A bunch of great stuff was published about my latest book over the weekend, while I was off cavorting on a birthday holiday:
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece on electronic book marketing, which talks about my experiments in making downloadable versions of my novel available.
Science-fiction novelist Cory Doctorow — whose books are published by Tor Books, an imprint of New York publisher Tom Doherty Associates LLC — has made his past two novels available as free downloads on his own Web site. His reasoning: As a relatively unknown author, he is worried more about getting readers familiar with his work than about how a free version might cut into sales. “My biggest business challenge is obscurity,” says Mr. Doctorow, who also writes for the tech-related blog Boing Boing. “The more freely my books flow, the better.”
Mr. Doctorow’s efforts have helped curry favor among his core audience of technophiles. Players of an online simulation game called Second Life have invited the author to a virtual book-signing event. They asked for Mr. Doctorow’s physical measurements and pictures of himself in his favorite clothes, which they used to design a virtual character for him. One player even created a virtual version of the book that Mr. Doctorow will be able to sign by clicking with his computer mouse. Mr. Doctorow points out that he hasn’t paid a cent for the publicity.
Canada’s THIS Magazine has published a great, immensely flatttering article about my writing and my work with EFF.
One central figure gets left out of this polarized version of the copyright wars: the artist. Putting aside the few vocal stars who have already made their millions, we seldom hear from actual creators. Enter Doctorow, guns drawn. “The copyright industry talks about how it needs to engage in further education of the general public so people understand more clearly what copyright does and doesn’t allow you to do,” he says. “If you need to understand copyright to listen to music or read a book, it’s like having to understand banking and securities law to withdraw five bucks for lunch. It’s nuts, and it tells you that the law has overreached.”
Doctorow’s answer? Give it away. And he does. More than 500,000 copies of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, have been downloaded for free from his website. In his view, free digital distribution allows authors to edge out the competition and acquire an audience. It seems to work. The paper run of Down and Out, published by Tor Books, sold 35,000.
Matt May, of the Staccato Music Podcast (a podcast focusing on Creative Content licensed material) has posted an interview with me about EFF and my new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
After getting off to what was already an impressive start, Cory Doctorow has finally delivered the book, the one that puts him over the top as one of the rare, demonically original, challenging and gifted writers SF sees about as often as two-headed calves are born. These ranks include the likes of PKD, Ballard and Delany, artists who manage to write mold-breaking, unconventional stories that uproot nearly every preconception about what storytelling ought to do, and yet avoid being alienating or vapid and self-indulgent.
Matt May, of the Staccato Music Podcast (a podcast focusing on Creative Content licensed material) has posted an interview with me about EFF and my new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
My only scheduled Canadian signing for my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is tomorrow (Monday) night in Toronto, at BakkaPhoenix books at 7PM. Bakka is the sf bookstore that I worked at in the late 80s/early 90s — many other sf writers are Bakka alumni, including Michelle Sagara (Michelle West), Tanya Huff, Nalo Hopkinson, Robert J Sawyer and others. The store’s a real piece of Toronto history, and has an amazing new location at Queen St W and Niagara.
July 11, 7PM: BakkaPhoenix Books, 697 Queen St West, Toronto, ON, M6J 1E6, (416)963-9993
Last week, I posted about Gabriel Serafini’s efforts to get his friend Damon Wallace, a talented visual artist, to create fan-illustrations for scenes in my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Wallace has posted two more wonderful illustrations (I especially love the family portrait illustration) in the series. He’s also running an RSS feed for anyone who cares to keep track of new illos as they are posted.
London has been rocked by a series of explosions on the buses and Underground. I’m not in London — I’m in Michigan teaching. So far, all of my loved ones are fine, too. Thanks to everyone who wrote in asking after me.
In preparation for my July 24 in-game virtual booksigning in Second Life, the Seocnd Lifers held a competition to design a virtual copy of my novel. The winner has just been announced and the virtual text is now freely available in-game. It’s a really sweet virtual artifact, too, designed by Second Lifer Falk Bergman.
In a particularly brilliant addition, Falk has created a script which will enable Cory to autograph the Second Life edition his novel. To do that, readers just have to bring their copy of his book to the event, and set it on a small table in front of Cory. To autograph it, Cory simply has to mouse-click the book, which causes a digitized picture of his real signature (with author’s dedication) to be superimposed on the cover. So signing the virtual edition of his book requires about as much effort as it does when he takes pen in hand to autograph the tree-based version.Falk’s attention to detail is staggering. To recreate the cover of the hardback edition he brought Caliandris Pendragon onto the project, to painstakingly create an avatar resembling its exotic young woman in blue jeans. (Caliandris’ attention detail is also staggering: before fashioning a tribute to Dave McKean’s cover art for Someone, she led the team that created Numbakulla, a tribute to fantastic adventure games like Myst and Riven. The Second Life game is still in operation, thanks to a dedicated fan base, some of whom actually offered to help subsidize the monthly server costs of the island it’s based on.)
(Thanks, James!)
