the sort of thing you sit and read on a computer. But when we went onto Amazon because of the slow shipping times due to Covid, it's just not satisfactory. And I think people shopping on Amazon are quite used to very quick deliveries. So we basically pulled back that service. And I don't really and never really wanted to support that company. I like the sort of grassroots sending it out from the farm, as it were. People told me I should do fulfillment by Amazon and have a warehouse stock in America and have it sent out in one or two days and that would be great. But they want nearly the same amount as a publisher wants just for distributing the book. And quite frankly that's just very bad economy for an author. So I don't recommend that. I've actually tried to encourage people to self publish and certainly if you're willing to put the work in to build up an audience and be vocal and communicate on social media, it's such a great decision. Some people are worried about the prestige of being a published author, but who cares about that? You know, I just feel like the arguments I've heard for going with a publisher are just not relevant to me. There's no authority that comes in that channel that I don't have anyway through the work that I've put out and benefited a whole lot more people with. And then the other argument is, well, they can get it into bookstores or in front of libraries, etc. But the people that are reading niche books about regenerative small farm practices that we're teaching about tend not to be looking for that in a bookstore, you know, and so people I know are seeking out the information that they want. So anyway, that's the route I've chosen and I'm extremely happy I've done that and I hopefully will help encourage other people to self publish because it's such a joy and such a fun thing to do. This book is now ready to print, but it's actually had a bit of a title change and I'm still playing with that up until the date of release. We're on Kickstarter right now with 36% funded and I hope a bunch more of you will get excited about this book because I think it's a beautiful treasure of a resource and hopefully the start of a series of books which will be great. Now, shipping books all around the world is a lot of work. There's a whole lot of work to be done with the accounting. There's complex VAT rules for digital books and services that could be supposed surprising if you're not used to those things. And there's dealing with customer relations and returns and books being lost and damaged. It's amazing how many books turn up totally wet. People send me photos with their mashed up books where the book is just saturated or they've had a French cookery book put back inside their boxes. I've seen the Post people throw in boxes of books and you know, this is a heavy book. You can't throw it around like that. And yeah, it's certainly not without its work and troubles, but I'd say it's very much more rewarding to be doing this and to have some personal connection because I get to see the names of everyone who's bought that book and there's some really surprising names in there. It's really interesting to see a which countries it goes to and looking at trends and understanding who our audience is. And yeah, I find it fascinating. I'd love to hear from other authors whether they're in the field of farming or not. Just I'd love to hear your experiences with self publishing or working with publishers. I'm not trying to speak bad about publishers and everyone's trying to make their, you know, contexts work and their businesses work. It's just I've never been interested to have someone take control of my creative process, which is really the reason I enjoy putting books together. It's such a fun creative outlook and it also refines my thinking and clarifies certain things for me in the process. So it's something I really enjoy. I want to show you a bit where the Ridgedale Builds book is right now. I'm really in love with this project. It's so cool to look back at like basically I've got 40 of these which has got everything in it from designing field lanes to the infrastructure we've built. And it's so cool looking back on this, it's a treasure trove but it's unfortunately like super scribbled and higgledy piggledy and probably wouldn't make any sense or couldn't be interpreted by anyone but myself. But it's so cool working with a CAD expert. And Maritz has done an amazing job of really thinking through carefully how to best depict angles and data so that it's as simple and clear, as concise as possible. We're kind of trying to make like an IKEA manual essentially so that anyone can just get a cut list together, get all the tools and parts they need and just make these structures really easily. And it's so cool bringing it to life from this. So it's a book that I'm really actually falling in love with a lot. It feels really cool to be working on this just to show you a bit of the process. It's really fun. This is just sketching out the book to think about how we're going to present the information. We've been working on our really lightweight hernia free broiler pens that anyone can move and just going through all the little technical details that make them work and the refinements we've added over time. Been working on the sturdy dolly as well as alternative dolly solutions, how to convert the pen over to make a Ridgedale roller pen. We're getting into the eggmobile now and soon we'll be into nest boxes and a whole host of other amazing projects. On the Kickstarter front, we're 36% funded and we've still got 10 days to go. This is really to see if it's worth bringing into print. So I really hope a bunch more people get behind this because I think it's a really beautiful book. I'm so happ to be working with such amazing people with this. The reason why I love Kickstarter and why I like doing these sort of public crowdfundings is because a, it gives me a sense of the demand for what I'm producing and whether it's worth doing. And that's really what this Kickstarter campaign is about. It's a proof of concept and if people like the idea, then I'll produce a whole series of books because I just think it will be such a beautiful resource. Even though it's a snapshot in time and these farms are always constantly changing and growing, it just creates a network that people can connect with each other and share their problems and challenges and strategies, but also just it's such a great resource for people coming into farming to see the plethora of approaches and contexts and financial situations. So we don't get stuck in this it needs to look a certain way thing. And you know, as I've spoken out before about being known in the field or other Internet sort of celebrities in the field, it becomes, you know, people get stuck on wanting to follow set recipes when it could look really any way. And that's what I really want to highlight by highlighting some of these amazing people. But I really like Kickstarter because it's all or nothing. So if it doesn't get funded, this book won't go ahead. And I like that. As opposed to some of the other crowdsourcing models where you get partial payment and that just doesn't work very well because you don't have enough money to carry out the project. So I've set the target for the Kickstarter at what we need to bring the book into production, to warehouse books and to deal with everything that comes with that. And printing obviously is a big cost and so you need to sell some upfront to know that it's going to work out. And I like to do it publicly the whole way through. You know, I'm always putting things on Facebook, asking people for their opinions on the titles, the colors, etc. Because I really value that feedback. Sometimes I'm making a decision, you know, regardless of that feedback, and sometimes it's really helping me out. So I love that interactive process and that's really what this whole farm and my whole work is about, really. And I like the fact that it's publicly visible if people are excited about it and the financials of it, because often people are crowdsourcing money for projects where you can't see if they've been successful or not. You can't see the total sum or what it's going towards. You don't really know what's happening. And I don't like that. And I usually rarely contribute to anything of that nature because it's just not transparent. And I think that transparency is a key part of why sites like Kickstarter work, because people can see where their money goes. It's all visible and clear and people feel safe with that and not just from their personal investment in whatever it is they'll get in return, but the overall, you know, integrity of the project. So I think that's quite important to me and something I would recommend others to do. Now, you do lose 10% to the Kickstarter and payment fees, but that's something you just have to plan in and budget for. But I would rather do that than just set up a pre order list on the website. And you don't know how many people have bought it, so you don't know how the book's developing, you don't know if other people are excited about it. So I like the whole transparent approach that Kickstarter brings and it's something that I'll keep enjoying using. I think ultimately, unless this Kickstarter successful, it's unlikely that we'll bring this to print and it's a shame if we don't because this was marking the start of a series of just looking at all of the best up and coming farmers and hopefully spreading that more globally. Because it's so beneficial to hear people's stories and see what they're up to and the different strategies and approaches they have. So hope a bunch more of you can jump on the Kickstarter. I've got to get back into the afternoon shift for riding and I'm really excited we're going to try and get most of the illustration and explanatory text for this book. The Ridgedale builds done before mid March when our season begins and I get so busy I haven't got time for anything like this. It's super nice to have these long winters to have time time for these creative processes and to be able to create resources that can benefit so many people in the longer term in various parts of the world. So really enjoy it. I really enjoy having the feedback when I put out questions about color schemes or covers and having that interaction, that's a really important thing for me. And I really enjoy that interconnection with the people who are following us and who have insights into things that I don't. And I really enjoy having that personal kind of process. It's really fun for me. So thanks so much for watching folks. If you haven't subscribed to our channel, make sure you do and click the notifications bell so you hear updates from us. You can find out all the offerings we have in the links below. And don't forget to check out the Kickstarter. It's not on for long and it'd be great to see that book come into publication.