Cory Doctorow - With a Little Help

Scott Sigler was kind enough to create an awesome 60-second promo for With a Little Help.

Michael Sauers was so pleased with his limited-edition copy of With a Little Help that he produced an unboxing video and a photoset.

Last month, I launched my DIY short story collection With a Little Help and invited librarians and teachers to send in their addresses so that I could publish a list of worthies to whom copies of the book could be donated. Due to a technical cock-up, these emails went awry and I only figured this out during the Christmas break. The good news is that the list is now online, and ready for your donations. And of course, if you’re a librarian or teacher who’d like to be added to the list, email givewalh@gmail.com.

The Hugo Award nominations are now open; attendees at last year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne or next year’s in Reno are eligible to nominate. I usually wait until the annual Locus List of notable publications to help me make my choices and jog my memory, but in case you’re wondering, yes, indeed, I do have some items eligible for this year’s ballot:

* Novel: For the Win (Tor, 2010)
* Novella: Chicken Little (Gateways, edited by Jim Frenkel, Tor, 2010)
* Novella: Epoch (published in With a Little Help, Sweet Home Grindstone press, 2010)
* Novella: There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Now is the Best Time of Your Life (published in Godlike Machines, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Science Fiction Book Club, 2010)
* Short story: The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening, (Shareable.net, 2010)
* Short story: Ghosts in My Head (Subterranean Press, 2010)

2011 Hugo Award Nomination Period is Open

Hal Stern got one of the first batch of limited edition hardcovers of With a Little Help, and he received it in time for Christmas. He’s lavishly documented his unboxing experience, and is clearly delighted with the book! I’m about to leave for Christmas holidays but I’ll be back to shipping new batches after January 10. Thanks to everyone who ordered the book so far — about 70 copies of the 250 have been sold!

My first thought, like any kid with a wrapped present in hand, was to tear open the packaging. However, the burlap sack is just wonderful. “Fondled” is too strong; I slowly unrolled the sack ensconcing my book, stopping to take pictures and note the defects in the burlap, the dyes and paints announcing its provenance, and to wipe up the floatsam left behind on my desk. I’ll never look at Amazon’s shrink wrap or packing peanuts with only minor disdain again. This was a labor of love. I saved the burlap sack for reasons that will (I hope) become clear when we finally move out of this house and I have to clean up my office.

What’s inside? Goodness, oh goodness. And a surprise.

Unboxing Cory Doctorow’s “With A Little Help”

When I created the Lulu.com store for the With a Little Help paperbacks, I discovered that adding an ISBN to the books automatically raised the minimum price on the book from $11 or so to more than $17 (that’s because adding an ISBN makes the book available to retailers like Amazon, and Lulu wants to have some margin to use for a wholesale discount).

I wasn’t happy about this, but I figured it’d be worth trying a launch-high/discount-later pricing strategy until I could figure out how to get the price down. Now, with help from Lulu, I’ve figured out how to get the paperback price down to a much more reasonable $14.50. The present book interior features some 75 typo-fixes, crowdsourced from early readers (each typo is commemorated with a footnote thanking the eagle-eyed reader).

With a Little Help paperback

I did an interview about With a Little Help with Mur Lafferty of the I Should Be Writing podcast. Mur is a great writer and a killer podcaster; she reads one of the stories on the WALH audiobook.

MP3 Link

Earlier this week, I chatted with Thomas Gideon of the Command Line podcast about my With a Little Help project; he’s just put up the audio!

MP3 Link

Rick Lieder, one of the four talented artists who produced covers for my new DIY short story collection With a Little Help, is selling prints of his cover-art, which illustrates the story “The Right Book,” (which Neil Gaiman narrates on the audiobook edition).

With a Little Help by Cory Doctorow

At long last, I have finally launched my self-published short story collection With a Little Help.

With a Little Help is my first serious experiment in self-publishing. I’ve published many novels, short story collections, books of essays and so on with publishers, and it’s all been very good and satisfying and educational and so on, but it seems like it’s time to try something new.

You see, I’ve always released my work under open licenses from the Creative Commons project, so that my readers could share and remix my works. A good number of these readers wanted to know why I didn’t distribute the physical book as well, and see what a writer working on his own could do.

So here you have it. With a Little Help, consists of 12 stories, all reprints except for “Epoch,” which was commissioned by the Ubuntu project‘s Mark Shuttleworth for $10,000 (this being the most expensive option for buying the book — don’t worry, there are cheaper editions). The book is available in many forms:

* Paperback, on demand from Lulu.com: $18.
Available in four covers, with art by Frank Wu, Rick Lieder, Rudy Rucker, and Pablo Defendini (who also did the book’s design, working from John Berry‘s wonderful typography). Every month, I add a new appendix to this edition, detailing my balance sheet for the project, as a service to others contemplating a similar venture.

* 250 super-limited hardcovers: $275.
These are hand-bound at the Wyvern Bindery in Clerkenwell, London, and printed by Oldacres of Hatton Garden. Each book has original paper ephemera (see Flickr set) donated by various writer friends to the project, and comes with a SD card bearing the full text of the book as well as the full audiobook.

* Audiobook: MP3 CD $10. Ogg CD $5.50.
I tapped many voice actor friends (Neil Gaiman, Mur Lafferty, Wil Wheaton, Leo Laporte, Emily Hurson, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Hugh AD Spencer, Mary Robinette Kowal, JC Hutchins, Roy Trumbull, Jonathan Coulton, Spider Robinson, Jesse Brown, and Russell Galen) to record the stories in this volume, and their recordings were mastered by John Taylor Williams, who also masters my podcast. (Podcasters, see here)

* Free electronic editions: Free.
The full text of all the stories in this collection is available as free downloads under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning that you can copy them and make your own versions, but you can’t make money off them and you have to let others remix your creations. The audiobooks are likewise available as free downloads on the same terms.