Thirty-nine amazing, generous, inpiring authors contributed to our soon-to be released book about exploration geoscience. A few gave us more than one chapter: Brian Russell, Rachel Newrick, and Dave Mackidd each gave us three, and Clare Bond, José M Carcione, Don Herron, and Rob Simm did two. We humbly thank them for their boudless energy — we're happy to have provided an outlet! And Evan and I each did three chapters, partly because I was obsessed with getting to the completely arbitrary number 52. It just seemed 'right'. 

There are biographies on all the authors in the book, so you can find out for yourself what a diversity of backgrounds there is. By the numbers, out of 39 authors...

• 10 are connected in some way to academia (5 of them full-time)
• 19 are North American
• 22 currently work in North America
• 1515 papers and 14 books have been written by this crowd (not including this one :)

Update on the book: we got our proof copies on Friday and spent the weekend combing it for errors. There was nothing catastrophic, so the bugs were fixed and the book is ready! We are completely new to this self-publishing lark, so I'm not certain how the next bit goes, but I think it will be live in Amazon this Friday, a whole week early. Probably.

What happens next is also not completely clear yet. We are working on the Kindle edition, which should be out soon. In terms of layout, digital books are less complicated than print books, so we are mostly removing things that don't work or don't make sense in ebooks: page numbers, fancy formatting, forced line-breaks, etc. Once the Kindle edition is out, we will have a go at other platforms (iBooks, Google Books). Then we will turn to the web and start getting the material online, where it will no doubt be different again.

We'll keep you, dear reader, up to date right here.