Back From Vacation. Added a New Team Member. A Thank You for User Ratings. - 06/22/2009 - 3:26 PM:
By: Aaron Stanton
I've been out of town for the last few weeks, but I'm back now. For future trips, I've asked one of our team members, Dan Bowen, if he'd be willing to help keep the blog on target (meaning, helping writing posts, and also pushing me to write posts) when life gets hectic. I haven't gotten a response from him on it, yet, but I think he'll be agreeable.
In a way, these last few weeks have been a watershed moment for Novel Projects. Specifically, a year ago I couldn't have left the company for two weeks and expected much to get done. The fact that I could take my first vacation in 3 years and leave for two weeks without the world crumbling at the home base is a good sign. Between Paul, Tony, Eileen, and the rest of the crew, things functioned as they should. Business phone calls still got made. Work was still done.
In fact, it turns out that so much got done that when I got back, my office had been moved into another roo...
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We Could Use a Tiny Bit of Help With Our Feedback Tool. - 05/20/2009 - 3:21 PM:
I have a favor to ask. Dan, one of our statisticians, has been going over our the results of our Feedback Tool. The Feedback Tool is designed to let humans rate a paragraph's score on action, density, pacing, dialog, and description, which we then analyze to help improve our formulas. This helps us make sure that our "action" being measured by the computer is the same thing that most people consider to be "action" in reality.
We have a fair number of feedback results in that tool already - roughly about 3,000 ratings. But we recently updated the code to track a new metric, something that we were not tracking before. So we need more data points now, and we need it in a fairly short period of time. As in, two weeks, if possible! Not much time at all.
He asked me if I'd put a request out for some help, so here I am. :)
This is just a really quick request - if you're a fan of the project an...
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The Innovator's Dilemma. Why Working in a Startup is Fun. - 05/06/2009 - 10:00 AM:
I'm reading a book right at the moment that is extremely encouraging to startups, or at the very least, should give you an interesting perspective on the role of startups in any given industry. It's called, The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. Now, I tend to read business-related books almost at random. I go out and find a bunch of them, and then work my way through the list on the assumption that I'll come across some nuggets of useful information.
I almost stopped reading The Innovator's Dilemma, because it specifically focuses on how to develop disruptive technologies inside of a large corporation. Since we're not a large corporation yet, I was tempted to pass it up. But I didn't, and I'm glad I didn't. We deal with large corporations on a daily basis, and I figured that understanding things from their perspective was well worth the effort.
What I found was actually a few nuggets of wisdom that I think every startup employee or owner...
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An Interesting Week: Business Panels and New Programmers. - 04/17/2009 - 11:24 AM:
It's been a strange sort of week. I spent much of it feeling as if I'm battling a cold, and am just a little bit out of it. Yesterday, for example, I spent the entire day chasing down a bug in the code that turned out to not really exist - it was an oddity created by a bad assumption. Then I attended, and was somehow unexpectedly roped into sitting on a panel for a local business conference, only to discover just beforehand that I was actually wearing two shoes that didn't match; my left and right shoe each came from a different pair, one dark brown, one black. Somehow, I'd mixed up my dress shoes in the closet and not paid enough attention to notice.
The worse part is that I have a sinking suspicion that I've been wearing them this way for weeks. :) In my own defense, the photo makes the difference look more obvious than it really is, but still...
That said, the panel itself was fairly fun, and I'm glad I was able to do it. I had to turn down a pan...
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The Wheel of Time's Missing Characters. - 04/01/2009 - 6:00 PM:
I grew up reading The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. When he passed away, it was a significant moment to me, partly because he was one of three authors I grew up wanting to meet (the other two were Michael Crichton and Stephen King, only one of which is still alive). For those of you not familiar with the series, here's a little background. The Wheel of Time is an epic fantasy series that began sometime in the early 1990's. The first 11 novels of the series have been significant bestsellers, with three of the most recent novels hitting the #1 spot in the New York Times Bestselling list. As a series, it's sold over 30 million copies, which means it beats out Twilight by about 1 million copies (last I checked). It's a bit short of Harry Potter's 400+ million copies, but it's a big series. Lots of people take it seriously.
Before he passed away, Robert Jordan promised that the next book, the 12th one, would be the last of the series, ending a story arch that ...
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Waiting for Final Battlestar Galactica. 10,000 Hours of What? - 03/20/2009 - 9:48 PM:
I'm sitting here waiting for the final episode of Battlestar Galactia to air (I've got about 27 minutes), and decided I should let the world know that we're all still alive. The trip to New York, then San Francisco, left us swamped with things to do. Reports to assemble, people to talk to, things to present. This weekend is the first weekend since New York that the entire office hasn't worked at least two full work days on Saturday and Sunday. Before we went full time, Paul and I calculated that we were working an average of 52 hours a week on Novel Projects, and 25 hours a week on outside contracts to keep ourselves alive. Now that we don't have outside contracts, I think we've just shifted the entire focus over. 70 hour weeks are not uncommon. I've been using a time tracker called T-Sheets to track my day to day time; once on the other side, good or bad, I think it will be interesting too see what sort of time commitment starting a company like this really takes.
...
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Home From New York. Excellent Trip, But Sometimes Frustrating Conference. - 02/14/2009 - 12:01 PM:
We're back from the conference, now - we arrived late on Thursday night, and I think everyone is glad to be home. Dan has returned to Florida, and I'm pretty sure everyone on the team is going to basically hibernate for the weekend.
Due to an inconsistent Internet connection at the hotel, the BookLamp Flickr and Twitter feeds ended up being our friends. Hopefully you knew they existed (the next iteration of CGHM will feature them more obviously).
I'll talk about the Tools of Change conference in more depth next week, but it was both interesting and very positive. Every private meeting was simply excellent. The actual panels, though, gave me very mixed feelings. There is a very specific focus in the publishing industry that seems to be all about books, and about virtually nothing else. I watched a panel discussing why video games such as World of Warcraf...
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