Sorry about the quiet! I’ve been caught up in a series of good books. I received Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series and was glued to that until I found a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, which I’ve been reading voraciously for the past two days (it takes a lot to tear me away from Jasper Fforde). Cory is a journalist, science fiction author, and contributer to the blog Boing Boing, and also referenced on the webcomic XKCD. He was one of the first people to publish a novel under a Creative Commons license (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), and he very kindly published Little Brother under the same license.
What does this mean, you ask? Well, this means you can download the book for free, and distribute it for free, and create derivative works for free as long as you don’t capitalize on them. So, head on over to Cory Doctorow’s website Craphound and download the book, or go to your local library and snag a copy, or go ahead and actually buy it, because it’s a pretty awesome book.
Cory was showing the rest of us the way to the digital frontier before most scribblers, myself included, realized the full potential of the internet and its affiliated technologies. Now I can post my novels on-line and have people around the world reading my work in seconds–and I don’t have to cater to the moods and vagaries of editors and agents, I can bypass all that and go directly to readers.
Thanks to the internet, my two novels, SO DARK THE NIGHT and OF THE NIGHT, have been downloaded hundreds of times in the past few months, read by folks from Nova Scotia to Vietnam.
And Cory was one of the guys who steered me in the right direction. Thanks, pal…