It goes like this: when I lived in LA I went to a gym called 24 Hour Fitness, the one in Santa Monica. Before I stopped doing cardio (the way normal people define cardio) entirely I used to do the eliptical for fifteen minutes or so before a workout. I had discovered that I didn’t despise cardio if I listened to a podcast while I was doing it, so I would always listen to something: lectures on globalization, macroeconomics, neuroscience. And then I found out that Cory, who I had heard of but never read, was podcasting a reading from Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, a book about events I remember taking place in a scene that I was a part of (80s hack/phreak BBS stuff.)

Anyway, I was excited to have the opportunity to listen to this, which was possible because Sterling had licensed it Creative Commons (thus enabling Cory’s podcast reading) and because Cory had decided to spend all that time and trouble reading it and then putting it online. What I wasn’t excited about were the little prefaces Cory began each reading with, which were filled with current events about his life that I had no interest in. Until he happened to mention one day that he was going to be teaching at CW2008 in Seattle, how he himself was a Clarion alum, and how much the process had helped him.

That was really how it all started. No Cory podcast, no Shane in Seattle. My life would be very very different than it is right now.

Anyway, that’s really neither here nor there. The real news is that Cory’s in the news again, having proposed a fascinating experiment in publishing, which he will run on himself. The idea in a nutshell: his new collection will be available in a variety of formats (including for free), with a variety of meta tie-ins, and a variety of strategies to get the whole package into stores and into your greedy little hands. But how much will he make, in the end?

To be honest, I have no idea how much money that will be ($10,000 has already come in, of course). But I do know what I’ll do about it. I’m going to disclose it, all of it, every month, in a running tally in a monthly column here in Publishers Weekly. And incidentally, this article is grossing me all of $900, less my agent’s 15% commission, and the columns $400 hereafter. I will then put this into an appendix, which will be added to new editions of the book and compared to the revenues from Overclocked. That’s as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as I can come up with, but I think it will speak well to the question: what’s the best a writer like me can do on his own, versus with a traditional publisher for whom he does everything he can to aid in book sales?

And that really is what this experiment shows: a best-case analysis of what a guy can do, sans publisher, in the sci-fi industry. I say “best case” because Cory is a huge name, with big talent, probably the most rabid fan base in all of sci-fi dom, and an understanding of online culture that is second to none. I’m guessing this experiment will be a grand slam of epic proportions, not all of which will be measurable simply by tallying up the benefits he accrues from the book — his pre-existing books will sell more, too, and he’ll get even more publicity, accrue more notoriety, and acquire more fans.

Naturally these secondary benefits are impossible to quantify directly. But that’s the way this world works now, which Cory knows better than almost anyone. It will be exciting to see the numbers.