I’m absolutely tickled to announce that my novel Makers is up for the 2010 Prometheus Award, given annually by the Libertarian Futurist Society. My last novel, Little Brother won in 2009, and it was an incredible honor. Once again, I’m sharing the ballot with some tremendous books and authors, including Liberating Atlantis by Harry Turtledove and The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin.
All About:
Makers
About Reviews Buy it Download e-book Audiobook Donate a copy Remixes
I’ve just set up a store selling direct MP3 downloads of the Random House audiobook for my last novel, Makers, thanks to the good offices of Random House Audio, the eShop WordPress plugin, and Mike Little, my WordPress tech guy.
The Makers audiobook runs 18.5 hours and is formatted for burning onto 15 CDs. It’s read by Bernadette Dunne. I really like Dunne’s reading (here’s a sample) and RHA’s production job is tops. The MP3s are 128K/44KHz.
I get an additional 20 percent on top of my customary royalty if you buy it from me, and you get a book that has no DRM and no crappy “license agreement” requiring you to turn over your firstborn in exchange for the privilege of handing me your hard-earned money.
Right now, sales are only available through PayPal, though I hope that’ll change soon. And if this is successful, I hope to add the audio for Little Brother and my forthcoming YA novel, For the Win.
The folks at Shapeways surprised me in January with a 3D-printed version of the UK cover for my novel Makers, which had been designed by Shapeways community member Dmitry Kobzar. Mr Kobzar was good enough to release his 3D files under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial license.
Now Shapeways is selling 3D prints of the cover for your delectation in a variety of materials (just in case you don’t have a 3D printer of your own with which to run off a copy!). For the record, I don’t get any of the proceeds from it — I just think it’s way cool.
Ben O’Steen got his maker on by printing out the entire text of Makers on a cash-register receipt, using a till printer. Awesome.
Joris Peels from Shapeways liked the cover on the HarperCollins UK edition of my novel Makers, which features a variety of objects depicted in the novel as plastic model-parts attached to a sprue. Shapeways being a custom 3D printing shop, Joris whipped up an incredibly detailed 3D version of the cover illustration, which arrived in today’s post. Color me grateful, delighted and gobsmacked. Thanks, Joris!
Update: Joris adds, “The design was modeled by Shapeways Community member Dmitry Kobzar; He spent 13 hours and 7 minutes making it. He will be thrilled that you’re happy with it. The reason I asked Dmitry to model it was so we could make Makers come to life just like the people in your book do.”
We’re going to release the model files under a Creative Commons license. Watch this space!
Shapeways 3D printed version of the UK Makers cover
Tor.com’s just posted the final iteration of the little rotating tile-game based on the Creative Commons-licensed illustrations that accompanied the serialization of my novel Makers. The 9×9 grid is truly a thing of awesome beauty.
Each installment in Tor.com’s serialization of my latest novel Makers was accompanied by a Creative Commons licensed illustration from Idiots’ Books, in the form of a tile that can be interlocked with previous tiles on all four sides. We’re planning to release these as a limited-edition deck of cards in the future, and we’ve also been releasing little flashtoys that let you play with the tiles onscreen as they were released.
Now Tor has an embeddable version, courtesy of Malloc, which you can stick in your blog or wherever you choose! Here’s the code:
Review:
Barnes and Noble
In the end, Makers feels like a personal, cultural, and literary milestone: an employment of the full literary toolbox of SF, in the service of a portrait of how the world actually works.
If only every genre author set out with the same high ambitions, there would be no talk of SF’s failures, only triumphs.
Paul Di Filippo, Barnes and Noble
JC Hutchins — he of the boundless energy! — has assembled a free “holiday sampler” of excerpts from great new books, handily bundled together in a handsome PDF, well suited to loading onto your device or printing out for your Xmas holiday. In it are excerpts from recent books by some of my favorite authors, including Cherie Priest, Seth Godin, and Scott Sigler (as well as an excerpt from my latest novel, Makers.
In The Nick of Time holiday sampler (PDF)
JC’s page on the project with full contents and links
(Thanks, JC!
Review:
Michelle Pauli, the Guardian
Doctorow’s novel fizzes with ideas and jumps with breathtaking speed from one technological breakthrough to another until you’re no longer sure what’s based on reality and what’s purely a figment of his inventive mind.
Michelle Pauli, The Guardian
