News

I just found out the good news yesterday – SADbot has been accepted into Artbots! The show this year is in Ghent, Belgium. So either me or Ben (hopefully both!) will be heading to Europe to install and hang out with the other robot art.

Becky and Matt have been doing an amazing job with Make: Live. I was lucky enough to get featured in one of their earlier episodes (yes, this post is very late). Thanks Becky and Matt, and keep up the good work!

I had a twitter turned email conversation with the parents of a couple of budding makers that was just too cute not to share!

It started when @KateHG4 tweeted a link to this photo:

Then a link to this video of their Rube Goldberg Machine in action! They bought the pieces from my Ponoko.com store. This is the first Rube Goldberg machine I’ve seen made using the plans from the book, and the fact that the whole family was involved is just amazing. Then our conversation went like this:

@dustynrobots: that just brought a HUGE smile to my face – looks like you and your kids were having fun! Mind if I link that vid to my site?!?

@KateHG4: Link away! Daughter (age 7) wants to be an inventor & we’re museum folk, researcher types, not makers. She has this book http://amzn.to/hin56N & we’ve been trying to figure out how to support her. Got your book & found it hugely engaging. Whole family watched the egg syringe video on your site over & over. Had to file down the ponoko pieces a bit to get it to work for this. But it worked & now we’re psyched about moving on to the next chapter. A whole new interest for us, now we’re investigating mindstorms too. Oh, and daughter was over the moon when she figured out you were female.

@dustynrobots: Wow! If she likes those, she’ll LOVE: http://amzn.to/dTZhBX Mind if I put up a blog post about this? My email is dustyn@dustynrobots.com btw. sorry to hear about the ponoko pieces – where were they off? i’d be happy to correct the file for future makers

After that we went to email, she gave me some suggestions for book talks at museums, and she said that even though her and her husband aren’t makers or artists, they found the book very accessible. Now this is what I call real success – when I first wrote the book, I had no idea I would reach a 7 year old little girl that would have fun with the projects and get excited that her cool new book was written by a girl too. Helping support parents that want to support their kids’ maker dreams is a market I had no idea existed. Even if it’s just a market of 1, it makes the whole project totally worth it. And hopefully the parents had fun too!

For any of you who missed the launch party at Eyebeam in December (or even if you went), come on out to the book party/talk tomorrow at ITP! The book grew from a class I’m teaching there for the 5th time right now, and the department has been kind enough to host this event. If you’ve never been to ITP, now is a great time – the positive energy on the floor is contagious. Refreshments start at 6, then at 6:30 we’ll move into room 50 so I can talk a little bit about the book and answer all of your questions. Oh, and did I mention we’ll be raffling off 2 FREE BOOKS?! See you there!

Highest rank ever!

A lot of people ask me how book sales are going, so I thought I’d share a little bit about what I know. You would this this would be an easy thing to track, but you would be wrong.

As of December 29th, 2010 – about 4 weeks after the book was released – a contact of mine at McGraw-Hill told me they had sold 2,335 units. That number sounded good to me! But the trick is those don’t really count as sold, because those are all the units that are sitting in warehouses of the resellers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc) and could potentially be returned. The “sell-through” number is the real indicator how how many customers have books in hand. That same day, McGraw-Hill told me the sell-through was 75-100 copies a week through the major resellers (mostly Amazon).

I was craving better data, and luckily Amazon answered my call with access to a new Sales Info tab within their site. Any author that has a book sold on Amazon has access to “Author Central” where you can change the description, upload an image of yourself, and now track sales:

Another trick in the numbers is that this data is provided by Nielsen BookScan and includes only approximately 75% of all retail print book sales in the U.S. Previously this data was only available to publishers, so this is a huge step forward. However, this number does not include international sales or eBook sales. As of January 7, 2011 McGraw-Hill told me there were 497 Kindle sales. That’s a pretty good number too, but that’s the only eBook format they have data on – no idea how many Nook Book or other downloads there have been.

Within the BookScan data, I can see sales by geographical region (above), and totals per week (below).

Now Amazon itself doesn’t track number of books sold (or at least they don’t give access to that data) but they do track sales rank for both paperback and Kindle versions. But although this rank gets updated hourly, the only data point that gets saved is the sales rank around midnight Pacific Time.

To me it seems silly to go to the trouble of calculating a sales rank every hour, then just losing all that valuable data! I’ve mentioned this a few times in emails to them, but haven’t seen any changes. It would be AMAZING to have more detailed data to track cause and effect of marketing efforts without refreshing my book’s page every hour. For example – what’s the best time to put up a blog post, tweet, or Facebook update in terms of driving sales rank?

Another thing that gets updated hourly but they don’t track at all is sales rank within category. My book has ranged from #1 to unlisted in a few different categories, but I have no access to that history at all.

I realize Amazon does have an API, and there may be some way for me to get all this data collected and stored, but I have no idea how that works – Leave a comment if you do! I would love to post a real time (updated hourly) graph of sales rank on this site but will have to settle for the limited-but-better-than-nothing data Amazon provides for now.

Thanks to everyone who bought my book and helped with these numbers! And finally, I would LOVE if you left your honest opinion in a review on Amazon. Whether you’re a middle school student or a college professor, your opinion is valuable and I would love to hear it.

SADbot: the Seasonally Affected Drawing robot – More DIY How To Projects

I’ve been meaning to post instructions for SADbot for a while, and the Epilog Challenge at Instructables was just the motivation I needed to get it done. Ben Leduc-Mills and I originally created it for the window gallery at Eyebeam, and we also took a mobile version to Maker Faire NY this past September. The Instructable is the slightly abridged version of project 10-3 in the book. The book version has more explanations, but the Instructable version has color pictures (and more of them) so it was nice to finally pull it together. Now if the Instructables community thinks it’s awesome, I can win an Epilog laser cutter! Amazing! Please help by clicking through to the site above and rating the project and leaving comments.

Thanks! Happy New Year.

UPDATE: I did not win the laser cutter, but I was one of 30 finalists out of over 600 entries! Thank you to everyone that voted.

From Eyebeam Art + Technology Center’s announcement:

We are proud to announce Eyebeam Alum Dustyn Robert’s long-awaited new book, Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists published by McGraw-Hill. The book grew out of a class Dustyn teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) called Mechanisms and Things That Move. Dustyn completed the book as a resident here at Eyebeam.

Come out and celebrate Making Things Move at our year-end party Holiday MIXER on December 11. We will be making mouse-trap powered cars (a featured project from her book) from 4PM-6PM, and then at 6PM we will host a Grand Prix and champagne toast to Dustyn and her achievement.

Making Things Move will be available in the Eyebeam bookstore starting December 11, and is also a prize in our Holiday Raffle.

It’s official – as of today, my book is officially in stock through Amazon and shipping immediately! Happy Black Friday everyone.

Just a quick post here to let everyone know that my book is actually real, and I know because I got my stash today! Mine shipped right from the book bindery, and others are in transit to warehouses right now. It looks like they’ll ship out pre-orders as early as next week! I’ll be spending the weekend updating the website with videos, pictures, etc. in anticipation. And stay tuned for a BOOK LAUNCH PARTY announcement! Hint: Save the date for December 11th

My editor at McGraw-Hill tells me that the manufacturing supervisor says the “book bound date” is 11/16 and the “warehouse” date is 11/23. I’m still not sure exactly what that means, but it seems like I’ll get a few copies about a week after the book bound date, then they’ll start shipping to any pre-orders soon after that. Exciting!

A day or two ago I saved this screen short from Amazon: Best numbers I’ve seen yet!

I wish there was some way to graph this data over time to see how sales change in response to media coverage, blog posts, etc… that’s the nerd in me talking. I bet there is a way. And I will find it.

Also, the awesome people behind Ponoko.com’s blog just told me they featured the Not Lazy Susan project from chapter 10 as their Product of the Week! I put the table top up in my Ponoko.com store, and the file is still available on Thingiverse for free.