Here’s part eight (the conclusion) of the podcast reading of “True Names,” the novella I co-wrote with Ben Rosenbaum. This week, it’s me reading!
Monthly Archives::
April 2008
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.
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!
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!
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.
Here’s the latest Instructables HOWTO to tie in with my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of young geeks who use technology to restore liberty to post-9/11 America.
This week, it’s HOWTO start a flashmob:
Timing is everything
This refers back to the whole participation thing. If your event is spontaneous in nature and just requires people to show up at the same time and do something goofy(say, gather at a subway stop and follow the first bearded person you see as if they were Jesus), they won’t need much time to prepare. The ideal time for this sort of event is at the end of the workday (between 5 and 6PM) during the week as a) the streets are more crowded and b)participants are more available. For whatever reason, Thursdays seem to be most effective.If you are planning something more elaborate, like a Costumed Rampage, you want to give people at least a week to prepare, and preferably two. These events are most effective in heavily populated shopping and tourist areas, so Saturday afternoons work best. Note: these often turn into drunkfests.
Review:
Fantasy Book Critic
It’s timely, smart, relatable, realistic, thought-provoking and fun, and that’s why I strongly believe that readers will be talking about Cory Doctorow’s novel for a very long time.
Random House has produced a wicked audiobook for Little Brother. Like all my work, there’s no DRM on this title, period, and it also comes with permission to take up to 30 minutes and use them in your own remixes! The audiobook is available here, or through this widget, which you can embed in your own pages.
Review:
Ken Macleod
Remember the scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Manny sketches a structure for an underground organization? Now imagine that, done properly. With X-boxes.
Ken Macleod, author of The Cassini Division and The Execution Channel
