Mens Size Chart: Fill & Download for Free

Yes, if you have something truly unique.Otherwise, probably not.Having a successful book subscription service comes down to having something unique that no one else can offer.I should note that we run a subscription service off of our website, ChickenSoup.com, and it's an area I intend to focus on this year. In order to avoid going into any confidential information I have about my own service, I'm going to focus on a few competitive ones instead. However, if you play with mine and have any suggestions, please let me know via message or in the comments - I'm always looking for obvious and non-obvious ways to improve it.First of all, you need to look at the potential market for your book subscription service. I assume, because it's a subscription, that you want to follow the business model of other physical subscription services and send 6-12 books per year to your customers (I'll get to on-demand ebook subscriptions later).Pew has a lot of great statistics on book reading, including the breakdown of ebook versus print, men versus women, demographics, and how many books people read per year (if they read books at all - about a quarter don't). I want to focus on this chart at the bottom of that article:Forget about the average number (mean) for a moment, and look at the median. This is the midpoint - 50% of people read this amount or less, and 50% read this amount or more. You can see from the average that there is a universe of people who read a lot of books, but for most of the audience, you're talking about 3-5 books read per year.Here's another informative statistic, just to help you keep in mind that not all reading is for pleasure:We'll get back to this one later.A median of 3-5 books is less than you'd want if you were running a subscription book business where you sent books in the mail every other month. There are only two demographic groups - people who earned over $75,000 per year and college graduates - who read the low end of what you'd want to send, which is probably 6-12 books per year.You might say that you want to cut it down to 3 books per year that you want to send... but that's a really hard business to run. Not only are you not bringing in enough money to pay the bills at that level, it's not enough volume to be top-of-mind for your customers. You don't want to start a business that doesn't have the potential to be top-of-mind in your space.The point of these statistics is that you have to aim for a small subset of the world that reads a lot of books per year - the people driving up that average to 15+ books read per year.This shouldn't be surprising. Most businesses follow some form of the 80/20 rule, where 20% of their customers comprise 80% of sales. In books, this is actually a little more extreme - 13% of readers read over 50 books per year.I propose that the universe of people for whom a book subscription service would be truly useful - people who read enough that having a monthly or bi-monthly surprise book in the mail - is almost entirely contained in this 13% of readers.You can assume that about half of these books are fiction, and half are non-fiction (source). It's probably a little different than that, but it works well for thinking through the problem. So, right off the bat, you're probably at 6.5% of readers for whatever category you're in as a likely universe, because there's not a ton of cross-over between fiction and non-fiction readers in terms of how avidly they read their preferred category.You have 13% of the 76% of American adults that read who are your universe of potential customers. Roughly, you're talking about a universe of ~24 million potential customers for your subscription service (population data here). This is about a third of the people who graduated from college (census data), and reinforces that you're looking at small subsets of various groups to get to this big overall number. And, remember, you've really only got half of this - about 12 million people - because you're probably fiction or non-fiction.So... forgetting about how you'd segment and target these book readers - that's a whole different post - how are these people getting their books already?There are four obvious answers:Amazon, which controls a massive portion of the industry with over $5 billion in just book sales (see the numbers here);Every other physical retailer, including Barnes & Noble and all independent booksellers;Every other ebook reading service, including Nook, Kobo, and Apple; andLibraries.Amazon controls so much of the industry that you have to look at what they charge to price out your own service. The average ebook price there seems to range from $6 - $10, depending on the day, and looking through the higher end of the market - hardcover books - I'd estimate that the average price there is somewhere around $18. Don't forget that there are about 54 million Amazon Prime members who don't have to pay shipping anymore, and don't think about that annual subscription cost when they're buying individual products (and, remember, that's roughly double the size of your total addressable market - it seems safe to assume that Amazon is the company that controls most book messaging that they see).For your service, that means you'd need to provide more value on a 6-book subscription than Amazon does and include shipping with that value. That's $108 of value that customers get from 6 books (on average) during a year.The average list price of a hardcover book is roughly $27. So you're going into this with a $9 cost disadvantage before shipping, which is going to eat another $4 or so of your cost. That's right, it's going to cost you about $186 to deliver those same books to customers - you're at a $78 cost disadvantage versus people just buying books directly off of Amazon.And, of course, Amazon already owns a lot of this customer data, and is marketing to these people constantly. I've written in other posts about how much it costs to acquire customers.You just can't compete on physical books, unless your books aren't available on Amazon and there isn't a price comparison (the most successful book I know of that's done that is Charlie Munger's, but I'm sure that there are others). But the vast, vast majority of books are available on Amazon, and you're unlikely to be a billionaire who can finance his own mini-competitor for the sake of supporting charities.The question is then, where can you compete?There are two different subscription ebook models out there. One is Oyster, which got taken over by Google and, by all accounts, failed, and then there's Safari Books Online, which is a book subscription service that I find indispensable and happily pay for.Oyster had a wide variety of titles, but it never had the breadth of Amazon. This, probably more than most other factors, was its downfall -- if I have to go to Amazon just once to buy the book I want, the subscription service immediately becomes less useful for me.You can't be all things to all people as a start-up. Amazon didn't try that when they started out, either.So let's look at Safari, which has every O'Reilly book (including pre-releases) as well as books from some other publishers. I spend a lot of my day working with programmers and coding, and the O'Reilly books have long been the best source out there for learning new techniques, getting a quick refresher, or anything else. They were always my go-to books.On top of that, these books are expensive - generally, if I wanted to buy it in a store, you're talking about $30.Finally, it's unbelievably useful to have thousands of these at my fingertips. If I need to find out how to build something quickly, I know that I'm better off going through a chapter or two of an O'Reilly book rather than reading through some internet tutorial (unless I'm looking for something trivial). The people that O'Reilly gets to write their books are vetted and just incredibly solid programmers, and when I don't have time to waste exploring, it's what I want to use.At $399 per year, this sounds expensive, but as a reference library, I know I'm reading through more than the 13 books per year I'd need to in order to break even. I think I averaged somewhere around 30 in the last 3 months in which I at least read a chapter.My point here isn't to put out an ad for O'Reilly - the point is that they have unique content, and they've found this small niche of people for whom that unique content is incredibly valuable and where it's worth it for us to pay up front because we know we're going to use the books all year long. If you believe compete numbers on this, there are about a million people out there like me. I don't think that they're all buying a $399 subscription, but you can see that it's probably a really good business for them.Plus, they don't have to pay anything extra. They've already made the ebooks. All they need to do is maintain their (awesome, inspiring) apps and websites.That's one helluva business.So your question has to be where can you find a niche like O'Reilly's, which is really professional development for developers?And do you own the content so that you don't incur extra cost in manufacturing or delivering the book?Once you start looking around, you'll see that there are niche businesses out there doing similar things to O'Reilly. For example, in cookbooks, Blue Apron has an auto-ship program, and Amazing Clubs has a Cookbook of the Month Club. But, really, Epicurious has a lot of this market cornered already, in large part because they have the entire Bon Appetit catalogue of recipes, and that's one of the best single sources of recipes out there. Plus, their site and apps are really phenomenal.Children's books are another area where there are a lot of people who have a subscription service. But children's books tend to be physical books (at least for young kids), and children's books are also a primary use case for libraries. I love taking my kid to the library. He can pick out five or so books, read them until he's bored with them, and then get to pick out five more. It's like Christmas for him every time he goes in there. Kids get bored with books so quickly, and having more than his favorites around the house is sometimes just adding clutter.Libraries have ebook subscription businesses of their own. I know of three companies that provide ebook subscription services for libraries. So there's probably not much room there to compete.Everywhere you look, you start to realize that you really need to own the content to make a go out of this kind of subscription model. And, in fact, that's what a lot of the club businesses do for other non-book content - they private label what you're getting so that you can't compare prices (really hard to do that on books, though).So, yes, you can start a book subscription service if you have something unique that people want and where you can be price-competitive with Amazon... but to do that, you probably need to be a top-of-the-line publisher in your category, or have an exclusive agreement with that publisher in your space (and they have to be the publisher in the space). This makes fiction really hard, because there are a lot of publishers of fiction. Ditto for popular non-fiction. Getting all of the publishers out there to band together for your start-up is really complicated. I tried it once in one of my start-ups, Bookspoke, which failed, and I haven't seen much out there that suggests to me that it's gotten easier in the intervening decade.Finally, it also has to be a pretty narrow space, because what you really want is a small following of rabid fans to start the business in the first place - you need people like me, who desperately need those programming books I get from O'Reilly, to transfer the spend I would have had on Amazon to your company. Virtually all retail businesses are built on these kinds of strong fan bases, where you as a company will bend over backward to make sure they're happy no matter what.

Yes, it gets easier if you sit down and outline your steps/Process. Michael Gerber wrote E Myth and essentially teaches business owners how to assemble a Process system and then apply it.I published as not a lark but closer to an experiment on the advice of the premiere adult educator, Stephen Brookfield. I was going on a sabbatical of sorts from school and he encouraged that it was the perfect time to collect the past decade’s worth of teaching workshops, classes, professional developments and compose them into books.My 1st Book turned into 4 BooksI’d written and published fiction for years, in magazines, around the country and had been back and forth with two publishers over several fiction manuscripts but I was particularly attracted to 100% ownership of my materials.I did an inventory and headcount of my highest attended workshops around sexuality and started very specifically—-Pleasuring Tops, Bottoms and Versatiles: A Manual for BI, Gay, and Same Gender Loving Men.But in the process, I discovered books worth of materials to pull together. Multiple Orgasm Training for Men and Good Men for Good: A Guide for Finding Keeping and Being Loved By One——both workshops I’d taught for years—-were knocking right at the mental door too. By having three books, of closely related material to focus on—specific sex, general sexual training for all men and a relationship self-help book I was able to far easier divide up my notes from workshops. While I hadn’t planned it while I was a program facilitator I would assemble essentially work binders that might contain a season’s worth of workshops—-reference materials, videos, etc. so all I had to do was pull out binders and I could turn them into full chapters.I’d done about 20 hours a week of group workshops for a total of 10+ years at universities, non-profits, consulting, so that made it easy to have a deep sense of my topics. I also have a really extensive library on sexuality (I’m currently prepping books to move and I’m up to about 125+ banker boxes full of books…and counting). They hold about 20 books per box and my mover, who I’ve had through multiple states for almost 20 years, actually has a system he has me and my book collection on, for easier moving. I read about 5 books on average a week so I’m generally increasing my collection by about 200+ books a year.Layout and Proof CopiesI’m lucky that I have some experience, call it Intermediate level, I have certifications in MS Office, Page Maker, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark and I’ve worked for several magazines and chapbooks and owned and produced one as a teen. I also did this intensive graphic designer training several years ago to work at financial institutions (Goldman Sachs, Lehman, etc.) preparing presentation books (I was technically okay but lacked an artistic sense/schooling, I realized as I learned more and more programs easily but didn’t have an “eye”.)Also over the course of a decade, I’d made pamphlets, newsletters, reports, presentations, catalogs, a host of things consulting and working at several jobs. So I have some design experience.The above helped immensely with getting basic cover and formats done to the point where I could send for Proof copies.Having charted my Production Process—-I’ll post binder pics—-I have a system of what it takes for a book to be “ready”—-how long, how many copies, what I’m looking at during each stage. That’s important, you have to regiment the whole system so that someone else can come in and do it because optimally at some point, someone will—-if you want to make money at this.In 2013 I did about a 3 Stage Process, now I’m closer to a 16 Stage process (with several steps repeated if need be).I know what works and doesn’t work—-like the horrendous review I got about the layout of Good Men for Men in 2013——and he was right! I looked at it and saw that I was trying to make the book physically “easy” to read rather than factoring in the size, weight, font size to finding a balance. I contacted him, thanked him, re-did the whole book and sent him a free copy.One of the things that taught me was to have a book similar in page size, fonts, etc that I look at as a dummy version of a book. Now I can pretty much see a book/Proof in my mind’s eye and dive into the process, whether on KDP, on my own programs and fix things and more importantly experiment with size, color, etc.. It becomes insane when you’re playing with an 8–9 font as 8.5, 8.2, 8.7 because you’re balancing it against headers, page numbers, rows per page, amount of text and sometimes I’m flashing through this stuff, clicking away—-pushing Word past its parameters—-I’ve crashed it several times and now working into InDesign skipping right over MS Publisher (which I used for about 2 weeks before it became obsolete in my experience/work lol).Time will increase your production skills so that you have a reasonably attractive manuscript to send back and forth to an editor. But it’s like becoming a good lover, the only way you get better at sex is having sex. In publishing that means you’ll have several Proof copies that are wrong, bad, no good, for a thousand micro reasons that you will swear on your left hand had no errors when you submitted the file for a Proof copy.I generally have about 3–7 Final Proof copies before a book is ready for sale—-this all entailing editing, copy editing, restructuring, layout, and finally….the cover.Covers of Books Is a Skill Unto ItselfThe first covers were horrid.KDP was cool—- they had templates. Click here, type there, upload this way and boom it was a cover. Of course, then you have to figure your way through their system as they offered about 20 template choices (and still do) and you have to choose to arrange, pics, colors, font, etc.For the first 2 years—-I went a little batty after the first 3 books—-I thought—-hey, what about all my published short stories?—-so that became a book/collection of short stories, Escapades—-I actually one night at work with the four books just holding them and smelling them and arranging them, on my desk, and looking at them—-they were MY BOOKS!Then I had all of these other binders of workshops that were specialized topics that were important but perhaps not a 300-page book but a bit more than a 20–50-page chapter in a book. What to do?Then I started noticing all of these “short form” books. Legally to be in a book store shelf the spine of a book has to be a certain width so that the title, author and publishing house are apparent. It works out to about 136–150+ pages as a minimum.This was perfect to these mini-books so I published 52 of them as cheaper supporting text to the main three books around sexuality. It also brought me full circle to book covers where I got more and more practice than just a handful of books would’ve initially given me.I bought art books, took art classes, bought lots of books on artists and immersed myself in color theory, etc. to get an idea of what I didn’t understand. I even have books of great magazine covers, great book covers—-getting insight into what works, what people like, what represents well, how to be creative.I have lots of graphic design books, advertising, marketing—-you want to get them to just sometimes flip through to see new ideas, ways of color working, try to figure out how you could reproduce something.People buy book covers. Particularly when it’s leading your text online so you really have to spend some time—-a month perhaps—— on trying out covers—-walking away, trying new ones.Often to the last Final Submission time, I’m within a week or a few days of altering a cover. It could be the cover font size, color, font itself, where the company logo goes, how text rests over pictures. I have a book out now that there are three images, including text, on the cover and they are aligned to the cover when you lay it out flat to publish 9.5 and 12.25 inches—-there’s some cropping involved—-but when assembled to the manuscript and looked at as one front cover, it’s not all centered because the pages”pull” the images slightly.Yes, I have to change it.I have to, it literally drives me crazy.Of course, the realignment process is maybe an hour long back and forth.Another book, Stay actually has 7+ cover drafts. Of them maybe 5 are strong contenders.Hush has at least 6 versions on its Proofs and I’m working on #7 which sort of answers the cacophony/abstract I want from what the text, the story contains. I try to capture like a photograph a “picture” of the plot.A book cover should be a snapshot of time travel.You see it, it interests you, you read the blurb, you buy the book. You then read the book and in the reading or by the end you then SEE the cover as “Oh, that’s why——I get it.” The cover should be a deeper illumination, suggestion, playful touch, snapshot of the text itself.But it’s got to be playful, suggestive, entrance, illustrative—-it’s too easy to be the hammer to nail, you want a flirty playfulness about it. Or you want to give the reader an idea of a character or place.Hush’s covers have tended to be abstract choices or shapes, including a tetrahedron, which plays intrinsically to the end of the book. So I’m going to Proof a copy with the design and see if in physical form it works.Those two books probably are within the ballpark of their finish line for a cover but it’s only because as I do all the interior work, textual, layout, etc, I’m constantly looking for the cover that will work, stand out, hold up, sell well, is color coordinated, looks good.Lots of small publishers skimp on cover work because they believe the story is the bomb. It’s not. The cover is sometimes half of the sale. Or more.Selling/MarketingThen you have to sell the damn thing. I’ve done pretty well in some respects and there were other market forces/demographics that I didn’t consider which affected outcomes.For instance, another inspiration for publishing from the get-go was that there was very little credible material for me to use when I was teaching those workshops for a decade for men of color. I was often cobbling together information from multiple sources (White sources) to fit, omit or include the audience I was presenting it to. Some advice is universal in regards to the male body, dating, sex but identity and sexuality are different for people culturally.Pointedly, non-heterosexual Black people have a differing view and experiencing sexuality than White gay men or women do. I was able to market to that demographic—-however that demographic for multiple reasons include race and sexuality are intentionally invisible.I immediately shot up in sales and rankings and popularity because there’s Essex Hemphill, E Lynn Harris, and James Baldwin…. and then out of nowhere, me!It wasn’t that hard to become an authority—-I already had thousands of workshop participants and a TV show here in NYC so I could just say author on Amazon and places started inviting me to do workshops and book signings. That meant that my product had to be on point. One signing in Brooklyn, I was so dissatisfied with the 30 book copies, I received Proof copies rather than Sale copies the day before the signing, I gave them away for free for people staying so long. (there was also a rainstorm and two cabs to get to this place far out in Brooklyn from where I live/Columbia in Manhattan).I’m now taking several marketing classes to learn how to sell better as we have scheduled a revamping and new editions of books, another 30+ fiction books coming out and 200+ nonfiction ones, over the next couple of years.The E Myth teaches through the allegory of a pie shop and how a one-woman pie shop has to learn how to become a bakery in order to survive. That’s what you have to do if you publish more than one book or if you want that one book to become something.The challenge is you’ll be acting as multiple departments within your own publishing house and often times the writer is the first employee in and the last one needed once the book is finished. I see lots of people publishing who really, really, really want to be writers. That’s akin to really, really wanting to chop up onions—-that’s not a chef.I would say the learning curve for me was 4 years plus until I got to the E Myth systems design and then I took an entire year and sieved my whole company through it, reorganized, questioned, looked at what worked and what didn’t. Doing so made it infinitely easier to then re-do, update and publish new books. It also gave me mental space so that I am not overwhelmed by how many actions and people are involved, it’s normal to me now.I now have better control of my own work and work Process. I also have better schedules and plans for doing things—-and most importantly space, gaps, time off, the ability to see how long something really takes, how much energy something else really takes. Before I was doing a lot of everything and then near collapsing or feeling like I had to stop a project because I couldn’t get it done (there are still two books that have officially gone into my life as year-long writing projects because they were so complex, I wanted to do them “right”.)You get better with a lot of time focused in particular areas in segments.I’m better at covers—-I have a whole binder of ideas and now I can do much more sophisticated things with images to a flat or wraparound book face.Self Editing to Send to the EditorI’m near advanced skill level at the interior layout—-I got one Proof copy so beautiful, page by page, I nearly wept when I got it a few months ago. That doesn't mean that I don’t have three or four dozen post-it notes—-I color code layout to yellow, story issues pink post-its, and grammar as blue and then green as new ideas—-I even have the multi-colored pen with colors. But I’d gotten one aspect of the book done really well from the gate. That’s what Mastery, the whole Ericcson thing is—-getting it great from the gate rather than needing so much warm-up time.It sounds and looks like a cacophony but what it really is is my slicing the book apart by those contexts so that I can look at them very specifically, fix very specific things. Some days the issue is pagination—-it has to be under 500 pages—-everybody, everything in the book must now be geared towards the layout working and reducing the book to under 500 pages. That's about 10 different things I have to micro and macro change, including pieces of the story/text, to achieve that outcome.Does that mean changing chapter headings?Let’s look at the blank space on pages?What about long lines, therefore more words to a page? Widows and orphans?Can I shave a point off of the font size and still be readable?Can I still have the spacing be 1.5 so it looks clean?What about if I cheat and take it down to 1.3? 1.15?Your goal is to get it to the point of the least amount of noticeable errors as possible.I was ready to cry because it was a perfect page by page layout, text justified properly, easy read to the eye at arm’s length, title and name centered/justified and proportionately perfect to the body text.For 600+ pages it came out in its first Proof copy perfect in those respects. Now there were two cock-ups with chapter pages and it still has to go through at least two more edits but it was readable.By the way, there are always errors that you notice as the publisher. There are some cheats I’ve had to make into products because the computer simply could not bend reality the way I needed it to. I had to back off. The computer felt harassed.You might wonder at the length and depth of this post and others like it that describe the process…but here’s what you don’t consider, by combining all of these musings over time into—-yes, a book about publishing/writing.See, Daddy doesn’t play, it’s all grist for the (money making) mill.#KylePhoenix#KylePhoenix#TheKylePhoenixShow

Edited in response to commentsShort AnswerThe Ming Treasure Fleets were amazing achievements.Were they as amazing as propaganda makes them appear- well, that depends on your propaganda!It is doubtful that the ships were 450 -480 feet long with a displacement of 15,000 to 20,000 tons, however, the larger ships were several time larger than European vessels in use at the time for ocean going voyages. See my answer Were the Chinese Treasure Ships of the 15th Century really as big as rumored? How would they compare to the naval vessels of today in size?At the time of the Ming voyages, European ships would have neither the size nor armament to deal with a Treasure Fleet vessel. The big changes in European naval capability came after the Ming Treasure Fleets had been laid up. By say 1510, the European warships were powerfully enough armed to deal with Treasure Fleet vessels, but this is nearly a century later.These changes will be described in Annex AIt is doubtful that the Treasure Fleets made voyages of discovery akin to the later European ones. This is discussed at Annex B.Long Answer with References1.Background1405 a Chinese admiral, Zheng He, set sail with an enormous fleet of ships carrying more than 27,000 people. This was the first of seven voyages of discovery which took Zheng and his ships all over the known world, from India to the Gulf of Persia and as far as East Africa. They took Chinese goods, evidence of the might of the Ming Empire, to the people they visited; and they also returned to China with treasure from the places they visited, and exotic items including a live giraffe.These seven voyages were an expression of the might of the Ming Dynasty; but they were regarded by some Chinese courtiers as a wasteful extravagance, and after internal disputes they came to an end in 1433. These extraordinary journeys live on in the imagination and the historical record - and had a profound effect on China's relationship with the rest of the world Ref 1.The voyages were a mixture of goodwill visits, cultural imperialism and gunboat diplomacy. A lot of soldiers were carried and military operations were carried out.These voyages were a remarkable achievements. Fleets of this number of ships and men would not be seen again until the turn of the 20th century.2. Sorting Fact from FableThere are many remarkable features of the Ming Treasure Fleets about which we can be fairly certain. This is discussed at reference 1.However, quite a lot is not known owing to loss of written records, limited archaeological support etc. The Treasure Fleets have also grown a number of “factoids” which are subject to significant doubt amongst scholars.2.1 What we can be confident aboutThe Ming Treasure fleet existedThe Ming Treasure fleets were big,The Ming Treasure fleets visited India, and the East African Coast (as attested by artefacts)The ships were large in comparison to contemporary European vessels.2.2 Areas of UncertaintyI think it is hard to determine the answer to the question about the capabilities of he ships, based on the reading and listening I have done.What do we “know” about the Ming treasure fleet?How do we know it?How accurate are the sources?Our knowledge about the Treasure Fleets comes from:Written documentsArchaeological evidence and artefactsModern reconstructions and engineering researchThe area of Chinese history that I have studied in detail is the Opium Wars. During this period, Chinese writing (I have only read translations) are strange to the Western reader. The reports of battles, British equipment, tactics, behaviours are fanciful and at times ridiculous. Reports of great victories are made, where none occurred. The British are recorded as carrying out bizarre black magic ceremonies in reports made by intelligence agents to generals.Based on multiple and diverse Chinese sources, which include the diaries of citizens as well as officials we would conclude that during the Opium War:Many battles were one because the British employed Chinese traitors (Han-chien) fight their battles -which is untrue andThe “Black Devil” Sepoy soldiers were produced by the British by using black magic on captured Chinese- which is both absurd and racist.See Ref 2 for some examples of this.So when I encounter other uncorroborated ancient Chinese texts, I remain agnostic as to their accuracy. Alan points out in his answer, this from a different era and in a different historical context to the Ming voyages. Notwithstanding this, uncorroborated documentary evidence needs to be viewed with circumspection in my view.There are suspiciously few reports of sinkings and disasters in the Ming accounts (correct me if I am wrong here) whereas the in the European voyages death rates and ship losses are common. Maybe the Ming were much better than the Europeans at sailing.Or maybe we have only ”edited highlights”.Or maybe quite a lot was made up.I think it is hard to judge at this time.3. The Ships ThemselvesI have seen models of very large vessels but we need to await further research before we can be sure that they were:a. Actually builtb. Actually sailed the seas- rather than sitting in an estuary as a place to host and impress the great and the good.Records for the ships does exist in the forms of stone inscriptions, allegedly first-hand accounts, the Ming Shilu 實錄 or “Veritable Records,” official and unofficial histories, illustrations, and shipyard treatises. The discovery of an 11 m rudder post in Nanjing has been given as evidence of giant vessels, but this is disputed by some historians.The oldest detailed written records go back to the 17th century Ref 3; there are more fragmentary details written at the time of the Treasure Fleets but these do not tell a consistent story.There is a major credibility problem with the giant Chinese ships. The Europeans, took many centuries to move from ships of the size of the Santa Maria to, say, Brunel’s The Great Eastern. But it is asserted by some that the Ming made the transition in a couple of decades (again, please correct me if I am wrong here), see Ref 4 .A conference, held 25–26 September 2001, was organised by the National Museum of Marine Science and Technology, the Wu Jing 吳京 Cultural Foundation, and National Taiwan Ocean University. It concluded that the treasure ships could have at most been 75 m ( 250 ft) long -big, but fraction of the size of some models you can see on the web of a Ming Treasure ship making Columbus’ vessel look like a dinghy.In Ref 5 Richard A. Gould, determines that the oft cited leviathan ships could not have been built because there is no evidence of “special construction techniques such as iron strapping for supporting the wooden hulls” and hence, “there is something inherently improbable about the claims made for them in the Ming texts”.The designs I have seen of the Ming ships are shallow draft vessels. I remain to be convinced that they would have performed well in long ocean voyages- but I am not an expert on deep water sailing. Of course, there were a range of different voyages and some of these may have hugged the coast. There was already a tradition of Chinese trade shipping at the time of the Ming voyages, so some ships suitable for oceanic travel are highly likely.However, the Chinese were building a model of a “medium sized treasure ship” before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. At the time I had a little bet with myself that it would not be sailing up the Thames to join the London Olympics in 2012. I won my bet!4. Could Contemporary Warships have Dealt with Treasure Fleet Ships?No. (Assuming 150–200 foot Treasure Ships).As I wrote in the Short Answer, there were no large ocean going war vessels in the European order of battle at time of the Ming Voyages.Annex A: Progress in Naval Warfare 1350–1600Ship borne artillery was noted aboard the fleet of the founder of the Ming dynasty, Chu Yuan-chang in the 1350s and there is a bombard date 1372 in the Beijing military museum . At the contemporary (1340) Battle of Sluys, the English ships probably carried firearms the battle was decided by English archers.According to Ref 6, each ship in the Treasure Fleet had to carry 50 guns and 1000 projectiles (albeit sizes not described).Based on illustrations, European ships of this time carried small breech loading artillery, but these were mainly for anti-personnel rather than ship-smashing effect. Ref 7By 1445 there were artillery war galleys for use in the Mediterranean. These had oars and a few bombards in the bows Ref 8. These would have been manoeuvrable and able to smash Treasure Fleet ships under the right conditions- but getting them to the Indian Ocean etc was not feasible even if the charts were available. Apart from seaworthiness, galleys required huge crews and could not store the necessary food and water.Following this time, European naval and gunnery technology made rapid progress, which left the Chinese technology behind; in fact he Chinese later somewhat abandoned naval artillery.Key European developments were.Increase in size of ships without increased size of crews owing to design improvements.Armament with breech loaders was replaced by more effective muzzle loaders- breech loaders were just not up to firing heavy shot using the available technology.Introducing gun port- these started to appear in about 1500 and enabled ships to mount far more guns. Ref 9Mounting powerful muzzle loading guns on wheeled carriages to facilitate recoil-assisted loading- recoil rolls the gun back into the ship, allowing crew to access the muzzle, load then run-out the gun to fire.By 1509 Henry VIII had ships mounting 43 heavy (ish)and 141 light guns.By 1511 The Mary Rose (the preserved wreck can be seen in Portsmouth- if used to be a pile of rotting wood but now the museum is much improved) has 78 artillery pieces, some breech-loading. They were mounted on compact four wheel carriages that facilitated recoil assisted loading. This key technology was not fitted to Qing junks in the 1840 Opium War (they did have an ex British 34 gun ship which was fully armed but they had no idea how to employ the vessel and it was captured and burned without any British casualties!-Ref 10In 1521 Portuguese ships were defeated by the Ming, but their gunnery was superior see Battle of Tunmen - WikipediaBy 1588 and the time of the Armada, English ships had become effective carriers of decisive naval artillery. Unlike their Spanish opponents, the English ships used recoil to assists loading muzzle loading guns [Ref 11]Annex B: China Discovers the World?The fleets followed well known trade routes and are by no means like the voyages of Columbus, Magellan etc.The voyages were to shock and awe other “tribute states” and the voyages were by no means peaceful. This is all discussed at Ref 1.I feel Gavin Menzies popular book has been largely discredited -one historian Felipe Fernandez Amesto went as far as to describe Menzies as “either a charlatan or a cretin”!Historian Robert Finlay followed suit [Ref 12]:Unfortunately, this reckless manner of dealing with evidence is typical of 1421, vitiating all its extraordinary claims: the voyages it describes never took place, Chinese information never reached Prince Henry and Columbus, and there is no evidence of the Ming fleets in newly discovered lands. The fundamental assumption of the book—that the Yongle Emperor dispatched the Ming fleets because he had a "grand plan", a vision of charting the world and creating a maritime empire spanning the oceans—is simply asserted by Menzies without a shred of proof ... The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance.The issue is clouded by there being a Chinese desire to portray themselves as peaceful ambassadors, in contrast to the rapacious Europeans. This means that, in my view, quite lot has been made of material of limited quality.I hope this helps.[Surely I deserve praise for not making a single “junk” pun in the writing of this answer!]ReferencesBBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Ming VoyagesWaley A (1958) The Opium War Through Chinese EyesChurch K (2005) ZHENG HE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PLAUSIBILITY OF 450-FT TREASURE SHIPS Monumenta Serica 53 : 1-43Xin Yuan’ou, “Guanyu Zheng He baochuan chidu de jishu fenxi,” pp. 5, 7-8, 13.Richard A. Gould, Archaeology and the Social History of Ships (Cambridge 2000), p. 198.Goodrich and Feng (1946) The Early Developments of Firearms in China Isis XXXVI pp121–122Parker G (1988) The Military Revolution Cambridge 2nd edition p 84Ibid p87Unger RW (1981) Warships and Cargo Ships in Medieval Europe Technology and Culture XXII pp231–52Bernard WD (1844) Narrative of the Voyages of the Nemesis 1840–43 p129Martin CJ (1983) The Equipment and Fighting Potential of the Spanish Armada University of St Andrews chaps 1–7Finlay, Robert (2004), "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America" (PDF), Journal of World History, 15 (2): 229, doi:10.1353/jwh.2004.0018,