And here’s an excerpt from a Haaretz article about “an anarchist group” in Nir Moshe.

“The journey began with a visit to Nir Moshe, where a group of anarchists lives and grows vegetables on an organic farm.”

A blogger called “gouldy” describes volunteering in Nir Moshe in a TravelPod post titled “Green Living next to Gaza” within the sound of bombs.

The author Paolo Bacigalupi said in a great interview about his career at the Mumpsimus blog, “With “Sand and Slag”, I had a beef with an old boss of mine, and his absolute belief that science would solve all our problems into the future.” This excerpt hints at the origin of the disturbing story, “The People of Sand and Slag.”

Paolo Bacigalupi, author of the widely acclaimed stories in the collection Pump Six and Other Stories, describes how he came up with the ideas for them at Mumpsimus.

The folks at Trashotron describe the Pump Six collection, and even host an mp3 audio file of “The People of Sand and Slag” read by the author, which you can listen to free. And I hope they forgive my direct link to it.

Bacigalupi was featured on NPR’s Weekend Sunday Edition recently with his reading of a short excerpt of another of his famous “Green Sci-Fi” classics, “The Calorie Man.”

My favorite Pump Six blurb:

“I hate this guy. All of a sudden he comes out of nowhere, writing like a weird angel, and winning awards, and knocking us old pros out of the box with stories about stuff we hadn’t gotten around to thinking up yet. (Like that stupid bio dog!) Plus he’s young and good looking. Luckily, he has an unpronounceable name.”
– Terry Bisson, author of Numbers Don’t Lie and “Greetings”

[Update: found this interview of Paolo Bacigalupi from July of this year by Charles Tam]
[Another update: Boing Boing post about a new SF collection entitled Seeds of Change, including a story by Ken MacLeod]

A Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow about rats in an upscale L.A. community got me thinking about how vermin could be controlled in an off-grid, organic-friendly manner.

One of the commenters to Doctorow’s post mentioned Jack Russells as rat hunters. Cory’s personal blog is called CrapHound. Another recent post by Doctorow about satirical WWI-era maps featured countries represented by different canine breeds. So with dogs on the brain, I searched Wikipedia for Jack Russells, but found no mention of their rat hunting skills. However, I did find a “related link” to a breed I’d never heard of before–the Rat Terrier.

Rat terriers seem to be lost Americana, like the Victory Gardens of WW1 and WW2, and deserve to be rescued from the dustbin of history.

If you were creeped out by Willard, then these are the kind of dogs you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Terrier:

Rat Terriers were cherished as loyal and efficient killers of vermin on 20th century American Farms, as well as excellent hunting companions. As a result they were one of the most popular dog types from the 1920s to the 1940s. However the widespread use of chemical pesticides and the growth of commercial farming led to a sharp decline in the breed from the 1950s onwards. Fortunately breed loyalists maintained the bloodline, leading to the modern Rat Terrier we enjoy today.

But what if tobacco plants had positive alternative uses?

Using research from university studies, Bill Drake makes the case for growing zero-nicotine tobacco for biomass rather than smoking.

Tobacco-based ethanol can be produced for far less cost per gallon, with far more economically valuable sidestreams, than corn-based ethanol. . .tobacco is a heavily coppicing plant, enabling it to produce very high biomass tonnage. . .tobacco thrives on poor soils in a wide range of environments. . .not only would tobacco fuel not take away from food crop production, as corn-based ethanol does, it would actually add immense tonnage of food-grade protein that can be extracted from the sludge remaining after ethanol is produced.

A recent Reuters story makes similar claims from different sources.

[Safety reminder for biofuel homebrewers:
BBC reports Man hurt in fuel-making explosion]

In Somalia, for example, each person typically uses four bags of charcoal per month for cooking. That’s equivalent to a large tree that takes 50 years to grow in that arid region of goats and camels. When the village of Bander Bayla was struck by a tsunami, the relief effort included 950 large solar ovens, able to cook just as quickly as the fuel burning stoves they replaced, eliminating further deforestation and unhealthy smoke from their cooking fires. This YouTube video has that story.

Here’s a video of smaller solar cookers, including the one being unfolded in the animated GIF:

“I had a technical self-reliance question that you could address on the blog, MLL list, or directly: What are the requirements of a root cellar? We have a dirt floor, brick walled basement, but what alterations would be needed to store food through the winter effectively?”

Heather Flores, in her book Food Not Lawns, wrote on page 206, “Getting rid of your refrigerator is a great way to open up space in your kitchen, reduce unpleasant cleaning chores, and cut a big chunk out of your energy consumption at home.”

Flores discusses food safety, advocates local produce because it stays fresh longer, suggests “building a draft box and/or a root cellar to store perishables” and describes them in more detail.

Here’s a site with many links about root cellars.

Also, here’s what Harvey Ussery of The Modern Homestead, who I’ve talked to personally, and who has enough experience to write about homesteading for Mother Earth News, wrote on the subject:

“I do not have a proper root cellar. An alternative is what people used to call a “clamp.” Basically, that’s just a hole in the ground, with some protection from frost (I’ve used straw bales) and something to shed rain so your vegetables don’t end up in standing water. Such storage is better than a refrigerator, which is dehydrating. Inside the clamp, the temperature is cold, just above freezing, but the humidity is high. Root crops such as carrots, turnips, beets, daikon and other winter radishes, and rutabagas keep very well in a clamp—also cabbages and Chinese cabbages.”

“Another strategy for cabbages is to pull up by the roots, stack them in a mound with the roots up, and cover heavily enough with straw to prevent freezing.”

“We store potatoes and sweet potatoes in the basement. (Ellen wraps the better tubers of sweet potatoes in newspaper.) Conditions are not ideal there because of waste heat from the furnace, but they are good enough—the tubers keep until late winter.”

Wind power may be viewed as an indirect form of solar energy moving the atmosphere, but megawatt production (like the Pickens Plan) is restricted to select wind corridors. But despite recent advances over current wind turbines, thanks to lift from airfoils (shape of airplane wings) with clever mechanical linkages and Shawn Frayne’s micropower windbelt for cheap, small and remote locations, overall there is more potential for renewable energy from direct sunlight.

The difference between wind and solar is even illustrated in Gore’s remarks, although comparing them wasn’t his primary focus. Here’s an excerpt from his speech from an article in The New York Times:

“We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet,” Mr. Gore said. “Every bit of that’s got to change.”

And it can change, he said, citing some scientists’ estimates that enough solar energy falls on the surface of the earth in 40 minutes to meet the world’s energy needs for a year, and that the winds that blow across the Midwest every day could meet the country’s daily electricity needs.

MIT reported a student project to build an innovative 12-foot parabolic strip solar collector to produce steam efficiently, based on Washington state inventor Doug Wood’s designs:

One of the keys to making an inexpensive design was something Wood discovered by accident as he built a variety of solar dishes over the years: Smaller really is better. Unlike many technologies where economies of scale dictate large sizes, a smaller dish requires so much less support structure that it ends up costing only a third as much, for a given collecting area.

MIT Sloan School of Management lecturer David Pelly, in whose class this project first took shape last fall, says that, “I’ve looked for years at a variety of solar approaches, and this is the cheapest I’ve seen. And the key thing in scaling it globally is that all of the materials are inexpensive and accessible anywhere in the world.”

Pelly adds that “I’ve looked all over for solar technology that could scale without subsidies. Almost nothing I’ve looked at has that potential. This does.”

This project is a welcome antidote to the notion that a huge central grid is more cost efficient. Off-grid homesteaders, rejoice!

Wizard Saruman isn’t going to like this.

A commenter on another site said “crows are the new dogs” after watching a widely blogged TED talk by Joshua Klein on how he taught crows to find coins and put them in special vending machines. Crows will remember specific people for years and can make tools to obtain treats. Their brain to body ratio is the same as chimpanzees.

Perhaps they could be trained to search for lost people and somehow signal their location, just like in Lord of the Rings.

Might cockroaches, rats, mosquitos, fleas, and/or locusts also be employed for human benefit?

[Update: Boing Boing reports crows stealing coins from a car wash.]

A process that looks simple is found at kitchen-biodiesel.com. The “Automatic Alternative” shown below the animation is one of their sponsor’s systems.

Don’t take the abbreviated animated GIF thumbnail I made from images there as the whole process. Make sure to actually visit their site to get a full description of each step including temperature, the amounts of reactants to use, times to heat, cool and settle, and which ingredients are toxic or corrosive. For example, here are the warnings for methanol and lye:

Methanol
POISON! Causes eye and skin irritation. May be absorbed through intact skin. This substance has caused adverse reproductive and fetal effects in animals. Danger! Flammable liquid and vapor. Harmful if inhaled. May be FATAL or cause BLINDNESS if swallowed. May cause central nervous system depression. May cause digestive tract irritation with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

Sodium Hydroxide
POISON! DANGER! CORROSIVE. MAY BE FATAL IF SWALLOWED. HARMFUL IF INHALED. CAUSES BURNS TO ANY AREA OF CONTACT. REACTS WITH WATER, ACIDS AND OTHER MATERIALS.

Do NOT inhale any vapors. Cartridge respirators do not work against methanol.

A CNN report about Nigerian civil engineer, Dr Joseph Adelegan, and his projects to convert waste into useful commodities, describes his latest idea to recover energy from cassava processing waste, which in the past would be dumped untreated to pollute local water supplies.

Through innovative biogas technology, zero emission bioreactors at specially constructed plants treat the cassava waste and produce biogas which drives microturbines for low cost, safe and reliable off-grid efficient lighting to thousands of rural homes.

Greywater is water that flows down sink, shower, and washing machine drains–but not the toilet. Greywater may contain traces of dirt, food, grease, hair, and household cleaning products. While greywater may look “dirty,” it is a safe and even beneficial source of irrigation water. If released into rivers, lakes, or estuaries, the nutrients in greywater (mainly phosphate from detergent) become pollutants, but to garden plants, they are valuable fertilizer. . .

A handful of uncooked rice might have been more appropriate.

You’ve got to see the menu to believe it.

The July 8th post includes the image of their cabin in the trees (cropped here in reduced thumbnail):

When we first bought our forest land, we tried camping in our trailer. The trouble with that was - we would frequently have to haul the trailer down to town to fill up on water, and empty grey and black water tanks. It was a tiny trailer, no room for much and more than 2 people really cramped the space. The best thing it had going for it - it could be moved. So we sold it and had this tiny, 12 x 16′ 2 story cabin built. It has all the comforts of home, but smaller!

The post continues with a description of the cabin accommodations, water treatment, the propane refrigerator, and a noisy, hated generator that “spoils the ambiance.” Solar may be used for the small energy loads in the future.

The founders already have 100s of acres to start, from the 419 area code on the site I guess the land is in Northeastern Ohio. New members will live in RVs to start, then move into a newly constructed cob house. More videos are at their site, http://projectoffthegrid.com.

Until urban centers in the U.S. become something other than crime-riddled, polluted cesspools of disease and poverty, I’m taking the rural side of the debate. Although I’m on five acres in Pahrump at the moment, I have far too many projects that require my presence in Vegas and Los Angeles to say I’ve made a clean break. I’m working on it.

I’d be thrilled to have new designs solve the problems of the cities. Sure, multi-layer forest gardens and other edible landscapes can be created in small spaces, such as reported by Ilex at the Homesteading In A Condo blog, but who can afford the land? Rural land is often one tenth the price per acre.

An ebook in progress by GeRue “and many friends” called The Complete Guide to Country Living can be read online. An excerpt warns against moving to the country unprepared:

Rural life for many is a wonderful alternative to city crime, crowding and cost of living. The majority of rural counties are gaining population. Those moving from city to country are often ill equipped for their new lives. From a place of public utilities they now find themselves in charge of their own water and waste systems. Enthralled with the concept of self-reliance and by acres of space they plant huge gardens and bring home cute kids, calves, colts, and shoats. The garden grows, goes to weeds and bugs, the veggies rot. Cute little animals become seriously large charges that injure themselves, get sick, resist confinement, and eat horrendous amounts of expensive feed. Delight and amusement changes to consternation and disenchantment.

Let us have none of that.

This online work in progress mentions permaculture, making a living on the internet, and ham radio. My way of thinking.

William McDonough, co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, discusses sustainable design in architecture and ends with his astounding plans for twelve new cities in China. Quite a contrast from the toxic hell that is Beijing. From Wikipedia:

Air pollution levels on an average day in Beijing are nearly five times above World Health Organization standards for safety. China’s extremely inefficient use of coal - the country’s main source of energy - results in much of the pollution. Despite promises to stage a green 2008 Summer Olympics, Bejing has had persistent air pollution - thus city officials are planning to reduce its motor traffic by half during the Games to improve air quality. In February 2008, the Chinese government announced that it would close 144 gas stations in Beijing, which amounts to about 10% of such stations in the city, to improve air quality in preparation for the Olympics.

I bought a product at the NW Flower and Garden show this year called seedballz I have some balls left over and thought… what will I do with my balls? I know- I will give them away! They are cool- they are handrolled by people with disabilities, and they donate 5% from their profit from sales to women in financial need. . .

I’m all for Food Not Lawns, Edible Estates, and Urban Homesteading if you’ve already got a house in the ‘burbs. My only quibble is that for renters looking to buy a place, for a fraction of the price of city or suburban property you could get rural land without the traffic and pollution. You could market stuff on the internet (anything, new and used, even downloadable information products, and no I don’t mean through eBay) and get your internet, TV and phone service via satellite. But that’s an ongoing argument for other posts.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to anyone choosing to be a vegetarian, a Vegan, or pro-Ana for that matter. Short of cannibalism by murder, everyone should eat — and not eat — whatever they want to.

I was married to a vegetarian and was a vegetarian, myself for five years — after my divorce. I even wrote an article in 1986 regarding my ignored suggestions to McDonalds and Burger King that they could get customers like me in — who wasn’t frequenting their fine establishments because nothing was offered for my wife — by putting veggie patties on their menu.

It took a while but eventually they did.

But PETA is going typically off the rails with its new campaign to target celebrities who eat meat, in the same way these extremists previously attacked celebrities who wear fur or leather.  Making Jessica Simpson their first celebrity target because she sported a T-shirt that reads, “Real Girls Eat Meat” — which if you’re dirty-minded like me doesn’t necessarily even refer to consuming  animal products and by-products –  is a Lake Pontchartrain Causeway too far.

PETAfeds don’t just eat nuts — they are nuts.

Vegetarians who morally condemn meat hate nature. They megalomanically claim for themselves a Godlike superiority based on the pathetic fallacy that non-reasoning creatures are as capable of experiencing suffering as self-conscious beings capable of  nostalgia, dread, and charity. They have no logical objection to a wolf killing and eating a sheep, or a lion stalking and killing a gazelle for food, but they fancy themselves morally superior to a human hunter shooting and eating a stag. It’s not that these insufferable busybodies love animals. It’s that they hate their own species, which nature has given a reasoning power they have failed to master.

As an architect and architectural critic, John Ruskin was an early advocate of conforming man-made structures to the environment they’re built on, and using local materials for their construction. The phrase “pathetic fallacy” comes from Ruskin. He originated the term to refer to the poetic use of attributing human characteristics to inanimate objects or animals.

–J. Neil Schulman, author and filmmaker
http://www.jneilschulman.com

J. Neil Schulman’s articles on animals rights have been widely reprinted, including in the textbook Animal Rights. His articles on the subject can be found here and here.

Here is his 1986 article about his suggestion to Burger King:

HOW BURGER KING GROUND UP A CONSUMER SUGGESTION

by J. Neil Schulman

In the hamburger war, I’m just not a guy you want as an enemy.  Out of MacDonald’s billions and billions served, I take personal responsibility for a couple of thousand.  If Wendy’s really wants to know where the beef is, they should check out my waistline.  And when Burger King commercials ask me if I’m hungry, I shoot back questions about the Pope’s Catholicism.

So last year, when I married a gifted, gorgeous, and goyische gal, friends worried about my mixed marriage–to a vegetarian.  My wife, Kate, doesn’t eat meat, fish, or fowl. I’ll eat anything that will keep still long enough to be salted.

But like all mixed marriages, a modus vivendi had to be established.  Ours is that we don’t try to convert the other to our own gastronomic faith.  When Kate and I eat together at home, we cook vegetarian because I enjoy sharing meals with my wife.

But when we eat out we order separately–no problem if a restaurant has a main dish on the menu that Kate can eat: anything vegetarian with a reasonable amount of protein.

McDonald’s doesn’t.  Though Burger King and Wendy’s have salad bars, neither is strong on protein.  Those wedding bells were definitely breaking up that old gang of mine.  So long, Ronald.  Nice to ‘ve known ya, Herb.

Even before I married a vegetarian, I knew how to cook up a pretty decent meatless burger.  You sautee chopped eggplant with a cup uncooked bulgur, some bell pepper and onions.  Mix in a pound of chopped firm tofu, a half pound of chopped mixed nuts, sunflower and sesame seeds, some salt and ground garlic.  Beat in an egg, form into patties, and grill.  Serve with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun.  It’s gotten me past more than one Big Mac attack.

So, when cooking up Veggie Macs, Kate asked me how long I thought it would take for one of the burger giants to woo the expanding health-food market, I thought, “The sooner one of them does, it’s hello to real Big Macs and Whoppers again.”

Quixotically, I wrote to the presidents of the two national burger chains represented in my neighborhood: Edward Rensi of McDonald’s and Jay Darling of Burger King.  The gist of my letter to each was the same: how about putting a meatless burger on the menu so vegetarians–and burger lovers like me who eat with one–could come back to their chains?

“Most important to your bottom line,” I wrote, “even non-vegetarians might prefer a non-meat/fish/fowl main dish once in a while in these health/cholesterol/weight-conscious days.”

My first response was from a Supervisor of Consumer Relations for Burger King:

“We appreciate it when our customers take the time to write. However, I regret to inform you that Burger King Corporation is unable to accept unsolicited ideas or suggestions.  You will be interested to know that we have large departments to research, develop and market our products.  Because of the experience and skills of the people in these departments, we make it a policy not to accept suggestions from members of the public.”

Returned therein was my letter to Mr. Darling, along with two fifty-cents Burger King Gift Certificates and the wish:

“Please accept the enclosed complimentary coupons for you and your wife to use on your next visit to any one of our restaurants.”

As Clint Eastwood would say: “Yah.”

I wrote again to Mr. Darling, expressing my plight without making any suggestions.  Again, my letter was intercepted by the same Supervisor and forwarded to an Executive Vice President, who took charge of expanding their reasons for brushing me off.

Burger King spent a fortune to bring in Herb.  But they won’t even lift a finger to bring in Herbivores.

Burger King’s imperious responses to my letters reminds me of another monarch–the one who said, “Let them eat cake.”  This makes me broiling mad.

It’s overwhelmingly likely that Burger King’s policy is intended to protect them.  If they introduce a new product once suggested by a customer, that customer might sue them for stealing an idea which originated earlier in a research department.

But if by some odd chance Burger King’s army of marketing mavins had somehow overlooked my admittedly obvious suggestion, the “Not Invented Here” syndrome would make sure the idea would never enter the corporate decision-making process.

How can free enterprise be free if corporations are so afraid of their own customers that a simple inquiry has to be answered with Nixonian stonewalling?

After this experience, I doubt I’ll ever find the opportunity to use the two Burger King fifty-cent gift certificates.  When Burger King makes a mistake, it’s a Whopper.

[Update: Neil sent along this interesting link]:
http://www.petakillsanimals.com

The fly in this ointment is that one of PETA’s recent campaigns is to treat the sale of common predator bugs the same as cows in the slaughterhouse or dogs from the pet store.

Don’t we get enough puritanism from the right? I suppose PETA would prefer non-commercial methods of bringing in good bugs, but how would that be better? Non-profits would build air conditioned tiny packing boxes with teeny satellite TVs for the critters to watch when they’re shipped? Guess I won’t be selling any more butterfly wing coats from now on.

The next thing we’ll have to feel guilty about is the exploitation of plants. They have feelings, you know. Check out Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality to be re-educated.

Animal loving gardeners will just have to use insecticide chemicals instead. Mmm, I love the smell of organophosphates in the morning.

[Update: As noted in another post today, Neil sent the following interesting link]:
http://www.petakillsanimals.com

“. . .efficient aerodynamic design lends itself to smaller wind turbines, which can operate closer to the ground or on a rooftop. They can handle a wide range of wind velocities, anywhere between 4 and 80 mph. They generate their power at lower rotational speed, so there is less noise and vibration hence less wear and tear. But most importantly the AeroCam can be manufactured at a lower cost than conventional turbines. This makes the overall economic argument very compelling.”

In severe cases, the Salmonella infection may spread from the intestines to the blood stream, and then to other body sites and can cause death unless the person is treated promptly with antibiotics. . .Some people afflicted with Salmonellosis later experience reactive arthritis, which can have long-lasting, disabling effects.

A recent Digg front page item described ways of fighting plant bacteria, including “compost tea,” as well as more obvious methods such as sanitary use of gardening tools and discarding hopelessly infected foliage.

Commenters on Digg were surprised that such an article made it to the front page. “How many Digg-reading web surfers are into this?” (I’m softening the “wtf?” vulgarity of the actual remark.) I’m encouraged that even computer nerds seem to be getting into the food self sufficiency act. Confirms the idea that urban gardening will be a dominant trend.

Another commenter recommended commercial products Dutch Master ZONE and Penetrator, while yet another said that they weren’t so effective in his area.

An older report from another Cuban source says:

The Cienfuegos oil refinery, a new joint Cuba- Venezuela project, reached 112.9 percent its target production for the first two months of operation.

That’s an echo from the Soviet days about overproduction in the latest five year plan.

The urban gardening that goes on in Cuba is admirable and we should all wish to have the same level of activity in every country. But, with this Venezuelan oil fueling Cuba’s revived export agriculture and new petroleum products exported above Cuba’s 120,000 barrels per day consumption, maybe we’ll hear a little less about how Cuba is such a sustainable green utopia.

As one commenter at Digg noticed, TCPR’s headline unfairly compares Gore’s annual usage to the average household’s monthly usage and Gore also uses his mansion as an office. But the truth of the matter still stinks.

Another Digg commenter recalled a Snopes write-up of a popular right wing political email that often gets forwarded. It describes George Bush’s Crawford, Texas “Western White House” as an exemplar of green architecture on every level compared to Al Gore’s ever more energy wasteful mansion.

Cindy Sheehan said “Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch (formerly Ken Engelbrecht’s hog farm)” was hard to approach for some mysterious reason.

Sadly, outrageously, Snopes, a site dedicated to debunking popular myths, says that the “Bush house is much more green than the Gore mansion” message is actually “TRUE.”

I lived in Daly City over 25 years ago, so watching this video of a farm springing up next to the 280 freeway near Daly City interested me. Well, not right next to the freeway, there’s enough land for a buffer zone. Quoting from the history page on their website:

The pluralism of the Farm’s history is indicated even by all the names given to the land: St. Mary’s Youth Farm, the SLUG Farm, and Alemany Farm. Rather than attempt an incomplete history of the Alemany Farm, you will instead find here a collection of narratives and archives starting way back in 1994.

The crops planted have expanded from just one row to a large flat area of the 4 and 1/2 acres and into another large section. The harvest was originally divided among the weekend volunteers but now there are plans for a farmers market, chickens and goats to provide fertility for the soil and keeping their own bees for pollination.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete.
. . .
What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil.

CNN Money reports “Exxon getting out of retail gas business” June 12, 2008: 04:33 PM EST.

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Exxon Mobil is getting out of the retail gasoline business, a market where profits have gotten tougher. . .

J. Neil Schulman alerted me to the cable TV news report and offers this comment:

“For Exxon-Mobil, the current incarnation of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil company — which my parents’ generation knew as “Esso” — to exit the retail gasoline business by selling off all its gas stations, is the San Andreas of financial earthquakes. This is exactly the sort of indicator of financial crisis I projected due to Federal Reserve mismanagement in my 1979 speculative novel, Alongside Night.”

–Author/Filmmaker, J. Neil Schulman, http://www.alongsidenight.com

Alex found out later that despite a full parking lot and packed attendance inside a fairly large meeting room, only a couple of hundred books were sold that evening. I’m sure at the Vice President’s level, an advance was paid and touring was part of the contract.

Alex Mandossian knows that the situation is very bad for the non-celebrity new writer or even a veteran “mid-list” author. At a couple of bucks royalty per sale and sparse attendance at signings, it’s impossible for a regular person to make a living following the usual pattern.

Alex solved the problem by adapting his successful teleseminar internet marketing techniques to allow readers throughout the world to interact with an author during live interviews. Books can be sold, signed and shipped during the phone or webinar session and the recording can be repurposed for other money generating activities.

Look for “Birth of the ‘Virtual Book Tour’” at Alex’s blog for an in-depth explanation in the video included with his text blog post.

[Update: I almost forgot the green angle. As Alex notes in his presentation, Virtual Book Tours remove the need for authors to jet around to various cities and also eliminates readers having to drive to the bookstore for the signing event. It’s more convenient for everyone, more lucrative for the author to reach a global audience, and while computers do use some electricity (about 150 watts on average, but only 50 watts for laptops), Virtual Book Tours are about 29 times more energy efficient than physical transportation.]