News

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in French

FolioSF has just published the French edition of my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, translated by Gilles Goullet under the title “Dans la dèche au Royaume Enchanté.” It’s available in fine stores throughout the French-speaking world, and, of course, on Amazon.fr.

Link

Little Brother tour schedule: Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco, NYC

Sunday night, I fly to Chicago to kick off my three-week US book-tour for Little Brother, my new young adult novel. I’ll be stopping in and around Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco and (probably) New York. The schedule’s still being firmed up, but Tor (my publisher) is keeping an up-to-the-minute schedule for each appearance. This is my first publisher-financed tour, and I’m incredibly excited! I hope to meet lots of you on the road!

Link

Think Like a Dandelion: reproductive strategies for the Internet era

My latest column in Locus Magazine, “Think Like a Dandelion,” came out of a talk I had with Neil Gaiman about the bio-economics of giving stuff away for free. Mammals worry about what happens to each and every one of their offspring, but dandelions only care that every crack in every sidewalk has dandelions growing out of it. The former is a good strategy for situations in which reproduction is expensive, but the latter works best when reproduction is practically free — as on the Internet.

1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans. Remember, copying is a cost-center — insisting that all copies must be downloaded from your site and only your site is insisting that you — and only you — will bear the cost of making those copies. Sure, having a single, central repository for your works makes it easier to count copies and figure out where they’re going, but remember: dandelions don’t keep track of their seeds. Once you get past the vanity of knowing exactly how many copies have been made, and find the zen of knowing that the copying will take care of itself, you’ll attain dandelionesque contentment.

2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale.

I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That’s because “I should buy a copy of this book” is inevitably followed by, “Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!” and the moment, as they say, is gone.

Link

Free Little Brother for teachers, librarians: a tipjar alternative for people who loved the ebook

Every time I put a book online for free, readers ask me how they can “tip” me for the download. The problem is, I’m not actually interested in tips, since these cut my publisher out of the loop, putting us on opposite sides of the free download equation. My publisher is extremely valuable to me, providing editorial and marketing and distribution services that I couldn’t possibly provide on my own without spending a lot more of the cover-price of the book than currently goes to my publisher.

For Little Brother, I’ve come up with a solution that balances out my publishers’ interests, my interests, the generosity of my readers, and the needs of educators and libraries.

Here’s how it works: if you’re a librarian, teacher (or similar — someone who works in a halfway house, social center, or comparable institution), you can send in a request for a free copy of Little Brother. I’ll post these, along with your institution’s address, on a public web-page (I’m also vetting these to make sure that they really come from educators and affiliated trades, and not just cheap people who want someone else to buy them a copy of the book).

If you’re someone who loved the ebook and wants to “tip” me, you can pay me back by checking out the list of teachers and suchlike in search of donated copies, and buy a copy directly for someone on the list, using Amazon, BN.com, Powell’s, or your favorite mail-order house. Send in the email receipt (delete anything private first), and the teacher’s entry will be marked as fulfilled.

I’m actually paying someone to manage this whole process, out of my own pocket. Olga Nunes, a friend and awesome web-developer, has agreed to take on the task of updating the page, vetting the entries, and answering your questions. You can reach her at freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your solicitations and/or donations.

So there it is: educators, librarians, social workers and other people who work with kids, send in your solicitations now! Generous ebook readers are waiting to send you free copies of my latest book!

Link

Little Brother downloads are live!

I’ve just put up my site for Little Brother, my young adult novel about hacker kids who use technology to reclaim the Bill of Rights from the DHS after a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Included on the site are:

• Creative Commons licensed downloads of the whole book
• An easy way to donate copies of the book to school classrooms
• Links to buy the book from various etailers (and an offer to get a signed, inscribed copy shipped direct to you by Borderlands Books in San Francisco)
• A place to put your remixes of the book
  
  

Still to come: the tour schedule, more Instructables HOWTOs, and lots of other news.

Link

My email ninjitsu

In my latest Guardian column, I disclose my five email power-tips — the system I use to manage hundreds of emails every single day:

Sort your inbox by subject

This is my favorite one by far. If something big is going on in the world, chances are lots of people are going to be emailing you about it, and they’ll generally use pretty similar subject lines.

When my daughter was born, the majority of congratulatory emails began with the word “Congratulations.” When I’d asked my friends to help me find an office, most of the tips I got began with “office.”

Best of all, if some spammer manages to get a few hundred copies of a message through my filter and into my inbox, they’ll all have the same subject line, making them easy to bulk-select and delete.

Foreign-alphabet spam is also a doddle, since non-Roman characters will all alphabetise at the bottom or top of your inbox; if you don’t read Cyrillic, Korean, Hebrew or Simplified Kanji, you can just delete them all with a couple of key presses.

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John Scalzi and me, video stars

Tor Books and Expanded Books produced a funny interview/trailer thing for John Scalzi and me in honor of our latest books — he’s bringing out a young adult novel in the Old Man’s Warverse in August called Zoe’s Tale that I’ve read a little from and it’s dynamite!

Link

Little Brother: the remixable, DRM-free audiobook

My next novel, Little Brother, officially goes on sale today! In addition to the US print edition, there’s a DRM-free audio edition (there’s also forthcoming editions in the UK, Greece, Russia, France and Norway, with others pending) from Random House Audio. My deal with Random House is that they’re absolutely not allowed to sell the book with DRM on it, which, sadly, means that Audible (the largest audiobook store in the world) won’t carry it — they insist on selling books with DRM, even when authors and publishers don’t want it.

Instead, you can buy the audiobook from Zipidee, a retailer that Random House uses — they have the spiffy embeddable Flash sales-object you see above (feel free to paste it into your own blog or whatnot), and there’s also this static URL for those of you who can’t use Flash.

The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it, you’re free to take up to 30 minutes’ worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it’s clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you’re allowed to do without my permission (of course!).

I’ll also be releasing (as always!) a free, Creative Commons-licensed version of the text of Little Brother, just as soon as I get back to London (I’m presently in Toronto, visiting my family with my newborn daughter). It’ll likely be Monday or so — there’s a bunch of little clean-uppy things I need to do with the Little Brother distribution site that I need to be in my office with uninterrupted time to accomplish.

Link to audiobook, Link to buy Little Brother

Overclocked and After the Siege are Locus Award finalists!

Woohoo! I’m on the Locus Award ballot — twice! Once for Best Novella for my story After the Siege and again for Best Collection for my book Overclocked. Thanks to everyone who voted for me!

Link

Little Brother Instructables feed

My next novel, Little Brother, is coming out in a couple weeks — it’s a young adult novel about hackers who use technology to challenge authority. The folks from Instructables saw an early copy of the book and were really inspired by all the ingenuity demonstrated by the book’s heroes, so they’ve made a series of HOWTOs in the voice of M1k3y, the techno-guerrilla who tells the story in Little Brother.

The first one has just gone live: Photo-Emulsion Screen Printing, a HOWTO for making t-shirts for your movement’s wardrobe needs.

The general idea: After stretching fine-mesh cloth over a wooden frame, you spread a thin layer of photosensitive emulsion on the screen and let it dry. You then take a black image on transparent or translucent surface, place it against the screen, and then expose the screen to light. The light causes the emulsion to harden and bind to the fabric. Where the light strikes the screen, the emulsion will bind, making a solid layer. Where the light is blocked (ie where your black image is placed) the emulsion remains water-soluble. After exposing the screen, you spray down the screen with water, washing off the emulsion only where your image was placed; this clear area is where ink will be pressed through the screen when you print. Finally, you lay the screen on your t-shirt, other fabric, or paper, spread ink on the inside of the screen, and press the ink through the screen. If you use textile ink, you can heat-set the ink after it dries, and it’ll be permanent and washable.

Link, Link to RSS feed for Little Brother Instructables

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