Cory’s novel is out today!
Today, my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town ships to bookstores. It’s another fine Tor hardcover, with jaw-droppingly beautiful cover art by genius Dave McKean to boot. This is a physical artifact worth owning. Hell, buy two.
As with my first and second novels, I’ve posted the entire text of this book online under a Creative Commons license that allows the unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text. You can send it around, paste it into a chat, beam it to a friend’s PDA, or print out a chapter to hand out in the university common room. Like Woody Guthrie said, “Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
The whole point of giving away electronic books is to experiment with electronic text and spot where the new opportunities for earning a writer’s living lie — working with my audience, not against them. So with every release, I’ve tried some experimentation. This book is no exception.
This book is the first novel to employ the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License. That’s a license that lets anyone living in a country that’s not on the World Bank’s list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain. If you live in a developing nation, you can print your own editions of this book and sell them, you can make your own movies, radio plays, translations and whatever else you can think of, charge whatever the traffic will bear for them, and never give me a penny or ask my permission (though I hope you’ll drop me a line and let me know what you’re up to so I can keep up on the book’s spread!). The only limitation on this right is that you may only export your works to other developing nations: the rich nations where my paying customers live are strictly off-limits.
I’m doing three signings for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in the first two weeks of July. The first two are in the Detroit region (I’m spending July 4 week in East Lansing, Michigan teaching at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop), and the third is in Toronto, at BakkaPhoenix books, the oldest sf bookstore in the country, where I once worked. I hope to see you at these!
July 5, 7PM: Archives Bookshop, 517 West Grand River, East Lansing, MI, 48823, (517)332-8444
July 7, 7:30PM: Schuler Books and Music, 1982 West Grand River Avenue, Okemos, MI, 48864, (517)349-8840
July 11, 7PM: BakkaPhoenix Books, 697 Queen St West, Toronto, ON, M6J 1E6, (416)963-9993
Also, Second Life players can attend an in-game signing on Sunday, July 24 at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT/10pm London time.
Here’s the spanking-new website for the book. I hope you’ll spare a moment to take a look. This is the longest thing I’ve ever written, and the early reviews have been stunning. I’m as proud of this as I could be, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it:
SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.
– Gene Wolfe
