January 2012 – Annals of Post-Medieval Thought

Quantum Inference on Amazon

Quantum Inference is now on Amazon and available for purchase.

The publisher CreateSpace, has distributed the book through Amazon. It shows up as a regular listing under the title Quantum Inference and the Optimal Determination of Quantum States, with an author page at Kingsley R Jones, PhD.

A few tips.

Although the book appeared on Amazon straight away, you have a fair bit of work to do.

You need to create an Author Page on Amazon and link your identity to the book. There is a Catch 22 here since you cannot be listed on Amazon as an author until you an author. You do this once the book is published.

Some details may be incorrect in which case you have to figure out how to fix them.

There is an edit submission procedure on Amazon should you need to change anything.

I am trying to do that now, since the PhD at the end of my name is not the convention in publishing. Normally, you would drop the post-nominal. I have not managed to fix this part yet. It is no big deal, but remember you are aiming for an industry standard result.

The author page on Amazon is important so I tried to add some interest there.

Mine is still pretty lame, but I daresay it will improve over time.

Now we are on to understanding marketing.

Self-Publishing

The digital revolution rolls on!

Here are a few quick notes on my self-publishing experience.

I started out with a simple goal. Learn how publishing works and become a publisher.

To keep things simple, I took an item whose copyright I own and which I thought there may be a small niche market for. The PhD thesis I slaved over seemed like a good choice!

Step One: It was only in loose paper sheets. When I left England in 1990 I was broke so I could not afford to get it bound. Also I had lost the computer file. Arrgghhh…

Scanning 161 pages by hand would be a bummer and not very professional. So I looked around for a scanning company. Guess what? The best firms are the Law guys. I found a Sydney company called Law-In-Order and they did a very professional digital scan to CD-ROM for a total cost of about $45 AUD.

Step Two: How to get the PDF printed?

I looked around at different sites like Smashwords and Lulu. These are all good but cater more for the novelist. I chose Createspace instead because the book is very niche and I wanted a high quality print job with flexible distribution options.

Step Three: Designing the book and loading the files.

Register at CreateSpace with an account and create a book project. Follow the online instructions, upload your PDF, design your cover and write your own third-person book description for marketing purposes. Total time: about 4 hours!

Step Four: Printers proofs and small gotchas.

I had to rescale my PDF to US paper size since it was UK A4. This required a fair bit of finessing on choice of book size. The cover art was a scan of the most eye-catching figure inside the thesis, which I had to re-size and retouch to 300 DPI. Finally, I had to add one additional blank page at the start to make up a multiple of four pages for the book.

None of this is hard, but it is frustrating. Spend time to get a good result.

Step Five: Receiving proofs and final checks.

I ordered five proof copies, because I thought that would be cheaper and I could give some of these away. Actually, you really only need one since they are marked PROOF and you will find it cheaper to buy copies online and ship direct to your recipient anyway.

The process of proof checking is very important as you don’t want to be charging people for a dud product. Take time over it and allow a few days to a week for this part.

Step Six: Marketing your work. The only hard bit.

Create a shop at CreateSpace and setup a discount voucher code. Your online store will be password protected and you can share the coupon with anybody you think would appreciate a discount. This is important as a way of getting started. However, as my career in research taught me, marketing is the be all and end all of success.

So far so good. At least we have a quality product out there.

As I said to begin with. The goal of this exercise was to understand digital publishing from front to back, since I want to use it in my regular line of business.

However, this process was so easy and the quality so good that I will now use it for other purposes. Creating books of photos for example, or other mementos.

All up cost. About $150 AUD including scan, 5 proof copies and extended distribution. These are the sort of numbers to keep in mind for a commercial project, like an extended white paper or (in my case) industry report.

The extended distribution is an experiment, but it is the way to make the work available to academic libraries. I want to understand how this part of the industry operates.

There are some more things to consider if you have a really valuable work, like the registration of copyright, getting your own ISBNs etc

I will deal with those at another time since they touch on what it means to be a publisher.

In the above CreateSpace is the publisher, whereas in future my firm will be.

Technology is a wonderful thing.

Be your own Gutenberg, people!

Quantum Inference Published!

Here is the cover of my newly published PhD thesis Quantum Inference and the Optimal Determination of Quantum States, from the University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

The book will be available to the general public on Amazon within a week at a recommended retail price of $29.99 USD.

However, for a limited time, you can acquire a discounted copy at $10.00 USD off by entering a parallel universe via the secret store:

Quantum Inference – Limited Time Offer

Simply enter the password:

6bayes@9

to gain access and use the coupon code:

JJB7J66Z

to acquire a discounted copy which is shipped and fulfilled by the publisher.

This special offer is made through this blog and LinkedIn:

Quantum Information Science Group.

Please look out for other forthcoming titles as I am dusting off the bottom drawer material.

Happy researching multi-versal people!

Kingsley

p.s. Gotta rush, the Cockatoos are eating my Yucca.

Quasipapers from Kingsley

This site collects previously published, and many unpublished, research papers from my earlier career as a mathematical physicist and theoretician.

The academic world has opened up greatly in the sixteen years since I left university and government research. Like many PhD graduates of the 1990s era I boxed up my old work in the basement and built a rewarding career in the finance industry. These days I am an active entrepreneur, and hedge fund manager. As luck would have it, many of the current opportunities that I pursue involve some kind of scientific knowledge or understanding.

I also find that I continue to generate interesting (to me at least) mathematical questions. When you spend a lot of time on planes and in airport lounges there is nothing more satisfying than to pick up a push pencil and a notebook and scribble some math.

Call me weird, but I enjoy that!

I will be sharing some of these results in Quasipaper form on this blog.

Quasipaper is my word for a recreational scientific article that tests or extends some aspect of my own understanding. During my time in academia, I generated a body of original research in: quantum information theory; quantum inference; the nature and interpretation of the classical limit; and quantum nonlinear dynamics.

While I did publish some twenty or more refereed scientific articles, the really original material never appeared in print. For this reason, I am reviving some of that, in freshly revised works, which treat more fully the connections across modern physics.

They will be released under a modification of the Creative Commons license so feel free to download, distribute or otherwise get involved. The only requirements are: 1) attribution if you make derivative works; 2) you notify me if something based on this work is submitted to an academic journal. I further reserve the right to submit modifications or expansions of these articles as formally submitted research papers at any time.

With that out of the way, please enjoy.

Best regards,

Kingsley Jones, PhD