Category: publicity

Percent Human DNA ribbon

When I attended my first WorldCon, I created some Airship Pirate ribbons to promote the serialization of Revin’s Heart. It was (from my perspective) a wildly successful promotional campaign. It was a huge amount of fun, gave me an ice breaker to discuss my book as people walked by the table in the dealer room, and was surprisingly (to me) gratifying to see dozens of strangers all over the convention wearing my ribbon. Since then, I’ve thinking about what I could do to meet or surpass the standard I set then. I think I may have done it with a new ribbon to promote the Better Angels.

The Better Angels are non-human biological androids. That means that they have no human DNA — they are the product of clean-room biological engineering. They are molecularly assembled to spec, fully grown (well, as pre-teen girls), and have a personality module that has programming to govern their behavior. So, although they look like pre-teen girls, they are not human. They were not born. They don’t grow or develop. And they are programmed with a stack of modules that provide all of the functionality for their behavior, from basic autonomic physiology to language and higher-order behavior. In the case of the Angels, they can be singing-and-dancing pop idols or ruthless, cold-blooded covert-military soldiers (Or more! Read the stories to see what else they can do!)

This time, I’ve created a ribbon people can wear with a space to write in their percentage of “human DNA.” You might ask, “How do you know your own percentage of human DNA?” What a great question! To answer that question, I’ve created an app (well, just a webpage, actually) that analyses your DNA and tells you what percentage is “human.” The Better Angels, of course, have zero percent “human DNA”, but how much do you have? Luckily, the app can tell you!

screen of Makasete Human DNA Analysis screen

The 任せて Human DNA Analysis app is simple to operate. You scan a QR code to open the app on your mobile device and tap the fingerprint icon on the screen. The app runs, emits several progress messages, and finally reports your percentage of “human DNA”. Sometimes the first time it runs, it may give you anomalous results. But if you run it a second time (or more), it gives you “more accurate,” precise, and consistent results.

Note the disclaimer at the bottom of the page, however: “Accuracy of 任せて DNA Analysis ±100%”

Also note that, yes, of course I could link the app here. But you’re going to have to come visit me in the dealer room to get the QR code. (smiley-face)

I used to write little web apps like this all the time. For most of my career, I was the Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center at UMass Amherst. I created dozens little web apps for teaching or infrastructure for the Biology Department. But I haven’t done anything like that for a few years. I had to solve a variety of minor technical problems to make it work, and I was tickled to find that I haven’t completely lost my touch.

I invested a fair amount of time investigating what to use as a plausible value of percent human DNA. The simplest answer would have been 99% or something like that. But that wouldn’t have given me a context to talk about the structure of the human genome, which is delightfully weird and complex.

Most people know there are these things called “genes.” And a lot of people know that genes contain the “code” for proteins. When Francis Crick and others “cracked the genetic code” there was great optimism that we would quickly be able to read the “blueprints of life.” But genomic structure turned out to be way, way, way more complicated.

It turns out that only a tiny part (1%-2%) of the DNA in your genome contains coding sequences to make proteins. There are lots of other sequences in there, many of which are still only poorly understood. Each coding sequence is paired with regulatory sequences that control when it is transcribed. There are also bits that code for RNAs that aren’t translated into proteins (transfer RNAs, etc). As much as 8% of your genome includes human endogenous retroviral sequences. Retroviruses (like HIV, varicella-zoster (aka chicken pox), and herpes) have been sticking their DNA into eukaryotic genomes for billions of years. Then there are structural and repetitive sequences, that include things like centromeres, telomeres, and microsatelites, that may comprise as much as 50% of your genome.

Humans are primates and mammals and tetrapods and vertebrates and eukaryotes. The amount of “uniquely human” DNA is actually vanishingly small. Almost all of our genes are literally identical with bonobos (our closest primate relatives) and are functionally identical with all mammals and tetrapods and eukaryotes. Some proteins (like ubiquitin and cytochrome C) have been honed by billions of years of evolution and are virtually identical across all living organisms.

In the end, I met with a couple of professional biologists to ask them what percentage I should report as “human DNA” with the goal of being able to tell a fun story about genomic structure. They were pretty amused by the idea, once they got past the science fictional elements (One said, “What! They don’t go through development!?”), and we agreed to pick something something around 60%.

The ribbons are currently scheduled to be delivered in time that I should have them for Readercon! And I will bring plenty to Worldcon. (Well, a goodly number, anyway. These things don’t grow on trees, after all.) I’m excited, because I suspect they’ll be a hit and, when people see others wearing them, they’ll want to stop by the table to get one of their own. And, who knows, maybe even pick up a book!

So if you’re coming to Readercon or Worldcon, come find me at the Water Dragon Publishing table and get your DNA analyzed.

At one time, an author might be able to focus on writing and let their publisher handle publicity. Now, an author is functionally expected to build and maintain a personal brand to attract readers independently of the publisher. This requires some avenue of providing information about your work and yourself that you can use to reach readers. Setting up an author website is the way to go.

There are a number of options to provide a channel of information. Some are “free”. You can use a social media platform (like Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn). Some are commercial platforms that you can use to restrict some or all of your content to paying customers (like Substack or Patreon). I however am primarily here to talk about another way: building an independent channel of information that you own, control, and can easily take with you.

The real problem with both the “free” and platform solutions is that letting a corporation stand between you and the public is that, ultimately, the service risks becoming (or has already been) enshittified. By positioning themselves between you and your public, their incentives are diametrically opposed to yours. Facebook makes its money by hiding your posts from your “friends” — unless you pay them. (The Oatmeal concisely illustrated this in his comic Reaching People on the Internet).

Today I’m going to describe my approach which has three basic components: purchase your own domain name, contract with a hosting service, and use a content management system. This ensures that you can reliably create your own information channel that is reliable, portable, and under own control. I am going to describe how I used Dreamhost to register a domain name and provide a hosting service that I configured to use the WordPress content management system (maintained by the hosting service).

Before actually setting anything up, it’s worth considering what information you intend to share and how it should be organized and managed. It’s worth looking at a number of other authors’ sites to see what information they provide and how they organize it. As an author, I want to share information about myself with a publicity photo photo, a biography, my current books, and contact information. Then I want to provide a feed of news about my writing activities: my upcoming events, new books, thoughts on writing, etc.

I use the Dreamhost hosting service. I selected it in 2007, so I’ve been using it for nearly 20 years. I’ve been very happy with it. I have one of the least expensive plans that I’ve shared with other people in my family. There are many more expensive plans, but as long as there is a relative trickle of interest in me, it’s plenty. If I felt that I needed more performance, I could upgrade to higher level services, that are still reasonably priced. But I generally haven’t felt the need.

With most of the plans, you get the first domain name included as part of the service. You mostly want to avoid a domain name that is going to conflict with some well-known service. I was able to get “stevendbrewer.com“. It used to be that people were unfamiliar with top-level-domains other than .com. Nowadays, people hardly seem to notice. (If Eritrea ever sells domain names, I would love to get “brew.er”. Every so often I check.) If the .com is already taken, I might look for a different name altogether in order to not be confused with the other entity. I would set your domain name to automatically renew.

Once you’ve registered your domain name, you can set up an email address and a website. As part of the website configuration with Dreamhost, you can have them install and maintain WordPress for you. I would strongly encourage this solution. Maintaining a content management system can be complicated and fraught. Using their solution will make you safer from hackers and save you a lot of unnecessary work.

There are vast number of additional services you can access via the hosting service. You can set up distribution and discussion email lists. (I actually am using micro.blog for my newsletter, which I’ll discuss later.) As I mentioned previously, you can purchase higher levels of webservice, including “dreampress” and “vps” both of which reduce the likelihood of your site becoming unresponsive if many people visit it all at once (i.e. it gets “slashdotted”). I haven’t personally felt the need to purchase this. One useful additional service is to add a txt record to your domain name service for your domain name, which allows you use your domain name as your “handle” in the bluesky service, which offers a form of “verification.”

Once your domain name has propagated and you have WordPress running, you can start setting up your site. There is “dashboard” page visible at a magic-url: add wp-admin after the domain name and you’ll be able to log into your site. From the dashboard, you can find links to configure and manage the entire site. There are a lot of settings to add information and control functionality. There are plugins you can add to add functionality. And you can choose what theme you want for the site.

The settings are accessible in the dashboard. The dashboard itself offers a health check, to ensure everything about the site is configured correctly. Most of the settings are in the sidebar. Under Settings: General, you can set all of the basic info for the site. As you install plugins, their settings will appear here as well.

I use several plugins for additional functionality. I use a paid license for Akismet to filter spam comments that get added to the site. I use WPForms Lite plugin to have a contact form (and can add other forms as necessary). I use the Super WP Cache plugin to improve performance. I installed the Open Graph plugin to improve metadata when I post links at social media sites. And I have two Mastodon plugins: Include Mastodon Feed, which let’s me show my most recent posts in the sidebar and Simple Mastodon Verification that adds the tiny snippet of HTML to my site for my website to be “verified” in Mastodon. Several plugins came along with the theme I selected.

Dreamhost offers a number of advanced themes as part of their install package. I picked “Crio” which is a BoldGrid theme. But there are a vast number of other themes to choose from. I wanted one that offered a list of social media links, a menu of “pages” along the top, and then a feed of news articles.

The page of a theme has a number of regions that can be configured independently. Generally you add content to the regions by installing “widgets.” The Header contains the title of the site (my name) and a “tagline”. The Footer only contains my copyright info. I have a sidebar that I have show up on all pages that provide information I would like people to have accessible to advertise other content on my site that people might be interested in. The body of the site either displays a list of recent posts or the body of either a post or page. It’s worth creating a graphic identity for your site as “favicon” that will show up when people bookmark your page.

From the dashboard you can create pages and posts. I don’t like the default editor to add content, so I use a much more basic one. You can choose the editor you like best. As you post articles you can also add supporting imagery and media to complement your writing. It’s a good idea to have a picture to complement every article.

Once your site is up and running, you might want to publicize your site and posts using social media. I generally craft these posts by hand, but you can use services, like micro.blog to automatically share links to your posts to various services, including via an email newsletter. I primarily use micro.blog to manage an email list. People can subscribe to the list using a form on my blog. It’s possible to manage the list entirely using Dreamhost, but I’ve been using micro.blog which makes it a little easier.

Building an email list “newsletter” is probably the most important tool for maintaining an audience for your work. I hate this, but it’s probably true. Using micro.blog, I can tag certain of my posts to be automatically be sent out via email each month.

In the end, by sharing my hosting service with my brother, I’m spending around $200/year for both Dreamhost and micro.blog. This seems to me to be a reasonable expense to support my author publicity work. That’s about the same as a cup of coffee out per week.

At the 2024 Nebulas convention, I attended of the very last sessions, Planning Your Own Publicity Campaign presented by KC Grifant, Jaye Viner, Eva Elasigue, and Robyn Dabney. It was a great presentation but, as I said in my earlier post about the Nebulas, I didn’t feel like there was a whole lot here that was new to me. It was still nice to know that I wasn’t missing anything obvious. Since I took relatively detailed notes, I thought I’d summarize them here.

The first question for the panel related to the timeline for planning a publicity campaign. Aim to start at least a year out: establish an online presence for yourself: set up a website, start a newsletter, identify people to help and support your campaign, and make a plan. Three to six months out, you should start trying to schedule in-person events (readings, book signings, etc.) You can find a lot of resources on the internet about running a book launch and you should educate yourself. And make sure to have fun.

Another question asked what can you expect your publisher to do. The short answer, of course, is doodlysquat. In the past, trad-pub’ed authors could expect a publisher to mount a publicity campaign for you, but that’s pretty rare now. Small presses mostly don’t have the resources to do very much. They might contact some of the higher-tier trade reviews and provide ARCs, but you mostly have to do the rest. Reviews are critical. The panels suggested reaching out to book bloggers, bookstagrammers, and booktokkers and the like: familiarize yourself with their work to make sure they review stuff like yours, politely send a message with an ARC, and don’t follow-up or expect a response.

Several people talked about planning joint events with other authors, which can increase the draw for readings and signings.

Most panelists agreed that your local indy bookstore is, after your publisher, the most important relationship to foster. They are generally supportive of genre fiction and can help you organize a launch event. Local libraries can also be effective partners.

The moderator asked how people spent money in support of their campaign. Few panelists found advertising to be very effective. It’s an artform and requires a lot of expertise to pull it off effectively. This is consistent with my experience as well. One mentioned boosting some posts at Facebook for $15. But swag was a popular thing to spend some money on: stickers, bookmarks, and other promotional materials. And events: conferences, conventions and, in particular, local comicons, which would often have an “authors alley” where you sell books and meet with fans.

One potential way to spend money is to hire publicist. Nobody on the panel had worked with one. One suggested that they tended to be outrageously expensive (e.g. a $10k monthly minimum).

They mentioned some expenses that didn’t really sound like “publicity” to me. One mentioned the importance to a cover when selling on the internet and not cheap out. Also it might be worth paying for a developmental editor to help sharpen your story. Or line editing. These are definitely important, but seem like they should be part of the publishing process. But perhaps important to remember for self-publishers.

They finally offered a few closing thoughts: Don’t try to do everything. Go for it, but remember to be happy with your book. And, finally, always be writing the next thing.