Next Steps

I’ve had a busy couple of weeks. First I had an Open University exam for the end of MST121 (Using Mathematics). The day after that I was presenting (and facilitating a couple of sessions) at our Directorate away day. The following day I spent 4 hours with the Government Digital Service, which was very interesting.

GDS is a very interesting environment, it has a buzz about it that is very different from your normal central government department. I think it is something to do with the very high geek quotient present. In the space of two desks one guy was in a tweed suit with a (proper) bow tie and another was in t-shirt and shorts. There was also a lot of lego about. I actually quite liked the use of lego minifigures on their Agile tracker board. Each dev had a lego person to represent what they were working on, and it was a very disciplined one thing at a time project control. Definitely what I’d do myself if I ever found myself leading a development team again.

In the evenings lately I’ve been investigating how to produce a paperback version of my stories. I’ve primarily looked at createspace, which is an amazon company, because they’ve been linked to from the Kindle Direct Publishing website. Over the course of the last three nights I’ve managed to design a cover, layout the interior and produce a PDF proof (I almost shipped a print on demand one – at $2.15 it appealed to my vanity, but it was $8.95 to ship to the UK and would take several weeks ETA 22 July!). So don’t be surprised if you see a paperback version of the novella, although I wouldn’t expect much in the way of sales as it is about 4 times the price of the kindle version because the economics of print on demand aren’t terribly cheap.