Once upon a time, I gave a presentation about spinning at a conference, and now that presentation is being turned into an article. A peer-reviewed one... and I'm currently working on the peer's comments and input.

If you're not familiar with this process of peer-reviewed publishing, let me give you the quick rundown. You hand in your paper, the editor reads it and comments on it (though that stage is optional), and sometimes you're then asked to change/expand/amend things. After that, the draft is handed on to one or more reviewers; they usually get a list of questions to help them evaluate the paper, and to help the editor(s) evaluate the peers' feedback. Those questions usually include things like "Is the paper well-structured?" and "Does the paper add to scientific discourse on the topic?". Once the reviewers have sent back their feedback forms and the paper itself with their comments and suggestions for changes in it, you'll get the whole load back from the editors, without any indication of who your peer reviewers are. Then it's up to you to go through the feedback forms and comments, and use them to make your paper better.

If you're lucky, you are getting solid, constructive feedback on your content, pointing out where things are still unclear, or where something is missing. A peer review can also show how different views on a single topic can be, depending on the individual and their area of specialisation, or their academic background. Archaeologists, for instance, will look at other things, or at the same things differently, than historians or art historians.

In any case, once you've tweaked and added and changed and wrote your replies to comments for the editor to read, you send your paper back again. Then you might hear back from the editor once more, if there are still some things to resolve; otherwise it will go into the process of typesetting. Then you will see it once more for the final proofread... and after that, it's finally all done.

The peer review process is not perfect, but it will definitely help make a paper better by pointing out things that you have missed as an author. Whenever I get the reviews back, though, it takes me a while to process them before I can really get to work on them... it's critique, after all, and that always tends to hurt a bit, no matter how well-deserved, well-meaning, and well-phrased it may be.

After that initial bit of deep breathing and letting it sit for a day or two (or three), though, I've always ended up with a paper I felt was better than before. And, hooray, I'm almost done with the current one!

To my and Heather's great delight, we are in the very, very last stage of getting Ancient Textiles, Modern Science 2 all done and set - the last proofs have arrived, and it's only a matter of giving the book a very last read, catching the very last typos, before it's all good to go to print.

Yay! Getting this book done was a string of pitfalls and delays, due to all kinds of things - crashing computers and illnesses only being two of them. So I'm really happy to get this to a close, and consequently proof-reading is what I am doing now!

If you want to have a look at what the book will contain, it's already listed on the Oxbow website, and you can even pre-order at a special price!

 

Things currently going on here: Writing, and researching, and reading.

I found that I've not done proper, longer research on a topic for quite a while, and it actually took me a bit to get back into it - especially back into the mindframe necessary. Also, there's reading and reading and not necessarily real results from what you are reading, as it might not have the information needed, or goes off on a tangent, or...

So just like making textiles takes time, and sometimes more than expected (or, well, usually), with a lot of the work in the preparation, the very same is true for researching things and writing articles. And just like making a textile, the prep work remains rather invisible for most people, even though it is crucial, and can be really, really time-consuming.

That all said, I'll return to my reading and writing and thinking, after sharing with you my bonus insight for the day:

If you are parceling out wool and take out stray bits of vegetable matter and put those bits right next to your coffee cup, one of them might end up inside it, making for a nice little wake-me-up spike of adrenaline when it tickles your tongue. I cannot recommend this as a coffee enhancer, though.

So... I've been doing some more back-and-forth mailing with my editor at the publishing house, and somemore poking and prodding at numbers regarding the Kickstarter, and I can tell you - it's daunting. Very, very daunting.

I would like to offer the book at a price that will end up being slightly lower than the final retails price, because I'd like to give backers the extra bit of "I got a good deal" feeling that I would want at a crowdfunding thing myself.

The problem with this is that it will involve a good deal of guesswork regarding the final price of the book - which can only be calculated finally once we have the finished manuscript, which needs to be translated first. Which is what I am going to run the Kickstarter for.

So there's some guessing involved, and some insecurity because we'll be dealing with currency change from Euro (the campaign will automatically run in Euro as I'm based in Germany) to British money, and the two are not fixed together regarding exchange rates. By now, I have run a lot of numbers, and I can already see that it will need a really, really huge number of backers if the margins are what I am currently expecting them to be. Too huge - it will look rather unrealistic, I'm afraid, so I will have to tweak and poke some more, and try to find a solution together with the publisher.

Things I'm currently planning to add, Kickstarter-exclusive, are signed (and possibly numbered) bookplates. Also possibly with some nice design on them. There will be Thank-you-postcards somewhere in the works. Most probably the majority of backers will just want the book, though, so I will really need to nail down things regarding its pricing.

Stay tuned - and keep your fingers crossed that we'll be able to hit the target when guesstimating things!

From time to time, or so I've heard, it's good to do something that scares you.

Well. Maybe there's truth to this, and maybe not, but whichever is the case, I'm going to do something that scares me - I will run a Kickstarter.

And yes, that's really scary.

Ages ago, when I published my thesis in German, I was already thinking of getting it translated into English. What I did not know back then was how difficult it would be to get this done. Translating is hard work, and it needs to be done carefully, and this will take time - especially for a hefty volume like the one I wrote. I remember almost toppling over with surprise when I got an estimate for the translation costs the first time. Then I did some test translating, and the appropriate maths that goes with it, and yes - it's sound. It's fair.

It's also a shitload of money, because it takes a shitload of time.

So it's a small wonder that a traditional, smallish publishing house will not be willing, or able, or both, to pay for the translation costs for a book that, despite its relatively great success in Germany, is still a niche publication. Which is a problem.

Finally, though, I have found a publishing house with people adventurous enough to try and go for alternative funding for the translation... which means a normal book contract for the book itself, and a Kickstarter campaign to pay for the translation costs, with the printed book as one of the pledge rewards.

And this is what I'm currently working on (yes, well, among the other things, obviously): trying to think of all the expenses and possible pitfalls, and trying to work out what pledge levels to offer. It's a task that somehow keeps on growing, as the questions add up, and it's surprising how much of an individual pledge's money will disappear into item costs, fulfilment costs, payment and kickstarter fees and taxes.

I'm also still wracking my brain about possible pledge rewards. (Suggestions are more than welcome - it's hard for me to imagine what you might want!)

So. Scary stuff. Happening. Let's find out if that thing about being scared really is a good thing!

The NESAT is still lingering on for me, not only because I got new ideas and new contacts that I have not yet followed up on completely - it also is still lingering as I need to finish my paper writeup.

I like to give my presentations freestyle, with no written script, and I very much enjoy doing that. It means preparing the presentation so I get all my prompts from the Powerpoint, and doing multiple test runs (but then I guess everybody has to do these). For those test runs, I really like to use the "rehearse timings" function ("Neue Einblendezeiten testen", for the Germans among you). This gives me a running count of how long I've already babbled to myself, and in the overview pane in the program, I can see how long each slide took me to narrate everything I wanted to say. This makes it easy to see if a slide has too much babbling done, and I should probably split it, or lets me see at one quick glance where I might be able to cut something. (Just be aware, if you are planning to try this out, that PP will automatically adjust the settings for the presentation to automatically advance the slides according to the rehearsed timing; make sure you set your presentation to advance manually before you save the final version, or you will be irritated no end as your slides advance without your doing, and probably just a little out of sync with your talk.)

The upside of this? I only have to concentrate on the presentation, and I can speak freely, and if necessary speed up some part or go more into detail in another one. (This, obviously, is mostly the case when it's a longer presentation in a lecture setting and not at a conference, where the usual 20 minute time slot does not allow for much deviation from the rehearsed durations.) The downside of this, however, is that when it is time to write the presentation up in form of a paper, all the writing still needs to be done - there's no presentation script to build up from.

So this is what I am currently doing - writing up my paper for the NESAT conference publication. There are clear author guidelines for it, with a very clear hard deadline, and also hard limits on the number of pictures and words - and I'm sort of half-happy and half-sad that both are rather low. It means less writing, but also less space for thoughts and considerations and explanations, and some of my points are rather easier to show with pictures - so I'm wrangling with that.

And while I'm doing that... maybe you would like to see my presentation? I have kind friends who filmed my paper, and with kind permission from the NESAT organisers, I have put this recording on Youtube - so here's a little bit of the conference for you to enjoy, even if you couldn't be there in person:

 

I've learned that my book "Kleidung im Mittelalter" is currently out of print... which is, in a way, good news (because that means it has sold all its copies, obviously) but, on the other hand, bad news (because it's out of print and thus not available at the moment).

I'm in contact with the publishing house, and it does look like there might be another print run. I'll keep you updated!