I’m really impressed with the cover of the UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds, the novel I wrote with Charlie Stross. But it turns out that producing that cover was quite a journey. Designer Martin Stiff was kind enough to share his notes on the process, along with all the proto covers he produced for the UK publisher, Titan Books:

Designing book covers is the best job in the goddamn world. If you’re lucky, like we are at Amazing15, you get to work with incredibly talented and lovely people, on some of the most fiendishly interesting projects you can’t even begin to imagine without the aid of viralised nootropics.

When the incredibly talented and lovely Cath at Titan Books asked us to design the UK cover for Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’ The Rapture of the Nerds we braced ourselves. If you haven’t read it, do it now. The book is a melting pot of brain-warping ideas, every time you think you get a handle on what it is, what it means, it shifts in your hands like an organic Rubik’s cube.

Books which can manipulate reality aren’t easy to design covers for. When you start a new project there’s generally two initial ways in: 1) you step into it and find a moment, a scene, an element and pin your cover design on that or 2) you step back and look at the overall picture – try and find the theme. But what do you do when that picture seems to keep changing? The answer is, you keep chasing it. And what happens when there’s other people involved in the process, each of whom has their *own* take on the book, a take which fluctuates as wildly as your own? The answer is you chase even harder and you don’t look back.

The first ideas we turned in were turned down. They looked non-fiction (v2), or too young (v3). Version 4 hung around for a while but it quickly became too *normal* and that’s just not something the novel is, so we threw it out. We fiddled with icons and graphics (v5, v6) and impossible shapes (v7) to match the impossible shape of the story but each time the book out-thought us and proved us wrong. Version 8 hung around for a while, but it still didn’t feel *right* dammit, it felt like a good book cover but Nerds isn’t *just* a ‘good book’, it’s so much more than that. For a while there we lost the plot entirely (v9 was so wrong it had to be fired into the heart of the sun to destroy it), and when we came back up we played with colours and abstract patterns like madmen. Version 10 and 13 had something – after weeks of getting dirty with angry covers that weren’t right we liked the simple cleanliness and easy lines. It felt like a breath of fresh air. It felt like The Rapture of the Nerds.

We chased harder. We imagined a bright spectrum filtered through a fractured pattern, clean fonts with nothing to hide. We got close. We kept the chaos subtle, a radiation of binary noise printed in spot varnish so you can only see it in angled light but you can feel it all the time under your fingertips. We got close and we caught it (v15). It wasn’t easy, but if it gets easy, you’re doing it wrong. We’ve just finished designing the covers to Doctorow’s Pirate Cinema and Homeland. Designing book covers is the best job in the goddamn world.

Martin Stiff, Amazing15

My latest Guardian column is “Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet” and it looks at what we really need from proposed solutions to the copyright wars:

I’ve sat through more presentations about the way to solve the copyright wars than I’ve had hot dinners, and all of them has fallen short of the mark. That’s because virtually everyone with a solution to the copyright wars is worried about the income of artists, while I’m worried about the health of the internet.

Oh, sure, I worry about the income of artists, too, but that’s a secondary concern. After all, practically everyone who ever set out to earn a living from the arts has failed – indeed, a substantial portion of those who try end up losing money in the bargain. That’s nothing to do with the internet: the arts are a terrible business, one where the majority of the income accrues to a statistically insignificant fraction of practitioners – a lopsided long tail with a very fat head. I happen to be one of the extremely lucky lotto winners in this strange and improbable field – I support my family with creative work – but I’m not parochial enough to think that my destiny and the destiny of my fellow 0.0000000000000000001 percenters are the real issue here.

What is the real issue here? Put simply, it’s the health of the internet.

Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet

I’m heading to Bradford tomorrow for Eight Squared Con, the 2013 Eastercon. I’m appearing on several programme items:

* Friday, 17h: Reading, Hawthorn Room

* Saturday, 12h: “On Twitter, Everyone Can Hear You Scream,” Boardroom (panel)

* Saturday, 13h: Book launch for RAPTURE OF THE NERDS, Conservatory

* Saturday, 19h: “Genre Get-Together: Science Fiction,” Conservatory (signing)

* Sunday, 12h: “Ready, Steady, Flash,” Boardroom (live flash fiction writing)

I’m also doing something in town on Saturday (details TBD) with the 1 in 12 Library Book Club.

Hey, Londoners! I’ll be launching the UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds today at 1PM at Forbidden Planet. Although the book is available across the country at finer stores, this will be your only chance to stroke the marvellous 3D printed Space Marine Stross and have your picture taken with it.

A young man named Alex came out to my Decatur, GA Homeland tour-stop and we had a charming (if brief) conversation, and subsequently snapped this quite wonderful photo. One of Alex’s teachers subsequently wrote to me to say that Alex had taken high academic honors in a Letters About Literature contest about Little Brother, and he was kind enough to allow me to reproduce both the photo and the letter here.

Thanks, Alex!

Dear Cory Doctorow,

Little Brother is one of those drastically important books that deals with real issues affecting everyone. This book was, in my opinion, more than just a book; it was a persuasive, life-changing book, the kind of gem that comes around too infrequently.

Before I read Little Brother I was scared to try something different. I surrounded myself with the same old young-adult novels (you know- goes on a quest, learns many things, big fight with a troll, the end) and never dared to step out of my little box.

One day during the sixth grade I saw a kid with too many teeth sitting in a dusty corner, reading Little Brother, and asked him what it was about. He shrugged and muttered something incoherent about Harajuku Fun Madness. When I arrived at home I looked up the book on the internet. Before long I discovered your website, and became intrigued by the fact that you were just giving away your e-books.

The book shipped in two days.

I am always thinking. Constantly tossing up an idea, usually shooting it down, tossing up another one, sometimes it flies, I wait for it to crash, then I walk over to it and shoot it another three or four times for good measure. The few months before I read Little Brother this had dumbed down a bit. I could feel it, like I was wearing earplugs, and only low, muffled, blurry ideas wandered through occasionally to stop and say hi before continuing on their way.

After (and during) the reading of Little Brother the haze had lifted and was replaced by an energetic excitement that jumpstarted my brain to life. My neurons hummed like lawnmowers. A refreshing feeling of urgency and eagerness surged through me– a feeling I’d not experienced since being eight years old on Christmas. And I started thinking again.

I put my flawless (yeah, right) guess-and-test technique to work, meticulously weeding through all the information to make sense of things. I realized just how possible the police-state situation could be- after 9/11 security everywhere was increased and tightened. The scanners updated. The rules stricter. The pat-downs more, ahem, thorough. What if this happened, but on a much larger scale?

Also, I’m a bit more paranoid. I know about those looming possibilities, terrifying ones- that technology could be used against me, that my freedom is more fragile than I thought. Already I’ve begun questioning the things presented to me as fact. I look at something and decide for myself if it’s the opinion I want to have.

My favorite part about Little Brother is how, in some way or another, it opened me up to so many other books and authors- Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Jack Kerouac, George Orwell, the list could go on and on.

Little Brother was and still remains the most important book I’ve ever read. If I had not read your book I would be awfully different, and probably much more ignorant and stubborn. Because of your book I started writing. I read more. I think more. You have written a book that is not only good, but life-changing as well. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Alex