News

UK editions of my novels; launch on July 20 with China Mieville

HarperVoyager, my UK publisher, have just published British editions of the three novels they didn't already have in print: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. There's also a UK paperback edition of Makers out this week.

I'm going to be celebrating all these UK launches at Clerkenwell Tales in London on July 20, in an event with China Mieville, chaired by English PEN's Robert Sharp. The event's set for 7PM and space is limited (though attendance is free). Email Clerkenwell Tales to RSVP.

Makers is a Sunburst finalist

I'm absolutely delighted to announce that my novel Makers has made the shortlist for Canada's Sunburst Award, a juried prize "presented annually to Canadian writers with a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection of speculative fiction published any time during the previous calendar year."

I've won the Sunburst twice before -- once in 2003 for my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and again in 2009 for my novel Little Brother. I'm so pleased to be honored again, and to be listed among such worthy colleagues on the shortlist.

MAKERS is a Campbell Award finalist

W00t! My novel MAKERS is a finalist for the 2010 John W Campbell Memorial Award. The other nominees include some of my favorite books of the year, such as Bruce Sterling's CARYATIDS, Bacigalupe's WINDUP GIRL, Mieville's CITY AND THE CITY and Wilson's JULIAN COMSTOCK. I was privileged to win this award for my novel Little Brother in 2009.

Makers tile-game, the physical object edition

Last year, my novel Makers was published and syndicated free as a series of 81 blog-posts on Tor.com. Tor had the insanely creative people at Idiots' Books produce 81 interlocking, tesselating illustrations, one for each installment, and made a sweet little Flash toy that let you play with making your own meta-illo by moving the tiles around.

Now, Idiots Books have released a limited edition set of physical cards that let you play the tile-game on your living room floor. I handed these out to folks on the For the Win tour, to great reactions. They're $12, and you can get them now.

Makers Tile Game

Proper noun frequency in MAKERS

Jeff Clark sez, "I've created a graphic from the text of 'Makers' that shows the distribution of the various proper nouns in your work. It seems to do a pretty good job of communicating the ebb and flow of the various characters throughout the book."

This works amazingly well -- I've never seen an automated text analysis that was so revealing of the emotional and plot elements of a book!

StreamGraph for Makers

Interview with NPR Writers’ Voice

Here's an interview I did about my novel Makers with the NPR program Writers' Voice. I share the bill with David Bollier, co-founder of Public Knowledge.

MP3 Link

Makers as dummy-text on a site for low-vision hockey team

Sandy works with the Ice Owls, a team of blind and low-vision hockey players. In the course of making the team's website, Sandy had need of some sample text with which to test the site with a screen-reader. Instead of opting for the boring, non-representative "lorem ipsum" text, Sandy used text from my novel Makers. What a cool place to find myself -- more testament to the awesome power of ubiquitous, pluripotent Creative Commons text!

Update: David Jordan sez, "I just saw your post about Makers as Lorem Ipsum and was reminded about my use of Little Brother in the Google Summer of Code proposal, which is to turn the freedom-loving, debian-based Nokia n900 into an accessibility device that reads printed text. At any rate I made a demo video using Little Brother as an example. I'll bet this could read a Kindle to a blind person, no matter what Amazon/the publisher says."

Makers is a finalist for the Prometheus Award

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.

Makers audiobook: direct from the author, no DRM, no EULA

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.

Makers Audiobook

Downloadable 3D cover for MAKERS is now also an article of commerce

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.

Cory Doctorow Makers cover 3D print

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