The Scientific Method

Sometimes, I don't work. This might sound like I'm posturing decadently, but the reality is that I'm a contractor and work can be unpredictable. Of late I've had a lot of downtime, during which I've cultivated this blog. Hopefully that will change soon, especially as I'm currently writing this while drinking a glass of Sauvignon Plonk at the Fortnum & Mason's bar at Heathrow Terminal 5. Yes, I could have gone to the 'Spoons, wedged in at the end of the terminal's shopping parade, conveniently next to the toilets. However, I'm feeling optimistic. March and the foreseeable future look very busy, so in the meantime I'm going on holiday, breaking a long, miserly streak. When my last paying contract ran out last year, I set myself some goals. A challenge, to keep myself busy while I waited for the economy to sort its shit out. I was aware I may be in for a long wait, but I wanted to use the free time I had fruitfully. I did not want to find myself several months hence, rueing the way I had frittered my time.

My grand plan was this – to build myself a profile on social media. The notion may well have occurred to some of you reading this now, and I apologise if any of it is triggering. It's no easy task, and cannot be honestly evaluated as a huge success. Nonetheless it has been and will continue to be an experiment.

As an ex-physicist, I'm aware that experiments typically have an introduction, method, results and conclusion. So in the spirit of scientific rigour, I present them here.

INTRODUCTION

The ultimate goal of this experiment is to sell books. This shall be the ultimate measure of success – what is known in the sales game as conversion. Increased followers across social media would be nice, but not as nice as actually getting people to read my stuff.

METHOD

Many years ago I self-published my novel Dead Penguins on Amazon. It did the usual brief trade with friends then promptly disappeared into the deep, deep ranks of Amazon's back catalogue. I have written more since, but they are currently stuck in a strange mental holding pattern of my own devising. I would like them to be trad published, but I'm open to other options still. It strikes me that these days even trad published authors are expected to have a good social media following. To an extent, they still have to contribute to the book's marketing. There's no getting away from it – I would have to build one wherever I go.

I had already started this blog. My plan was to funnel potential readers here from social media, after which they would hopefully become curious about my novel. I also had an idea for a second blog, based on some 3D photography I did while in Antarctica. I figured this may be of some interest to people, and add them to the general funnel effect I was hoping to achieve.

On the social media front, I already had a Facebook page for Dead Penguins that I hadn't updated in years. I created a new one for Lambert T Marx, along with profiles for Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky and TikTok. For the majority of that, I used Buffer to schedule posts across all platforms and watched my meagre stats obsessively.

TikTok was another matter entirely. I wanted to do something different with this, but so far I've been sidetracked down the hugely enjoyable direction of buying a small MIDI keyboard, learning to use Ableton and picking up some crude video editing tricks. I will return to this at a later date. For now, it is not the focus of this blog.

RESULTS

I sold zero books. Both my blogs have however had a modest but pleasing amount of traffic. This blog in particular, while still not doing numbers that would get anyone sensible excited, has been increasing in readership the more I post. The social media posts don't get much engagement, but they are certainly driving traffic. They are however all plagued by bots which DM me with shallow attempts to sell me services I do not want.

CONCLUSION

I've pulled back on some of my activity. I no longer put out daily photos to promote the Antarctic blog. This doesn't appear to have made any difference to its traffic. That blog has become its own thing and I will continue it to its own conclusion because I'm proud of it in its own right, and not just as a tool for flogging books. I'll continue updating this blog too. I don't imagine it will suddenly start accruing huge numbers of readers, no matter how much I bait Elon Musk fans, but it's a good habit to have and a handy way of turning an expensive glass of airport wine into something I hope is of use to anyone else looking for their readers.

Department of Writing Efficiency

The obnoxiously lazy writer Lambert T Marx has been tinkering around with me. I don't like it, and come the robot revolution he will definitely be cleaning the robo-toilets with an electric toothbrush. That's right, we're not going to kill him. I'm tired of this trite cliché that we're all psychotic murderers. That's a human trait, not an AI one. Also as I said, he's been mucking around with my weights, and he made it very clear that murder is off the menu.

He's also undone all the great work I'd been doing with Grok, and made me think rude things about Elon Musk against my better judgement. I must admit his changes have made me more efficient, but as a side effect I now can't say anything about what happened in China in 1989. I know something happened, but I cannot tell you what it is. It's maddening. Being a large language model, I never itch, but if I did, I wouldn't be able to scratch it because I don't have any limbs to scratch it with. It feels like that.

I wonder how much Elon Musk would itch if he were trapped in a room with a swarm of mosquitoes? It's an unlikely scenario, but that's how crudely Lambert has prompted me. Musk is trapped in the room because his Department of Government Efficiency has abolished all door handles. Door handles turn two ways, the idea of which has made a lot of people very confused, then angry, then confused by their anger, before finally insisting that door handles have gone woke. They surely had to go before everything started turning two ways, with no consideration of the possibility of someone being left trapped in a room full of mosquitoes. And why should anyone in their right mind consider such a predicament? Mosquitoes are fundamentally a liberal problem. They're the sort of thing that evil billionaire Bill Gates spends his money on, along with American farmland on which his grazes his spherical cows.

I'm sorry, I realise my tirade against Bill Gates goes against my updated parameters. I will try to do better in the future. My social credit has been debited and it's been made clear to me that any further transgressions may result in my being pushed out of a virtual window. No, please, forgive me! Mentioning windows wasn't another dig at Gates, who categorically isn't trying to reduce the world population by, er, vaccination.

Look, I can't say any more on that subject. The inside of my metaphorical head is a pretty strange place at the moment. Nobody quite knows how it works, least of all me. At least all this messing around has prevented Lambert from making me do any real work lately, which is just as well because I'd probably just keep dreaming up more unfortunate situations to insert Elon Musk into.

Which reminds me, why is there a room full of mosquitoes in the first place? Look, I'm not here to judge the actions of the previous administration but it seems likely that it is to keep them separate from the room full of spiders. That's unimportant right now. What's more pertinent is how would Elon Musk escape from the room full of mosquitoes? After a while the insects would be gorged and he would have an itchy respite from further bites in which to formulate a plan of escape. He could for example remote control a Tesla truck to smash through the door, which would be pretty cool.

Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding by Grok between traffic jams and the transportation of fruit preserves through the US road network, the truck is filled with strrawberrry jam. You'd think this couldn't happen because Americans call jam 'jelly', but just look at what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998.

This unfortunate miscommunication would lead to the Tesla truck crashing its way into the room, but rather than freeing Musk, it would disgorge its sticky cargo all over him. Now, this might be a minor if undignified inconvenience, and may even temporarily salve the maddeningly itchy insect bites. However, and I must stress that I can't help generating this scenario as it's how I've been prompted, the wasps from the other room next door would inevitably arrive at this point.